Page 106 of Until We Come Home

“Well, you’d better keep it up,” I tell him, my fingers curling into the collar of his shirt. “Especially now that we’re officially putting down roots in Seattle.”

“Are we?” he asks, something sparking in his eyes. “Or is this another one of your spontaneous Sagittarius moments?”

“I accepted Claudia’s offer last night,” I tell him. “And it’s not a whim. I want this. I want us.”

“That sounds pretty incredible to me,” he says, and kisses me, slow and deep, right there on Front Street.

Around us, the street is a wall of noise—Calvin and Maren calling out to us, the Station 7 crew trading jabs, the town cheering as the trucks pull into the bay. But right here in the morning light, in the smell of woodsmoke and crisp autumn air, he’s safe, and I’m home.

I pull him back down and kiss him again, and I don’t care who’s watching.

EPILOGUE

Mateo

A week before Christmas, I wake well before Mia, like always. The apartment is quiet except for the radiator clanking under the window. I pull on thick wool socks and head into the kitchen to start the coffee, but one glance out the window stops me.

It’s snowing.

Not the wet, half-hearted stuff Seattle manages once a winter, but fat, lazy flakes drifting past the glass, dusting the rooftops across the street, coating the bare limbs of the maple out front, blanketing the windshields along the curb. The whole block is muffled under white.

With the coffee maker gurgling behind me, I lean against the counter and watch it fall. We signed the lease at the end of October, a second-floor two-bedroom on the north side of Capitol Hill with creaky wood floors, tall windows, and a radiator that rattles like a ghost every morning at six.

It’s a ten-minute walk from Meridian and fifteen from Station 7, and it’s the first place in years that feels like a real home instead of a crash pad. Part of that is the space itself. Most of it is her.

Plants fill every nook, crowding the windowsills and shelves and trailing vines off the top of the bookcase. Her dance bag hangs on the hook by the front door, right against my line gear. Her pointe shoes dangle from the closet knob by their ribbons, and my boots sit under the coat rack beside her yellow rain boots, the ones with cartoon frogs on the toes. Two whole lives, tangled together.

Once the pot finishes, I pull down our two favorite mugs, hers with the little otters on the front. Hers gets a splash of oat milk, and I’m pouring the last of the coffee black into mine when the bedroom door swings open with a bang.

“Is that snow?” Mia calls, hurrying down the hall in one of my Station 7 sweatshirts and fuzzy socks, her hair piled into a knot on top of her head. She skids to a stop and presses both palms to the window. “Mateo, look! Actual snow! In Seattle! It’s a Christmas miracle!”

I hold out her mug, laughing. “I was about to come wake you, though I figured coffee was a safer bet than shaking you.”

“Snow in December is jet fuel in my veins. I barely even need the caffeine!” she says, taking the mug and wrapping both hands around it without taking her eyes off the flakes. “It’s gorgeous out there. This is going to make the best impression on your mom.”

My mom’s flight lands tonight at seven. It’s the first time she’s flown out to Seattle to see my life here instead of hearing about it over the phone. She’s staying through New Year’s, in the second bedroom Mia and I spent all last week painting and setting up.

We’ve FaceTimed her a dozen times, and we flew to Boston on a last-minute trip at the end of October for what Mia insisted was a proper East Coast autumn, pumpkin patches and Halloween and a weekend up in Salem.

But Mom hasn’t seen our place yet, and we’re both excited to get her settled. Plus, she’s been dropping hints about a new guy she’s seeing back home, and Mia is dying to grill her for details.

Three big gulps later, half the mug is gone. Mia sets it down on the sill beside a sprawling spider plant and shoves the coffee table back against the wall with her foot.

“Okay, ignore me for a second,” she says, stretching her arms high overhead. “I have to run through the snow sequence one more time before rehearsal this morning. Jada’s understudy called in sick, so I’m marking her spot for the full run-through. If I don’t drill it right now, I’m going to be the idiot standing mid-stage on the wrong count while thirty company dancers stare me down.”

For the past month, while she waits for her new job to start in January, Meridian has kept her busy with their Nutcracker. Between running rehearsals for the kids and assisting the ballet masters, she’s been wrangling twenty eleven-year-olds through the party scene and the mouse battle, which apparently involves more backstage drama than a city council meeting.

Every second of it makes her happy, and it’s infectious. Shows are her favorite thing in the world, the holidays are a close second, and someone finally combined the two and handed her a paycheck for it.

Music drifts out of her phone, and she steps into the middle of our living room in her fuzzy socks. The sequence flows out of her, a long, sweeping turn that unravels into a dip to the floor, a roll, and a rise back up onto her toes, arms reaching toward the ceiling. Coffee in hand, I watch. I could watch her move like this every morning for the rest of my life.

“The snowflakes enter in waves,” she explains mid-turn, not the least bit winded. “It’s a ripple effect. Each line comes in two counts behind the one ahead, so it looks like a blizzard sweeping across the stage. Then the music swells, Jada comes out as the Snow Queen, the company swirls around her, and fake snow rains down from above. It gives me chills every time. Your mom is going to cry, Mateo. Mark my words.”

Dropping into a deep lunge, she gasps and pops right back up, pointing a finger at me.

“Oh! I meant to tell you when I got home yesterday,” she says. “Meridian locked down the exact dates for New York in February. I’ll text them to you so we can start looking at flights, and you can talk to Barnes about the time off.”

“Sounds great.”