Page 142 of Wells

She is not a place I return to or a thing I recover. She's a woman walking beside me because she looked at the truth, looked at me, and decided to take one more step.

At the edge of the garden, she glances up at me. “Coffee?”

I look down at our joined hands. “Again?”

“Unless you have somewhere else to be.”

“No,” I say. “I’m exactly where I want to be.”

THIRTY-THREE

Epilogue

Ordinary Time: After the high feast comes the long green stretch the church calls Ordinary Time, the unhurried season where the real living happens. No mask, no screen, no secret, just two people and a yard gone to weeds, learning to plant.

One Year Later

I wake before her, which, after a year, I've stopped expecting and never stopped being grateful for.

Her bedroom is small enough that the morning gets into all of it at once, gray light through a window that looks out over the rooftops toward the river two blocks down.

The bed is secondhand, the dresser doesn't match it, and a crack runs up one corner of the ceiling that she's decided gives the room character. I have a penthouse thirty floors over the same river with a bed that cost more than this entire building, and I sleep here, in the narrow room she chose, because this is where she is and because she has never once asked me for the other thing.

That's the part I keep turning over even now. I've spent my life watching people do the math the second they learn the name and the money behind it. Cera did the opposite. She traded things for her thrift-store dresser and her one good chair. When I offered her the world on a plate, she looked at it like a trick, because for her it always had been.

The woman who once clawed to hold onto a life she hated sold all of it for India and came back wanting almost nothing.

She doesn't fill the empty space with me either, nor is she in any rush to move me in or take my name. We're here together because she lets me be here, and we're going slow, even a year in, because slow is the thing neither of us ever got to have.

She stirs against me, back to my chest, and makes the small sound she makes before she's all the way awake.

"You're staring," she says, eyes still shut, mouth curving. It's what she said to me through a mask a lifetime ago, and she knows it. We can joke about it now, but it's a constant reminder that there's no place for secrecy or lies in our life.

"I can actually do it now. Making up for lost time."

She rolls over to face me, and there's the thing I never get used to. No mask, no wig, no blue over the brown. Just her, no screen between us, looking at me like I'm the safe one in the room.

I kiss her slowly, because we have nowhere to be for an hour and because slow is its own kind of greed with her. She hums into it and slides a leg over mine, and the sheet goes somewhere neither of us cares about.

My hand maps the dip of her waist, the curve under it, skin still warm from sleep, and she arches into my palm, her body just answering mine because it wants to.

When I roll her under me, she goes easy, thighs opening around my hips, and I take my time with her throat. The soft skin over her collarbone, where her breath stutters when I drag my teeth across it, is my favorite part of her body.

She's already wet when my fingers find her, slick for me. The sound she makes when I stroke into her is one I earned in the dark a hundred times and never get tired of watching land on her open face in the daylight.

"Wells." My name on her lips increases my drive into her.

She catches my wrist before I can line us up. "Wait. Sit up."

"That sounds like instruction."

"It is. Against the headboard."

I do what she says because doing what she says is rarely a mistake. She climbs into my lap and settles her knees on either side of me, chest to chest, close enough that her forehead nearly rests on mine. She reaches down and takes my cock in her hand and guides me into her slow, sinking until she's flush against me, and we're as close as two people can physically get, her arms looped over my shoulders, my hands spread on her back.

"Is this a pose?" I manage.

"It is now." Her breath is uneven against my mouth. "Don't move yet. Just breathe with me."