Not the past version of us. Not the younger one that ran on instinct and stubbornness. This version. The one that had already broken once and somehow found its way back.
“Yeah,” I said. “I have.”
Her fingers stilled against my chest. “Recently?”
“Since the night you fell asleep in my arms and didn’t even pretend you were going home.”
That earned me a small laugh.
“I remember that.”
“You left your toothbrush the next stay” I added.
“That was not intentional.”
“Didn’t say it was.”
She shifted slightly, propping herself up on her forearm now, looking down at me. There was no rush in her expression. No pressure. Just openness.
“I’m not asking to recreate something,” she said. “I don’t want us trying to redo what we already lived.”
“Good,” I said. “Because that version of me didn’t know how to love you like I wanted you to stay.”
“And this one does?”
“This one wants to never come home, and you not be there ever again.”
That seemed to land somewhere deep inside her. I saw it in the way her shoulders softened. In the way she leaned down and pressed her forehead to mine instead of kissing me.
“Maybe we don’t decide tonight,” she whispered.
“Maybe we already did,” I answered.
She smiled at that. We stayed like that for a long time. No more heavy talk. No need to define timelines or logistics or whose place made more sense. Those were details. They’d come.
What mattered was the quiet. Her breathing evening out. My hand still moving against her back.
The strange, unfamiliar feeling of not bracing for impact.
For once, there was no alarm waiting to sound. No call dragging me away. No distance creeping back in.
Just her weight over me. Just the steady rhythm of something we were finally allowing ourselves to build.
And I realized I wasn’t thinking about the next fire. I was thinking about breakfast. About where she kept the coffee. About whether there was room in her closet.
About staying.
17
Days had passed since that weekend—since I folded myself into Tariq’s arms and he stayed. Since we made love on every surface of my place. Since we soaked in my bathtub and I let him wash my hair…well my scalp…with his big, gentle hands. Since he held my eyes and whispered that he wasn’t letting go again.
I still felt him. In my limbs. In the spaces he’d coaxed open and filled—body, spirit, all of it.
We hadn’t said we were “back together.” We hadn’t needed to. The way he looked at me? The way he moved inside me, moved with me—spoke with more certainty than titles ever could. It was in the way he touched my back when he passed behind me in the kitchen. In the way he pulled my thighs around him like prayer. In the way he whispered my name like it tasted better in his mouth than mine ever could.
Tariq loved me.
And I was in love with him—still, always, foolishly and forever.
