“For you?”
“For the girl I was supposed to love.”
Penn’s eyes shot up to mine.
“Her?”
“You,” I said, voice breaking on the truth of it. “She heard stories about you. Every time I came home from school. At four. At eight. At sixteen. I’d talk about the girl with the fire in her laugh and the storm in her eyes. She wrote that line for you before she died.”
Penn’s throat worked. “I don’t remember that.”
“No,” I whispered. “But I do.”
Silence unfurled around us, thick, tender, electric.
She leaned up and kissed the ink, slow, like it was a vow.
Something inside me shattered so quietly I almost didn’t feel it.
And then I felt all of it.
I pulled her onto me fully, her thigh sliding across my hip, her breath warming my jaw. She tasted like morning and memory and something dangerously close to home.
“You’re everything that ever made sense to me,” I said against her ear. “Even when I didn’t know why.”
Her answer wasn’t words.
It was the way she lifted her hips, slow and sure.
The way she pulled my mouth to hers, hungry and trembling.
The way she whispered my name like she was relearning something she’d lost.
What happened after that wasn’t sex.
It was reclamation.
Her nails in my shoulders, my hands gripping her waist like she was the only thing tethering me to earth. Our breaths breaking, our bodies finding that fierce rhythm that felt written somewhere long before we ever got here. She moved like she needed me the way I needed her, and I swear the universe bent around us, pulled us closer, urged us forward, begged us not to stop.
By the time she melted on top of me, shaking, gasping out my name like a prayer she hadn’t meant to say, I was gone. Lost. Found. Something in between.
We showered slowly, water carving paths over new bruises, new marks, new truths. I washed her hair. She laughed softly when I kissed her shoulder. We stood forehead to forehead under the steaming spray until the world felt real again.
Coffee to go. Her peach tea steaming in her hands. The road humming beneath the tyres. She had a deadline. A story to deliver.
But all I could think was: I waited my whole life for this morning.
And now I’d spend the rest of it making sure she never lost herself again.
When I dropped her at Carrie's building, I didn’t go upstairs with her. I crossed the street instead.
To the building with her name on it. The one she didn’t know was hers yet.
The antique furniture was already arriving. Walnut desks from Italy. A velvet settee in deep plum. Glass cabinets for the books she loved. A writing desk from 1893 she’d once cried over in an auction catalogue.
This place would be her empire. Her publishing house. Her thing. Her name.
I stood at the window on the top floor and watched through the glass as she walked into Carrie’s office. Her leg bounced. Her teeth worried the skin of her thumb. Carrie read each line of the catfish article with the intensity of a judge weighing souls.
