“I did,” I say simply. “I can do noise. I won’t do it to you.”
Something shifts in her face—relief, thank you, a new kind of trust. She steps close, palms on my ribs, not pulling me in and somehow pulling me in. “You’re dangerous when you’re good,” she says.
“Working on being consistently dangerous,” I say, because if I don’t joke, I’ll say something likeI’d burn it down before I let it touch you, and that’s too much for a weeknight.
We walk back to the spiral, to the landing where we pretend good night is easy. She catches my hand on the rail, presses a kiss to the knuckles—light, devastating—and says, “Go home before our reckless seconds turn into days.”
I go. Barely.
I wake at 5:12 a.m. to rain interrogating the roof. The storm arrived early, slanting in off the bay with opinions. The rehab band hangs off the chair’s arm where I left it. I loop it around a porch post and start the routine Marcus wants. Rotations. Holds. Slow burn. I count breaths, not reps, because I am training a different muscle too—the one that chooses patience when my whole history begs for a sprint.
By eight, I’m soaked and happy and on my way to the shop with two coffees and a crooked grin. She opens at the exact second I knock, like a magnet and steel. We spend the morning making the kind of weather people could live inside: story hour at ten (the otter is a diva and demands grapes), a line of tiny raincoats, one dad who cries at the last page and pretends it’s dust. Between the chaos, we exchange small looks that carry the weight of last night’s seven seconds. I’m no good at hiding. She’s getting worse at it, too.
At noon, a text from Marcus.
Marcus: Doc wants velocity video. Tomorrow by 3.
I shoot him a thumbs-up and a thirty-second clip of a clean throw into the net on the side lot. The shoulder sings onthe follow-through, not pain, not warning—just the memory of how good it can be. I send it and picture the doc nodding in a room full of slow computers.
At two, the storm flexes. Wind shouldering the door. Windows rattling like a choir. Bailey looks up, and I’m already at the back entrance, checking the latch we fixed and verifying that the shim held.
“You okay?” I ask.
“I like thunderstorms,” she says bravely. “But they can still scare me.”
She then adds, “Stay until it passes?”
“You couldn’t move me with a forklift.”
We light candles even though the lights haven’t flickered yet. We make cocoa. She puts on a record with crackles that sound like a campfire. We talk about nothing that matters and everything that does: the first book that broke us open, the first coach who yelled in a way that made us smaller, the places our parents got it right, and the things we forgive because it makes room for peace. My knee ends up against hers. She draws absent circles on my shin with her socked toe and doesn’t seem to know she’s doing it. I file the moment underreasons I don’t care if the stadium forgets my name.
The power flickers twice and holds. The storm swears and moves north like it lost interest in us. We stand at the window and watch the bay calm down, the surface smoothing its dress like it’s about to go somewhere fancy and lie about what it did all afternoon.
The door opens then without the bell—Rowan, dripping, grinning, carrying two boxes over his head. “Rescue drop,” he declares. “Mom sent soup. I brought scones. Also news. TheChroniclewants a quote about ‘the quarterback’s community outreach of literacy excellence,’ and I hate that sentence so much I came in person.”
Bailey blinks. “You walked here in that?”
“Heroically,” he says. “Give me a towel and deny me nothing.”
We feed him, mock him, compose a fake quote that is 100 percent just adjectives, then delete it because our mothers raised us better. He leaves trailing puddles and goodwill.
When the door shuts, the shop moans. Bailey leans on the counter, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “I used to think storms were interruptions,” she says softly. “This one feels like permission.”
“Permission for what?”
“To stop bracing,” she says. “To choose.”
I don’t touch her. I don’t speak. I let her choose.
Her hands find my face, my jaw, my mouth, and the beam sweeps, and the record crackles, and if patience is a holy language, then we’re fluent enough to invent our own dialect. We keep the number. We break it and reset it. We stop while we both still can and call it a win that feels cruel and exactly right.
Bailey’s hands linger at my jaw for a second longer, like they didn’t get the memo. Her thumb traces the corner of my mouth before it falls away, and I swear the record skips just from the shock of losing her touch.
The lighthouse beam sweeps across the front windows again, pale and slow, and the whole shop exhales like it’s been watching us.
“I should…” She clears her throat and straightens, palms smoothing down the front of her sweater. “Um. Check the windows one more time. Make sure we don’t wake up to a saltwater aquarium in the reading nook.”
Her voice shakes on the joke.
