Page 236 of Safe With You

“Seriously?”

I flipped back.

This was the part I was still learning how to trust.

Not Ellis. Not anything he’d done.

How comfortable I was becoming with him.

Five years with Lucas had taught me to pay attention to every shift in a relationship. If he got quiet, I wondered what I’d done. If something felt off, I searched myself for the reason before it occurred to me to look at him.

Somewhere along the way, loving him had become something I was constantly tending to.

By the time I finally left, I didn’t know how to separate loving someone from the work I thought I had to do to keep them loving me.

Ellis didn’t make me feel that way.

That was the part I hadn’t figured out what to do with.

If he was busy, he told me he was busy. If he said he’d call, he called. When he wanted to see me, I didn’t have to pull it out of him. I didn’t spend hours wondering whether something I said bothered him because if it did, I trusted that he’d tell me.

There was nothing to decode with Ellis.

No version of myself I had to offer first.

And somehow, instead of making me relax completely, that left me waiting for the moment when there would be.

I looked at my phone.

The screen was still dark.

I hated how quickly I noticed.

We didn’t talk every hour of every day. We never had. Sometimes an entire day passed before one of us reached out, and I’d always liked that there was room between us without the room meaning something was wrong.

Tonight, though, I wanted to hear from him.

More specifically, I wanted to see him.

I let that sit for a moment.

I missed him.

It was strange how much harder that was to admit than it should’ve been.

Missing someone meant noticing when they weren’t there. Noticing meant I’d gotten used to having him around, and I’d spent years making sure I could build a life where nobody’s absence had the power to rearrange it.

My eyes drifted toward the book in my lap.

Maybe that was why I’d been on the same page for twenty minutes.

My phone vibrated before I could think too much harder about it.

I reached for it and immediately wished I’d moved slower.

You home?

A smile threatened before I could stop it.