“I’ll take you to the office,” he said, sliding on sunglasses. “You have a story to deliver.”
I exhaled.
Smiled.
Let him open the passenger door for me.
“Yeah,” I whispered. “I do.”
And as the car rolled down the road, his hand settled on my thigh—easy, sure, claiming—I realised something.
I wasn’t walking into that office alone.
Not anymore.
Dane
The morning held that early hush where the world feels like it’s holding its breath. Penn was still warm against me, skin soft from sleep, limbs tangled with mine like she’d grown here. Like this was the shape we’d always been meant to make.
She traced the ink on my ribs again, her fingertip slow, reverent, following the words that had shaped me long before I’d learned how to shape myself. Her hair spilled across my chest, light as confession, and I watched her eyes flicker while she read me the way she reads everything she wants to understand. Not rushed. Not afraid. Just... curious. Open. Brave.
Most people looked at my tattoos like a warning. She looked at them like a map.
Her finger skimmed the script etched along the inside of my arm, the one that curled just above the crook of my elbow.
“What’s this one?” she whispered, voice still soaked in sleep.
“Light up the darkness,” I murmured, the Italian rounding in my mouth. “My nana used to say it whenever I was scared.”
Her breath hitched, like the words caught on something inside her. I covered her hand with mine, guiding it up to the small line of ink near the hollow of my collarbone.
“This one?” she asked.
“A reminder.”
“Of what?”
“That yesterday already happened, tomorrow isn’t promised, and today is the only thing I can hold.” I swallowed. “She used to tuck me in with those words.”
Her lips parted. “You have her everywhere.”
“I carry what I can’t lose,” I said. “And what I want to remember.”
She explored further, sliding her palm across my chest, right over Nana’s name, then down the ladder of dates etched between my shoulder blades, the coordinates running like a spine to the country that made her. My family. My ghosts.
Penn didn’t flinch. Didn’t pull back.
She just breathed me in, like the story didn’t scare her.
She followed the fine-line drawings next: the bee hovering near the forget-me-nots, the tiny swallow diving through a stitched line of raindrops, the scribbled moon I’d tattooed on myself at sixteen with a needle I sterilised in a borrowed lighter. All the wandering I’d done. All the pieces I’d stitched into skin because I didn’t know what else to do with my hands.
Then her hand stilled at the rib tattoo.
Calm her chaos but never silence her storm.
Her fingers trembled. A single breath fell out of her, thin and quiet, like she couldn’t hold it.
“She wrote this,” I said softly. “My nana.”
