Page 80 of Stuck With the Smokejumper

“I tried everything I could.”

“I know. We both did.”

We sit with that a moment, both of us understanding now, in a way neither of us fully did before, what the other side of this feels like.

“There's something I almost told you before you left,” Ivy says.

I look at her. She doesn't hedge, doesn't build up to it, just says it plain and steady.

“I love you.”

I don't hesitate. “I love you too.”

Something passes between us that feels different from every other moment we've had this summer, not more intense, just more certain, like a question finally getting its answer. I kiss her, and it carries all of that, everything simple yet enormous at once.

“We still don't know where we'll be in October,” she says eventually, quiet, not worried, just honest.

“No,” I agree. “We don't.”

I think about my conversation with Russ, the somewhere to start that might turn into nothing or might turn into everything. I don't tell her. It's too early, too uncertain, and I won't hand her a promise I can't keep yet.

“We'll figure it out,” I tell her instead. “We're already figuring it out.”

She leans into my shoulder, and I put my arm around her. Neither of us tries to solve anything else tonight.

October's still a question. So is winter, and whatever comes after that. Nothing practical has changed just because we finally said out loud we love each other.

But for the first time in my life, not knowing where I'll end up next doesn't make me want to keep moving.

It makes me want to figure out how to stay.

thirty-one

Ivy

Iwake up wearing Beck's shirt, and for a second I just lie here, remembering.

The porch last night. The quiet sky, no lightning this time, no storm anywhere on the horizon. The words I'd swallowed weeks ago, finally said out loud. I love you. And Beck, without a single second of hesitation, saying it back.

I love you too.

I've spent most of this summer wondering whether this was temporary. Whether I was falling faster and harder than he was. Whether August would end us before we really got the chance to begin.

Now I know. Beck loves me. I'm ridiculously, embarrassingly happy about it, lying alone in my room on an ordinary Sunday morning.

I glance down at the shirt. I’ve slept in it for three weeks straight because it was the closest I could get to him while he was hundreds of miles away. Beck's not hundreds of miles away this morning. He's down the hall, probably still asleep. Wearing his shirt suddenly feels almost silly, given the actual man is available.

I decide I don't care. I like the shirt. And I wouldn't mind him seeing me in it.

The kitchen's slowly waking up by the time I get downstairs, coffee already going. Tessa moves with the caution of someone who isn't fully human yet. I pour myself a cup of coffee and lean against the counter. A few minutes later Beck comes in, hair damp from a shower, and stops when he sees me.

His eyes drop to the shirt. Come back up to my face.

Something shifts in his expression, small, unmistakable. I know what he's thinking. His shirt. On me. After last night.

I like his reaction.

“Morning,” he says, crossing the kitchen, and instead of stopping at a normal distance he puts a hand at my waist and kisses me, easy, like it's nothing, except it isn't nothing, not this morning.