The creek will be running when we get there.
The house will be lit from inside.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Honey
I take his hand in the kitchen doorway and pull.
He comes. Of course he comes. He’s been coming toward me since he drove twenty-three miles out of his way with two cups of coffee and no real reason to be here, and we both know it. But I pull anyway, because it turns out that after everything—after the bar and the creek and the sycamore and a month of not answering my phone—what I want most is to be the one who reaches first.
He ducks the landing beam on the stairs without looking. I feel it land somewhere warm and certain—the ease of him in my house, his body already knowing where the low places are.
We’re laughing when we reach the top. I’m not sure how it started—a word he said on the stairs, or the way my grandmother’s third step still creaks the way it always has, or just the relief of this, of being on the other side of a month and a parking lot and a song coming through an open door. The laughter doesn’t stop at the bedroom doorway. It settles into something else there—not heavy, just real. The room with the amber lamp and the hairline crack in the ceiling and the curtains moving in whatever comes off the ridge at this hour.
He looks at me.
I look back.
“Hi,” I say, which is absurd given everything, and his face does the thing—the real version, the one that changes it completely—and he says “hi” back, and then I cross the distance because I’m done waiting for things to come to me.
I put my hands on his chest and feel him go still under them—not the startled kind, the deliberate kind, the kind that means he’s receiving something and intends to receive all of it. I reach up and start on his shirt buttons, and he watches me do it with an expression that is not the patient, careful look from the first time. This is something else. This is a male who knows exactly what’s coming and is choosing not to rush a single second of it.
“I’ve been thinking about this,” I say, working the third button. “For the past month. While I was sanding kits and not answering my phone.”
“What were you thinking?” His voice has dropped.
“That I knew exactly what I wanted and couldn’t make myself reach for it.” I look up at him. “I’m reaching now.”
He brings one hand up and tucks a piece of my hair back, slow and deliberate. “And that, Honey, is what I’ve been thinking about,” he says. Not that I needed him to say it. I wasn’t reaching for permission. But there’s a difference between knowing you’re wanted and hearing it named out loud by someone who doesn’t say things he doesn’t mean—and that difference lands somewhere in my chest and stays.
I finish the buttons.
I have thought about his chest since before I had any right to. He shrugs the shirt off, and I let myself look—the broad green expanse of him in the amber light, the muscles moving under his skin, the taper of his ears I’ve been carefully not staring at for months. I let myself look at all of it now. I put my palms flat against him and feel his heartbeat and the specific fact of him standing in my grandmother’s room like he has always been going to stand here.
And beneath my palms, low and steady, the vibration I remember from the first time—not quite a sound, more like weather moving through him. I stay here a moment longer than I need to.
His hands find the hem of my shirt.
“Yes,” I say, before he asks.
He lifts it over my head in one smooth motion and reaches behind me, and this time I don’t hold still for the looking—I reach for him while he’s looking, my hands at his belt. I feel his breath change.
“Honey.”
“I know what I’m doing,” I say.
“I know you do.” He catches my hands, not stopping me, just stilling them. “I just want to—” He stops. Looks at me. “I want to look at you for a minute. If that’s all right.”
I let him.
He studies me the way he did the first time—completely, without apology, taking his time—and this time I hold his gaze. I don’t manage it. There is no searching for something neutral to do with my eyes. I stand in the amber lamplight and let him see me and allow myself to feel what it is to be seen by someone who has been paying attention for months.
“Goddess,” he whispers. Just that.
I step forward and finish with his belt. We take care of the rest together—his pants, mine—and then there’s nothing left between us at all.
I sit him on the edge of the bed and stand in front of him and for a moment we are eye to eye, which almost never happens, and I feel it like a key turning—the rightness of it, the way lookingstraight into his face without tilting my head back changes something in the geometry of us.
