He said, “I love you.”
The first time he had ever said it.
I had known it, of course. I had felt it in every careful touch and every honest word and every night he stayed even when staying was complicated. But hearing it was different. Hearing it made it real in a way that knowing had not.
He had not said it yet, even though I had known it, even though I had felt it in every careful touch and every honest wordand every night he stayed even when staying was complicated. But he said it now—in his apartment in the pale gold morning light with my grandmother’s cardigan hanging on the back of his chair and my coffee getting cold on the nightstand.
I said, “I love you too.”
He said, “I know.”
I said, “Knox, I have been in love with you since you sat down next to Lily at the counter and she asked if you were my boyfriend and you said ‘working on it.’”
He said, “I have been in love with you since Day 1 when you deliberately served me the bad coffee and I understood that you were brave enough to be rude to a stranger. That you had fire in you.”
I said, “That’s not romantic.”
He said, “It’s true. It’s the most romantic thing I know—a woman who tells the truth even when it costs her.”
He kissed me again, and this time it was not gentle. This time it had teeth in it. This time he was kissing me like he had been waiting for this moment for forty-eight days, like every second that he had not been touching me had been agony, like I was the only thing that had ever mattered.
He pulled back and he looked at me with his ice-blue eyes.
He said, “You’re going to tell me if you want to stop.”
I said, “I don’t want to stop.”
He said, “Maple?—”
I said, “Knox, I have never wanted anything less to stop than I want this to stop right now.”
He unbuttoned the one button that was keeping my borrowed shirt closed. I had worn one of his shirts last night because my dress had been covered in pie filling and propane heater soot and tears from the proposal. He had given me one of his thermal shirts. It swallowed me. It smelled like him. It felt like home.
He helped me out of it slowly—not like he was trying to be sexy, but like he was trying to be careful. Like I was something precious that might break. His hands were warm and deliberate. He was taking his time. He was making a ritual of undressing me, of revealing me, of accepting every part of me that I had been afraid to show to anyone.
I pushed the thermal shirt off his shoulders.
He had a scar on his left shoulder blade from the car accident when he was nineteen. He had a tattoo on his left forearm that saidbelovedin old cursive next to a name and a date. I had never asked about it because I understood now—it was from his brother. It was from Caleb. It was from the moment when he understood that he had to love someone enough to carry them with him forever.
I touched the tattoo with my fingers.
I said, “Caleb?”
He said, “Yes.”
I said, “He would like me.”
He said, “He would love you.”
I said, “I want to use his name. For the baby. When we have the baby. When we have a daughter, we can use Joan for your grandmother. But when we have a son?—”
He said, “We’ll use Caleb.”
I said, “Is that okay?”
He said, “It’s more than okay. It’s perfect. It means he’ll be with us. It means he’ll be part of the life I get to have with you. It means the thing that broke me becomes part of the thing that makes me whole.”
He kissed me then—deep and unhurried. The kind of kiss that said he was not trying to hurry through this moment. He was trying to live in it. He was trying to make it real enough that it would never leave him.
