I hesitated, just for a second. Then nodded. “Yeah. Let’s go home.”
That night,I couldn’t stop touching the keys. Every few minutes I’d check my pocket, slide my thumb over the teeth like I was convincing myself they were real. Not just some daydream I’d conjured up on the drive over. Not some temporary escape. Butmine.
My place. My choice. My life.
It still didn’t feel natural in my mouth—“mine.” Not after a lifetime of having everything handed to me with strings already knotted tight. But this? This I paid for with the sale of my car, the last thread connecting me to the life I’d just severed. It felt right. Raw and terrifying andright.
Sin tossed another box onto the floor and flopped down beside it with a groan. “You officially have more books than you have forks. Which, to be clear, is a big fat zero.”
I snorted. “That’s because forks don’t make me feel like I might understand myself better.”
He gave me a look. “That’s the most pretentious thing you’ve ever said.”
“Is it?” I asked, quirking a brow. “Youdidonce describe me as a human library with daddy issues and a leather fetish.”
“Fair,” he said, and leaned back on his hands like he owned the room.
He kind of did. It was weird. Watching him make himself at home somewhere that technically belonged to me now—but somehow never felt like it really would until he walked into it.
A man like Sin didn’t belong to anything. He justwas. Fully and completely himself. Chaotic, sure, but unapologetic. It made me ache with jealousy and adoration in equal measure.
We’d hit up Target on the way back. A cart full of mismatched items, two mugs with flamingos on them for no reason except that I’d smiled at them, and gray towels we couldn’t agree on but bought anyway because compromise, apparently, was a thing couples did.
I hadn’t realized we were a “we” until the cashier asked if we were moving in together and Sin said,“Something like that.”
It made my chest ache—in a good way. In arealway.
After that run, the unpacking, the triumphant pizza delivery (Sin insisted on tipping 50% because, “this dude is delivering to a fifth floor walk-up with no elevator, he deserves hazard pay”), we sat shoulder to shoulder on the hardwood floor—because I didn’t have a couch—our legs stretched long in front of us, beers in hand.
I let the condensation drip down my knuckles and stared at the bare wall ahead of me. “I’m not scared,” I said out loud, almost surprised to hear it.
Sin glanced at me. “No?”
“I thought I would be. Thought I’d wake up panicking. Thought I’d beg someone to take it all back.”
He nudged his knee against mine. “But?”
I looked around the apartment—the empty corners, the scuffed floorboards, the single chair we’d found at a sidewalk sale on the walk back and carried between us like a throne.
“But, nothing. I’m not. I’m… relieved.”
He let that settle for a moment. “You know what that means, right?”
“What?”
“It means you never really wantedtheirlife. You just didn’t think you had a choice.”
I stared at him. The sharp line of his jaw. The quiet fierceness in his gaze. He said it so simply. Like it wasn’t something that had taken me years to unravel.
I swallowed. “You were always the choice. From the beginning.” He blinked, a little stunned. I clarified. “You were never something that justhappenedto me. I wanted you. Even when I was too much of a coward to say it.”
Sin looked away then. Cleared his throat. “Jesus, Theo, warn a guy before you go allNotebookon him.”
I leaned over and kissed his cheek anyway. “Thanks. For helping me carry all this.”
“The boxes?” he asked, pretending not to know what I meant.
I nodded toward the beer. “That too. But also… everything else.”
