“Tonight,” I say, “I remember this.”
He watches me like I stole his breath and he doesn’t want it back. “This?”
“This,” I repeat, squeezing his hand. “The part where we stop pretending the night is the only thing we share.”
He nods like a man hearing his sentence commuted. The relief on his face is terrible and beautiful; it makes my ribs hurt in a way I understand.
“Savannah,” he says, reverent and hoarse.
Life is short and sometimes mean; it stole yesterday already. I won’t let it take tonight.
“Come here,” I say, and there’s no tremor in it anymore.
He doesn’t stumble. He doesn’t surge. He just steps into me and his hands slide to my waist—firm, careful; possession restrained by reverence. My palms tighten at his jaw. We hangthere for one suspended heartbeat in the thin air between past and whatever this is about to be.
“Tell me to stop,” he says, because he’s him and he’d rather burn than take what I didn’t put in his hands.
I rise on my toes. “I’m telling you to start.”
His mouth finds mine.
It’s not gentle. It isn’t cruel, either. It’s honest. It’s ten years of prayers snapped like dry tinder. Heat arches up my spine so fast I have to grip his shoulders to stay put. He tastes like winter and coffee and the ghost of smoke, like the night we were fifteen under the Phantom River bridge when he kissed me with wet hair and shaky hands and said,I’m going to marry you someday, don’t laugh.He kisses me now like he’s answering himself across time.
I open for him and it gets worse, better, both—his tongue sliding against mine, a slow stroke that steals thought and leaves appetite. A sound escapes me, unpretty and right; he swallows it like he’s starved. His hands tighten on my waist, pull me to him, full to full, chest to chest, the length of him boxing me against heat. My fingers slide back into his hair, fist there, anchor. He groans into my mouth and the noise detonates low in my body.
“Savannah,” he breathes between kisses, as if he can’t stop saying my name and breathing at the same time. “God. Say?—”
“Yes.” I don’t know what he asked. It doesn’t matter. My answer will always be yes.
He tilts my chin and changes the angle and the world tilts with it. The kiss goes deeper, messier, a hungry drag that says everything the letters said and everything they didn’t. His mouth claims and yields, demands and gives, a rhythm we used to know in a different language and are fluent in, still. He breaks for air and I chase him; I retreat and he follows.
Cold air licks the strip of skin at my lower back where my sweater rides up under his hand. He slides his palm there, hot,protective, a brand and a blessing. I arch; his breath breaks on a curse that’s more worship than sin. He kisses the corner of my mouth, my jaw, the spot under my ear that made me useless when I was sixteen and incinerates me now.
“You’re shaking,” he murmurs against my skin.
“You do that,” I say, ruthless with honesty.
He lifts his head, eyes black with want and wet with everything else. “Tell me if I’m moving too fast.”
“You’re ten years late,” I say. “Catch up.”
He laughs against my mouth, wrecked and beautiful, and kisses me like a man who has no intention of ever being slow again. The world narrows to heat and pressure and the way his thumb draws a slow, destroying line at my waist. I feel giant and small, solid and new. I feel fifteen and unscarred and twenty-six and aware and all the ages of me at once.
I pull back enough to see him properly. His hair is a mess from my hand. His lower lip is red from my teeth. “I meant what I said,” I remind him.
His face softens at the edges, something tender under the heat like snow collapsed over a river—quiet, deep, moving. “I heard you.”
“Say it back,” I ask, because I want to hear him speak the sentence that will change his shape on the inside.
He holds my gaze like it’s a decision. Then he nods once. “It wasn’t my fault,” he says, voice rough but steady. “It was his love.”
The sentence lands between us and inside him like weight and like a lift. His shoulders drop a fraction. His breath evens just enough to carry us to the next thing. I feel something unclench in my own chest I didn’t know I had been holding, a spring releasing that had been coiled since the night everything split. I lay my forehead to his and close my eyes.
We don’t rush the silence that follows. We let it stretch its legs around us; we let the fire do the talking. When I shiver, he doesn’t ask permission with his eyes—he just opens his jacket and shifts closer, and I slide into the space like the answer I’ve been saving up for too long.
His arm comes around me, heavy and sure. Our joined hands settle on my thigh, heat bled from his palm to my skin until I can’t tell which is which. The box of letters sits on my other side like a witness or a pastor or a pile of tinder we’re not going to burn because we’re done using flame to prove our love exists.
“I’m going to make this right,” he murmurs, not an oath so much as an intention. “Not with some grand gesture. Not with penance. With… breakfast. With rides. With standing where you need me. With showing my face when it’s hard.”
