Page 85 of Hostile

He stood in the middle of my living room, hands in his pockets, looking around the way he looked at everything—thoroughly, without comment—at the clean lines, the empty surfaces, and the bookshelves arranged by a system only I could see. I waited, armored out of habit, for the observation.

“It’s quiet,” he finally said. “Your whole city is loud, and you built a quiet room at the top of it.” A beat. “It suits you. It’s the version of you people don’t get to see. I’m saying thank you, badly.”

“You’re saying it fine.”

I made tea neither of us drank. We sat on my couch like two people who had conducted hostile negotiations across mahogany for four months and had absolutely no protocol for cushions. Then the protocol problem solved itself the old way, the original way, the way it had solved itself in a dorm doorway in October rain eleven years ago—gradually, and then not gradually at all.

For a while, neither of us said anything.

The silence felt different now—not awkward, not careful, but weighted with everything that had happened between us and everything that hadn’t. Ten years of separate lives. Ten years of wrong assumptions, unfinished conversations, and moments that had seemed insignificant at the time but suddenly didn’t.

Wyatt sat close enough that I could see his outline in the blue-gray light from the windows, the lamp casting a warm edge along his jaw. Close enough to feel the pull of him—steady, patient, gravitational, the pull he had been exerting across parking lots, auditoriums, and boardroom tables for eleven years without ever once turning it into pressure.

I thought about all the versions of us that had existed over the years. The people we’d become without each other. The choices we’d made. The distance that had somehow not become indifference.

That was the part I couldn’t get past. After everything, I still cared. Not abstractly. Not as a memory. Not as a lingering attachment to the past.

Him.

Here.

Now.

The realization settled over me in a strange mix of relief and terror. Wanting him had always been complicated, but being honest about it felt even more dangerous.

So I did the dangerous thing.

Eleven years ago, I watched this man start across forty yards of Savannah asphalt toward me, get turned around at the halfway mark, and file it as proof of the physics, then drive home, never once letting myself imagine the crossing finished. Tonight the distance was fifteen inches of sofa. And I finally understood what some patient part of me had maybe always known: it was mine. The last distance was always going to be mine.

I crossed it.

The first contact of my lips on his was a question, and his response was consistent with how he approaches everything significant—by becoming completely still, with hands relaxed at his sides, allowing me to define the situation. For a moment, he merely received it, and I sensed the restraint within him like a held-back current, ten years of desire stored and released repeatedly, as he waited for my signature.

I signed.

My hand found his jaw, the faint evening roughness of it, and the stillness broke.

He kissed me back the way the tide takes a beach—no hurry and no mercy, everything at once and none of it rushed—and the decade came with it. It arrived not as memory but as sensation, all of it at once: October rain, a dorm doorway, and being nineteen with my heart hammering against a boy’s chest in the cold. The library at eleven p.m., coffee going bitter while neither of us looked at our books. A porch swing, a Tuesday, a sentence that never landed—and underneath it all, the taste of him, which was the same, exactly the same, and something in me that had been standing at attention for ten years finally, finally broke rank.

I made a sound I would have denied under oath.

His hands moved deliberately—one to my jaw, gentle and cautious, as if handling something fragile he didn’t want to break; the other pressing warmly against my back, as if a decision had already been made. He drew me closer until there was no space left between us, not even a hint of the previous fifteen inches. For six years, I had studied this man’s terrain, but I had overlooked the most important feature: the way his heart was pounding beneath my hand, clumsy, relentless, and completely unplanned. Wyatt Aldridge, who usually commanded boardrooms with calm and control, was now visibly trembling.

For me. Still. After everything.

We kissed like people paying down a debt neither of us had ever stopped calculating—long, slow, compounding, his mouth mapping mine like the years were line items he intended to dispute one by one. When we finally broke for air, his forehead settled against mine, both of us breathing as if the staircase had been longer than advertised, his thumb tracing my cheekbone in slow, unbearable arithmetic.

“Ten years,” he said against my mouth. Not a complaint. An inventory.

“I know.” My voice came out wrecked, and I let it. “We’re not doing them again.”

He shook his head ’No’ and kissed me again—this time more gently and deliberately, as the urgency softened into something unhurried, with all the time they needed. I sensed the smile forming on his face even before our lips parted, and that moment—more than anything—breaks me. After ten years of sorrow, guardedness, and two a.m. rehearsals, he was smiling into the kiss like a boy who had just learned the parking lot wasn’t the end of the story.

I stood. His hand came with mine, fingers threading through like they’d kept the pattern on file.

At the mouth of the hallway, I reached back and turned off the lamp.

The city glow through the windows was light enough.