Page 55 of Broken Cedar

I close my eyes for a minute. “I don’t want to go,” I say. The admission tears out of me ragged, honest in a way nothing else I’ve said today has been. “I don’t want tomorrow. I don’t want the airport or the apartment or the life I built that suddenly doesn’t feel like home anymore. I just—” I stop because there isn’t a sentence big enough for the rest.

We’re both silent for a minute.

“This got bigger than just sex,” Colt says quietly. “Didn’t it?”

I nod. My throat has closed around something that feels suspiciously like the beginning of tears, and I am not going to cry, not now, not when I’ve spent a week being brave about everything except the one thing that actually requires bravery.

“For me too,” he says. “I thought—I don’t know what I thought. That we’d have sex. Then you’d leave and I’d go back to running this place, and it would hurt, but it would be the kind of hurt I could handle.” He pauses and looks down at his hands. “But that’s not what happened.”

“What happened?” I ask, my voice small.

He looks at me. “You came home,” he says. “And it felt like you never left. And now the idea of you leaving again feels…” He trails off, shaking his head and doesn’t finish the sentence.

“I don’t know how to do this,” I admit. “Any of it. I don’t know how to want two things at once. I don’t know how to love you and also love the life I built, because they feel like they exist in different worlds, and I can’t—” I stop and take a deep breath. I try again. “I can’t see the version of me that has both. I’ve never been able to see it. That’s why I left the first time. Because choosing felt impossible, so I didn’t choose. I just…left.”

Colt is quiet for a long time. The kind of quiet that belongs to people who are thinking carefully about what they’re going to say next because what they say next might change something neither of them is ready to change.

Then he moves to sit beside me. Close enough now that our knees touch. He puts his arm around me, pulling me against his side. I don’t cry. But I want to. Colt’s arm is around me, his heartbeat steady beneath my ear, and for one impossible moment tomorrow doesn’t exist.

“I wish we had more time,” I murmur against his shirt.

“I know,” he says. His hand finds my hair, stroking gently. “Me too.”

We don’t move. We just sit. His arm around me. My weight against him. Two people who’ve loved each other longer than they haven’t, waiting for a morning neither of us knows how to face.

Chapter Fifteen

The hallway floor creaks as I tiptoe to Colt’s bedroom door. I’ve been lying awake for the past hour, replaying everything we said to each other this afternoon. And all I can think is that, tonight, I don’t want to think about tomorrow. I just want to be held.

I don’t knock, just turn the knob and slip inside. Colt is awake, sitting against the headboard, the lamp on the nightstand casting his face in warm light. He looks up when I come in, then quietly sets his book down on the side table.

I close the door and cross the room to sit on the edge of his bed. “I couldn’t sleep,” I whisper.

“Me neither,” he says, patting the space beside him.

I climb further onto the bed and lean my head against the headboard.

“What are you going to miss the most?” Colt asks. His voice is rough, like he’s been awake too long, thinking too much.

I don’t have to think about it. The answer has been forming since I got here, maybe longer.

“Everything,” I say softly. “The way the light hits the east paddock in the morning. The smell of the barn. Copper’s stupid face. Mom’s coffee cake. The creek. The way you move when you’re working—like every task matters, even the small ones. The way you don’t fill silence because you’ve never needed to…” I stop. My voice has gone shaky. “Everything, Colt. I’m going to miss everything.”

He nods, looking at his hands. “I’m going to miss you telling me I’m doing it wrong.”

I laugh. The sound comes out wet, halfway to something else. “You are usually doing it wrong.”

“Not always.” He smiles. That almost-smile. There and gone. “I wish,” he says, and stops. Then starts again. “I wish I’d said something. Eight years ago. Before you left. I wish I’d given you a reason to stay before you built reasons to leave.”

“You did,” I say quietly. “You were the reason. That was the problem. Wanting you felt too big. Too complicated. Too…permanent. And I wasn’t ready for permanent. I’m still not sure I am.”

“Will you ever be ready?” he asks.

“I don’t know.”

His hand finds mine on the bedspread, his fingers threading through mine. Warm. Rough. Familiar in a way that makes my chest ache. Then he’s moving. His mouth finds mine. My hands find his face, his stubble rough under my palms, his tongue against mine. His weight settling over me as he lays me back against the pillows.

We kiss. For a long time. Just kissing. His mouth on mine, on my jaw, on the spot beneath my ear. His hand under my shirt, palm flat against my stomach, then higher, finding my breast, my nipple hardening under his touch. I arch into him. A sound escapes me–small and broken.