Tanner
When you get home, can we talk? Really talk?
My chest tightened. I typed back immediately.
Yeah. I need to talk to you too.
Good. See you soon.
The drive to our apartment took forty minutes. Every red light felt like a personal attack, every slow driver an obstacle between me and the conversation I needed to have.
By the time I pulled into our parking lot, my hands were shaking.
The apartment was dark when I let myself in. For a moment, I thought Tanner wasn’t back yet. Then I saw him, sitting on the couch in the dim light from the window, waiting.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
We stared at each other across the living room, neither of us quite ready to close the distance. The silence wasn’t uncomfortable—it was heavy with everything we’d both been carrying for four days, all the conversations we’d had with people who weren’t each other, all the ways we’d missed this.
“How was your trip?” I asked, even though it was a stupid question. Even though I could see the answer written in the shadows under his eyes, the tension in his shoulders.
“Hard. Necessary.” He stood, and I could see the exhaustion etched into every line of his face—but something else too. Something that looked almost like peace. “Yours?”
“A disaster.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It was my own fault.” I dropped my bag by the door, but I couldn’t look away from him. Four days had felt like four months. “Tanner, I need to tell you?—”
He crossed to me, and suddenly we were close enough to touch. Close enough that I could smell his shampoo, see the slight redness around his eyes that told me he’d been crying at some point. Maybe more than once. “Me first.”
I waited. My heart was hammering so hard I was sure he could hear it.
“My mom said love is always a risk. That the question is whether it’s worth taking.” He reached for my hand and laced our fingers together. His palm was warm, slightly damp—nervous, just like me. “And I realized I’ve been so focused on all the ways this could go wrong that I forgot to appreciate all the ways it’s already going right.”
“Tanner—”
“Let me finish.” His grip tightened, anchoring us both. “I’ve been scared. Of losing you to football, of watching you get hurt, of you becoming my dad sitting in a hospital waiting for bad news that never stops coming.” His voice cracked, just slightly, and I squeezed his hand harder. “But being scared isn’t enough reason to push you away. Not when you’re the best thing in my life.”
Something in my chest cracked open—all the tension I’d been carrying since the moment I’d stepped off that first plane, all the armor I’d built up to survive four days in that house. It shattered, and underneath was just this: how much I needed him. How much I’d missed being seen by someone who actually knew me.
“You’re the best thing in mine too.” My voice came out rough, scraped raw by everything I’d been swallowing for days. “Theonly thing that made it bearable was knowing I was coming back to you.”
His eyes went glassy. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I brought our joined hands up, pressed my lips to his knuckles. “I kept rereading your texts. The ones about your mom. It made me feel like maybe everything would be okay. Like if you could be that brave, maybe I could figure out how to be brave too.”
“You are brave.” He said it like it was simple. Like it was true.
“I’m not. But I want to be. For you.”
“Then we need to trust that. Trust each other.” He stepped closer, until there was no space left between us, until I could feel his breath on my lips. “I’m done letting fear make my decisions. I want to choose you. Every day. Even when it’s hard.”
I pulled him into a kiss—desperate, messy, saying everything I couldn’t find words for. He kissed back with the same urgency, his hands fisting in my shirt, pulling me closer like he was afraid I’d disappear. I wrapped my arms around him and held on, feeling the slight tremor in his body, the way he melted into me like he’d been waiting four days just to exhale.
When we finally broke apart, both breathing hard, I pressed my forehead to his. We stayed like that for a long moment, just breathing together, letting the world shrink down to the space between us.
