And says nothing.
Because some things don’t need saying.
Instead, he pulls me closer with his arm around me, my face against his chest, his heartbeat under my palm, slow, steady, and real, and lying there in the darkness of his room with the desert quiet outside, feeling the rightness of this. Of him. Of whatever this is that has grown between us in the months since arriving in his house with grief, a laptop, and boxes of books.
Not knowing what to call it yet.
Only knowing I don’t want to lose it.
He falls asleep before me.
The moment it happens is clear with the shift in his breathing, the weight of his arm becoming heavier, and the small unconscious sound he makes as he goes under.
Lying there, I listen to him breathe. I look at the ceiling above us, the pool light moving slowly across it, pale and quiet, theway it always does in this room at night, and letting myself have exactly this much.
Just this.
His heartbeat under my palm.
His arm around me.
The desert stillness outside.
And one more night before everything changes.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
TATE
The following day is quiet.
No club, no calls, no Mexico sitting on the surface of everything, just underneath it, the way it has been for weeks, except closer now and more real. There is a quality to the day that knows what is coming and has decided to be gentle about it, the light softer than usual, the desert still, the house holding itself in a particular kind of hush that has nothing to do with noise.
There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.
She doesn’t ask me to stay.
I just don’t leave.
We move around each other in the easy way developed over these months, her at the island with The Ember project, me on the back deck with my phone, and Memphis stretched across my feet in the Nevada heat, the house cool and quiet around us. She makes lunch, appearing in the doorway to tell me it is ready the way she does most things, simply and without fuss, like it has always been part of how this house works.
At some point in the afternoon, the sliding door gets fixed.
It has been sticking for weeks, that particular catch and drag that you notice every time and forget every time, so I crouch down in front of it with a screwdriver. At the same time, she stands in the kitchen doorway watching with her coffee, her hip against the frame, completely unbothered by the fact that she is winning something.
“I’ve been waiting for you to do that for a month.”
“You could have said something.”
“I did.”
She had, actually. More than once. And each time there had been an ‘I’ll get to it’followed by not getting to it, because there was always something else, and now she is looking at me with the smile of a woman who has just won an argument without raising her voice. I look back at her and feel something move in my chest that is warm, uncomplicated, and entirely real.
“Fair enough.”
She smiles into her coffee and goes back inside.
In the late afternoon, Memphis and I take the desert trail behind the house, the one that winds up into the scrubland and opens out into a view of the whole valley if you go far enough. Out there in the open with the heat pressing down and the city small in the distance, I let myself properly think about tomorrow. The plan is settling into my bones with every step.
