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“I want you with me,” she says. “But there’s something I need you to understand before we go any further.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t want being with me to cost you this.”

She gestures around the studio. “Your work, your friends, having somewhere that belongs to you. You’ve built a life here, Kell. I don’t want loving me to make your world smaller.”

It takes me a second to understand what she’s giving me. She wants me, but she isn’t asking me to give anything up to be with her.

“I’m keeping the studio,” I say.

Relief passes across Laura’s face. “Good.”

“The bed too. My work. My friends. All of it.”

“I want you to,” she says.

I let that settle. “Sometimes I’ll paint late and sleep here.”

Laura nods. “I expect you will.”

I step closer. “But I still want to sleep beside you.”

Laura’s expression warms. “I want that too, and I like waking up with you. I just don’t want us to rush into pretending everything has to look exactly the way it did before.”

“It won’t,” I say.

Laura nods. “No.”

“We can decide what works.”

A small smile touches her face. “That sounds suspiciously reasonable.”

“Why do you sound so surprised?”

She shakes her head, but she’s smiling now, and the last tightness in the room eases. I touch her cheek, partly because I want to and partly because I can. Laura leans into my hand without hesitation.

The kiss starts slowly. There’s no rush to prove anything. Her mouth is warm against mine, familiar enough that my body responds before the rest of me catches up, but we don’t lunge for the bed or start tearing at clothes. I kiss her because I’ve missed kissing her, and she kisses me back as though she’s missed it too.

Her hands settle against my sides, and I draw her closer by the waist. For a while, we just hold each other.

Then one of her hands slips beneath the hem of my shirt. Her palm slides across my ribs, over the woven strands she already knows, then lower. I feel the change in my body before she reaches the place near my hip where my name first answered her touch.

Laura pauses. The first time she touched me there, neither of us knew what she was doing. She had barely brushed the place before my structure gave her the only word I had.

Now she knows exactly where her fingers are. She looks at me once, then traces the same path deliberately.

Warmth runs through me, deeper than arousal even as my cock begins to harden against her. The finer weave beneath her fingertips yields slightly to her touch, and something deeper in my structure answers.

Kell.

Laura’s breath catches.

I cover her hand with mine. “Again.”

Her eyes shine, but she doesn’t tease me. She moves her thumb over the place slowly, with intention this time, and the answer comes through me again.

Kell. She exhales something that sounds almost like a laugh. “It’s still there.”