"Yeah?"
"What was it like? Before me?" She shifts to look up at me. "Three years alone up here. What did you do?"
The question catches me off guard. I don't talk about those years. Don't like to think about them.
But she's asking. And I promised myself I'd try.
"Quiet," I say finally. "It was quiet. I'd wake up, check the perimeter, hunt or fish, maintain the cabin. Read. Train. Run the trails until my body gave out." I pause. "I thought I was healing. Turns out I was just hiding."
"Healing from what?"
My jaw tightens. The face flashes in my mind, the one I try not to see. J, grinning at me in the Afghanistan sun, thirty seconds before the world exploded.
"I lost someone. On my last deployment. My spotter." I force the words out, one at a time. "We'd been partners for six years. He was the closest thing I had to a brother. And I watched him die because I missed something. Because I didn't see the threat in time."
Sadie's hand tightens on mine. She doesn't speak. Just waits.
"After that, I couldn't... I couldn't be around people. Every face was his face. Every conversation was one I should have been having with him. So I came here. Built the cabin. Told myself I'd stay until I didn't feel broken anymore."
"Did it work?"
"No." I look down at her. "Nothing worked until you. You were the first thing that made me want to come back. To feel something other than empty."
Her eyes are wet. "Wolfe."
"I don't tell you this for sympathy. I tell you because you asked me what my life was before you, and the answer is that it wasn't a life. It was just survival." I bring her hand to my lips, pressing a kiss to her knuckles. "You gave me a reason to do more than survive."
She climbs into my lap, straddling me, her hands on my face. "I'm so sorry about your friend. About J."
Hearing his name from her lips cracks open a door I've kept locked for three years.
"He would have liked you." The words surprise me. "He was loud too. Talked constantly. Drove me crazy."
"Sounds like good taste runs in your found family."
I almost smile. "Yeah. Maybe it does."
She kisses me, soft and sweet, and I let myself feel it. All of it. The grief I've been running from and the hope she's brought me and everything in between.
"Stay with me," I murmur against her lips. "Tonight. Tomorrow. Every day you're willing to give me."
"I'm not going anywhere." She pulls back to meet my eyes. "I promise. You're stuck with me now, Wolfe Hendrix."
"Good." I pull her closer. "That's exactly where I want to be."
She's quiet for a moment, her fingers tracing patterns on my chest. Then she looks up at me, and her expression makes my heart stutter.
"Wolfe?"
"Yeah?"
"I love you."
The words land in my chest and crack something open. We haven't said it yet. We've shown it in a hundred ways, but neither of us has spoken it aloud.
I pull back just enough to see her face. She's watching me with those brown eyes, vulnerable and brave and everything I never knew I needed.
"I love you too." No hesitation. No qualification. "I've loved you since you organized my woodpile and told me it was art."
