He pulled me into him gently, wrapping the blanket tighter. Lowering me onto the cushioned deck as the sun bled orange and rose across the water, painting the sky in fire and blood and promise.
He pressed his forehead to mine. Exhaled.
“Penn…I’ve loved you longer than you remember.”
I blinked, vision swimming.
“I—”
“Yes,” he whispered. “You do remember. You just buried it. You forgot the shape of it.”
His thumb brushed my bottom lip, reverent, trembling. “I waited. I watched. Stayed in the shadows because you were still the girl in the forget-me-not dress, and I was the boy who showed up hungry, bruised, angry at the world.”
The memory splintered. Kindergarten. The biscuit. The dirt-streaked knees. The first hesitant smile. The high-school bullies, Blake and his boys shoving him into lockers it all. Flashbacks collided with the present.
That day in kindergarten, the forget-me-not dress, Blake and the boys pushing me over in the mud. Dane helping me up and them laughing at him, at me. Me handing him a biscuit while the other kids spoke nasty things about him and how he had no food. Every school corridor where he had been shoved, laughed at, erased. Every lonely, hungry night he had clawed his way intohis empire, all for a girl who didn’t even know yet that she was the reason he’d survived.
“I vowed that day,” he whispered, “I would always see you. Always protect you. Always love you. Even if you forgot me.”
His confession spilled into the air, into the salt, into me.
“I built everything—from nothing—so that if you ever looked at me again, I could be someone worthy of you. Stark Shipping. The offices around the world. The empire I clawed from dirt and fire. The youngest millionaire Wellington ever spat out. All of it… for you. Because the world hurt you, and I wanted to build one that didn’t.”
The sea rocked beneath us, warm, soft, intimate. I felt it in my bones.
Hours later, after the storm of truth and memory had burned itself out, I lay against Dane’s chest, my cheek over his heartbeat, the blanket cocooning us both. My body had stopped shaking, but my mind was still a trembling thing—raw, open, stripped of every lie I had once believed.
The yacht rocked gently under the stars, the sea humming against the hull like a lullaby meant only for us.
For a long time, neither of us spoke. His hand drifted slowly up and down my spine, grounding me in a way nothing else ever had. My breathing evened, my lashes sticky from dried tears.
“Penn,” he murmured eventually, voice low and reverent. “I’m so damn sorry.”
I lifted my head just enough to see his face. Moonlight carved him in silver—jaw tight, eyes soft, mouth trembling with restraint.
“You shouldn’t be,” I whispered.
He blinked, startled.
I swallowed, the truth rising raw and simple from somewhere I didn’t know still existed.
“You could have been anything,” I said. “Anything in this world. And you chose to be someone good. Someone who built himself from nothing, but bruises and hunger and hope. It didn’t matter where you came from.”
His breath hitched.
“You think I would’ve cared?” I whispered fiercely. “About shadows? About a childhood you didn’t choose? Dane… if you had stepped forward—out of the dark, out of the places you hid—if you had shown me who you were…”
My voice cracked.
“I would’ve chosen you.”
His eyes shone—wet, stunned, devastated.
Not from pity. But from finally being seen.
“Penn…” His voice broke on my name. “You have no idea what that does to me.”
He pressed his forehead to mine, breathing me in, like he was trying to pull my words all the way into his bloodstream.
