His eyes go soft and dark all at once. His throat moves. He answers without words. He waits with his whole chest. He waits like a man who has learned patience the hard way and decided it is a worthy altar.
The light sweeps. The bay answers with a glitter that could be a coincidence or a blessing. I set my mug down to hear my own pulse. I move my knees closer to his because I need the physical sensation of a decision. I look at his mouth. I look at his eyes. I look at the place my hand will go when the rules allow it.
Licking my lips, I let out a breathy whisper, “Okay. Now.”
I barely finish the word before his mouth is on mine, and the world rearranges to make room for this exact heat. He kisses me like he promised he would in a language made of both restraint and hunger. There’s a sound from me I have never made before. It startles me and doesn’t. His hand is at my jaw—careful, asking—and at my waist—claiming without taking. I open for him because my body has wanted this longer than my pride, and because my yes is a house I built, and I am finally home inside it.
When we break, it’s only far enough to breathe the same air. Foreheads together. His thumb rests just under my ear like a keepsake. He laughs a breath, stunned and grateful and a little wrecked. “Hi,” he whispers, ridiculous.
“Hi,” I whisper back, equally ruined.
Hauling me onto his lap, I straddle his thighs, pressing my center against the growing ridge in his pants. We kiss again, slower, and the room stretches to hold us. Outside, the town minds its own business for once or pretends beautifully that it does.
We don’t rush to the edge. We don’t spill over. We stack this on top of last night’s kiss, on top of the porch handhold, on top of a note kept in a drawer and one kept in a dresser, and we make it a foundation instead of a fire. My hands learn his shoulders, the healed places and the tender ones; his mouth learns my laugh and my silence; my body learns the weight of his not hurrying me; his body learns the waynowsounds when I mean it and when I meanenough for tonight,too.
When the wind picks up, slamming a loose shutter against the outside wall, we finally sit again, flushed and very alive. He takes my hand without asking. My fingers slot into his like we’ve had more practice than we do.
“I don’t know how to do this without wanting everything all at once,” he admits into the quiet.
“You don’t have to know,” I say. “You just have to learn. With me.”
He nods. “That I can do.”
We say very little after that because our mouths are busy with smiling and occasionally checking that the kiss wasn’t a dream. When he finally stands to go, he doesn’t ask if I want him to stay. The wanting is a bright, loud thing between us. The choosing is louder.
At the landing, he touches my cheek with the backs of his fingers like a superstition. “Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow,” I say, confident in a way that would have terrified me last month. “The otter and I will be waiting for you.”
He grins. “Always.”
I watch him descend the spiral, that long body sliding out of the room. The light sweeps once, twice. The night carries him toward the farm. The lighthouse—my stubborn, creaky, unwavering house—holds me steady while my heart does a dangerous, beautiful thing.
I lock the door and turn off the lamp. I press my palm to my mouth and laugh because my whole face won’t stop smiling and because Lila and Ivy are going to be unbearable and because I am not scared anymore. Not of being happy. Not of wanting. Not of being seen.
Downstairs, I flip the chalkboard to tomorrow and write,open for miracles at ten.It’s obnoxious. It’s true. I leave it there for the gulls to read.
Then I go to bed and dream of a storm that didn’t ruin anything and a boy who came home as a man and learned how to wait at the threshold until I was ready.
Chapter Twelve – Crew
The light that spills through my window isn’t blinding—it’s forgiving. The kind that touches everything before it wakes it up, testing if it’s safe to shine there. I lie still long enough to feel it move across my chest, over the scars and the places I still call ruins.
For years, my mornings started with noise. Alarms. Coaches. Reporters. The thick smell of antiseptic and liniment and adrenaline, all of it pretending to mean purpose. Now it’s quiet. There’s no stadium. No shoulder brace hanging on the bedpost. Just me, my breath, and the echo of her voice sayingnow.
My chest tightens around it.
I get up slowly, stretch until the scar tissue protests, then push through the ache. Pain used to mean weakness. Now it’s just proof that I’m still here.
Outside, the world’s already awake. Cows low in the field. Chickens gossip by the feed bins. The air’s heavy with dew and the faint sweetness of cut hay. I take it in like a prayer, one slow breath at a time, until it steadies the pulse tripping inside me.
Rowan finds me in the barn with coffee in one hand and sarcasm in the other.
“Morning, lover boy.”
I roll my eyes.
“You’re pacing. Again. Thought the barn was haunted.”
