He arrives with the sun behind him, tall and easy, carrying a paper bag that absolutely contains something burned and heartfelt. His smile is softer than the day. He looks at me like we’re the only two people inside this light.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” I echo, because my brain does not, apparently, own a thesaurus.
He holds out the bag. “For you.”
I open it and find a sandwich as advertised—edges too crisp, cheese melted into the deli meat—and a folded napkin that saysfor the prettiest book witch.I wheeze-laugh and then choke and then want to kiss him and then remember that wanting is a delicious, necessary torture right now.
“Terrible,” I say, biting into the sandwich anyway. It tastes like butter and smoke and a man trying. “Perfect.”
We fall into an orbit that makes sense to my bones. He fixes a squeaky hinge, and I ring up a stack of romances for a woman who whispers that she “hopes you two are a thing, but like, not in a creepy way.” He reads to toddlers like the otter puppet has a degree in comedy. I shelve returns and pretend I’m not cataloging the precise timbre of his laugh when a three-year-old howls “again” from the rug. We move around each other like we’re learning a dance without counting, a series of almosts and gentle passes, touches that are somehownottouches until they are.
After story hour, when the parents have reclaimed their tiny tornadoes and the rug looks like a sticker bomb went off, he finds me by the spiral stairs, palms braced on the rail above my shoulders in that not-caging, not-trapping way that steals breath only because it’s him.
“Thank you,” he says.
“For what?”
“For letting me be in this room,” he says simply, and I swear my whole chest rearranges. “For the otter. For the… moment.”
“We’re doing okay,” I manage.
He nods. “We are.”
We stand too close and don’t move away because moving away would require more bravery than I have when his mouth is right there. He leans the smallest amount nearer, and I swear I can feel the exact place air turns into decision.
“I have to close early,” I blurt. “Town hall meeting. I volunteered.”
“Of course you did,” he says, amusement fond and quiet.
“Are you—” I swallow. The rulebook shuffles pages. “Coming?”
“If you want me there.”
“I do,” I say before I can be clever. The truth is quicker than my defense. “I want—” I stop, because the thing I want is too big for between the stairs. “I want you at the meeting,” I say instead, which is not the whole sentence and also is.
He smiles like he heard the rest of it anyway. “Then I’ll be there.”
He is. And it’s a circus the way only civic responsibility can be. Holt has a bullhorn, which should be illegal. Mrs. Winthrop presents a color-coded spreadsheet of “emotional arcs” for garbage pickup after the next festival. Daisy bribes compliance with snickerdoodles. Crew carries folding chairs like they’re paper and endures a round of applause from a table of teenage girls who whisper feral analysis into their sleeves when he walks past. He exists inside it like someone who knows he can’t fix everything but can be the one who carries what he can. It is, infuriatingly, the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.
After, we walk back to the lighthouse in a stretch of evening that the sky forgot to tighten. The wind is almost gone. The bay is a mirror trying to remember what it wanted to reflect.
He stops at the bottom step and looks up at the lantern room, then at me. There’s a question in it. There’s also a promise.
“Come up,” I say, the two words a door I didn’t know I had the key to.
We climb without speaking because there’s too much to say and also nothing that would improve what the air already knows. In the lantern room, the world spreads flat and endless. The rug is a map I pretended would always be safe. I put the kettle on because ritual makes brave things feel like tasks.
He waits by the window, hands in his pockets, shoulders relaxed in a way they weren’t when he walked in the first time. The light makes his jaw look like someone invented structure just to justify this view. He’s not trying to be beautiful. He just is.
We sit. The rope hums in the wind. The room makes a quiet that belongs to no one else.
“I want to try something,” I say, voice steady because if it shakes, I’ll laugh, and if I laugh, I’ll never survive it.
He straightens, attentive. “Okay.”
“We can keep our rules,” I say. “We can protect the parts of this that need time to grow tight. But—” I inhale. Exhale. I am not afraid of naming the thing I want. “When I saynow, I want you to kiss me like you mean it.”
