A question flickers in her eyes. “Why?”
“Please,” I add.
She searches my face for a second, then pushes her chair back and stands. She’s close now. Bare feet. Oversized sweater. Eyes that have seen too much and still choose kindness. My hands lift almost of their own accord. I thread one around the back of her neck, fingers tangling in the soft hair at her nape. I don’t pull. I just rest my forehead against hers. Her breath catches.
We stay like that for a moment, the world shrinking down to shared air and shared heat and the gentle thud of our hearts trying to sync.
“Say it again,” she whispers, so quietly I almost miss it.
“What?” I murmur.
“That you don’t have a plan,” she says. “That you don’t know what happens next. That you’re… here. With me. That you’re still choosing this even if it’s messy and uncertain and…”
“Mara,” I interrupt. “I’m here.”
I take a breath, everything tight and open and terrifying. And then I say it.
“Yeah,” I whisper. “I want.”
The words leave me and hang there, fragile, and strong, both at once. Her shoulders sag with the weight of a breath she’s been holding for months. Her hands slide up, fingers curling lightly in the fabric of my T-shirt over my ribs, like she’s anchoring herself.
“Okay,” she says, voice shaking just a little, tears brightening the edges of her eyes. “Okay.”
We stand there, foreheads pressed together in a kitchen that smells like cinnamon and second chances, letting the moment settle. Then, slowly, giving her every opportunity to move, I tilt my head just a fraction. She doesn’t pull back. Her lips brush mine, soft, hesitant, a question asked in the language of contact instead of words. I answer it.
It’s not a long kiss. Not some dramatic, sweeping thing that belongs in a movie. It’s tentative and gentle and a little clumsy because my hands are shaking, and her nose bumps mine. But it’s real. And when we break apart, her eyes search mine again, and this time what I see there isn’t just hope. It’s belief. In me. In us. In the possibility that two broken people can build something that doesn’t fall apart at the first sign of a crack.
She smiles, small and wobbly.
“Want another cinnamon roll?” she asks, because of course she does.
I laugh, the sound thick with everything I can’t say yet.
“Yeah,” I say. “I want.”
Her fingers slip into mine as she leads me back to the table. And as we sit together, sharing food and bad jokes and more truths than I thought I’d ever say out loud again, I realize something else: For the first time in a very long time… I’m not waiting for life to happen to me. I’m choosing it. With her.
Fifteen~Epilogue: The Compass
Mara
One Year Later
The Gravel Crunches Beneath The Tires As The Bike Pulls Up The Drive. It’s a sound I used to associate with nerves, footsteps behind me, cars slowing down, things I didn’t want to turn and face. Now, it sounds like home. Like arrival. Like the world settling.
Marla still roars like she’s got something to prove, but now she carries two riders instead of one. I wrap my arms a little tighter around Jax’s waist as he eases off the throttle, guiding us up the winding drive that cuts through the pines. The air is sharp enough to sting my cheeks, sneaking under my scarf and biting at any patch of skin foolish enough to be uncovered.
Snow lines the sides of the drive, soft and untouched, glowing faintly blue in the late afternoon light. The sky is the color of steel wool and impending snow again. The world feels suspended, like it’s holding its breath with us.
“There she is,” Jax calls over his shoulder, his voice muffled by the helmet but still unmistakably his. “Cabin Sweet Cabin.”
I groan into his jacket. “You havegotto stop calling it that.”
“Never,” he shouts back, smug, and the bike’s engine rumbles with what I swear sounds like agreement.
We crest the last little rise, and there it is…. our cabin. It’s small. Quiet. All wood and windows, with a roof that looks like it’s exhaled under the weight of the snow. Smoke curls out of the chimney in a lazy ribbon, proof that the timer on the gas stove did its job and the place won’t be an ice box when we walk in. The big picture window facing the trees glows with fairy lights.
Somewhere inside, a plug-in timer has done its magic. Even from the bike, I can see it: the glow of the Christmas tree, reaching toward the ceiling in the corner of the living room. I added the lights before we left this morning, just to make this moment feel like the kind of scene my younger self would have dog-eared in a book.
