When our mouths finally broke apart, she didn’t move. Her forehead rested against mine, her hands still locked around me. I breathed her in. Cinnamon and firelight. That was what Scarlett Monroe would always smell like in my memory.
“I never wanted to lose you,” I said.
“You didn’t,” she whispered. “You just forgot how to find your way back.”
We stayed like that, wrapped in quiet, warm silence, until the wind outside reminded us the world hadn’t disappeared. It only paused for a while.
Scarlett pulled back and searched my face. “Is there more? More I don’t know?”
My gut twisted as I nodded.
“I want to know all of it.”
“I’ll tell you,” I promised. “Everything. But I’m going to need some time.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
I exhaled, and the relief was instant. For the first time in years, someone saw all of me and wasn’t running the other direction. She slipped her hand into mine again and led me to the bed. We sat down, side by side, her head resting against my shoulder.
It wasn’t sex. It wasn’t silence. It was something better.
Connection.
And I knew right then I wasn’t going to lose her again. I wouldn’t let myself. Not this time.
CHAPTER 7
SCARLETT
Monday morningsusually passed in a blur of lukewarm coffee, missing mittens, and first graders coming at me with sticky hands and big feelings. But today, I walked into Mustang Mountain Elementary like I had a secret. Like I was made of sunshine and stolen kisses.
My phone buzzed in my coat pocket, and I didn’t even have to look to know who it was.
Kingston: Miss you already. Try not to break too many hearts today.
I bit back a grin and slipped my phone back in my pocket before anyone could see. He was trying. After everything we’d been through, that meant a lot.
I shrugged out of my coat, my cheeks still flushed from the cold, or maybe from the memory of Kingston’s mouth on mine. I pressed a hand to my chest as I crossed the hallway toward the staff lounge, trying to settle the flutter in my heart before anyone could ask me why I was smiling like a woman who’d been thoroughly kissed all weekend. Because I had been, and I wasn’t the least bit sorry about it.
As I stepped into the staff lounge, the school librarian popped the lid off a container full of homemade blueberry muffins.
“Scarlett, thank goodness,” she said, her eyes wide behind her pink-rimmed glasses. “You're the only one knows how to make real coffee, and I swear if I drink another cup of this swamp water, I’ll throw myself into a snowbank.”
“Drama queen,” my friend Luna muttered, but she smiled and held out her mug so I could fill it with the brew I brought from home.
I dropped my bag, pulled out my thermos, and started pouring. The familiar scent of cinnamon coffee wrapped around me like a soft scarf, grounding me in the rhythm of a Monday morning. I still couldn’t stop smiling.
At least, not until Madge, one of the women who’d worked in the cafeteria since way before Kingston and I started Kindergarten, looked up from where she was sitting by the bulletin board. “You haven’t checked your email yet, have you?”
My heart stuttered. “No. Why?”
She pushed her glasses up on her nose. “Apparently, there was some kind of petition circulated over the weekend.”
I blinked. “A petition?”
The librarian groaned. “It’s about the tech center and who funded it.”
Suddenly, all the warmth in my chest went ice-cold. “Kingston.”
