“I’m not proposing,” he said quickly. “I want to be clear about that so I don’t scare you off. It’s way too soon.”
“Agreed.”
“But I am asking you to consider something.”
I looked up at him. His face was half-lit by the streetlight through the window, shadows and light playing across his features.
“What?”
“Come to New York with me.” His voice was steady, certain.
“Once I’m settled. When you’re ready. Move to New York, and let’s see what kind of life we can build together.”
It wasn’t a proposal. It was a question, an invitation, a dare.
Are you serious about this? Are you willing to risk everything on the chance that this could work?
I thought about the voice in the darkness back in my own time.There will be a cost. There is always a cost.
I thought about Emma, fading from the Polaroid, dissolving into white space and lost memories.
I thought about twenty-seven years of playing it safe, and how hollow that safety had felt by the end.
“Yes,” I said.
Jack’s whole face changed. Like a light coming on, like a door opening, like the first morning of spring after a long winter.
“Yes?”
“Yes. I’ll come to New York. I’ll build something with you. I’ll—” I took a breath. “I’ll stop running, Jack. For real this time.”
He kissed me. Soft and slow, like we had all the time in the world. And maybe we did. Maybe this was what the voice had meant by second chances—not just the opportunity to go back, but the courage to go forward differently.
When we finally pulled apart, the record had ended. The apartment was quiet except for the hiss of the radiator and the distant sounds of the city.
“It’s almost midnight,” he said.
“So it’s almost Valentine’s Day.”
“Happy early Valentine’s Day.” He kissed me again, and the clock on the wall ticked past midnight, and somewhere in the distance, a church bell rang the hour.
This kiss was different from the one by the Charles, different from the soft one minutes ago. This one started slow but didn’t stay that way. His hand slid from my jaw to the back of my neck, fingers threading through my hair, and I felt the shift in him—the careful restraint he’d been holding for days dissolving like sugar in warm water. My hands found the collar of his shirt, the warm skin at the base of his throat, and his breath caught in a way that made something low in my stomach tighten.
“Maggie.” My name in his mouth, rough-edged, barely a whisper.
“I know.”
“If you—we don’t have to?—”
I pulled him closer. “I know what I want, Jack.”
He searched my face in the half-dark, the streetlight and snow casting everything in silver and shadow. Whatever he found there must have been enough, because his hands slid down my back and he pulled me onto his lap in one fluid motion, and I stopped thinking about the past or the future or the cost of anything, because his mouth was against the curve of my neck and his hands were warm through the thin cotton of my shirt and the rest of the world had narrowed to the sound of our breathing and the impossible, electric fact of skin against skin.
We didn’t make it to the bedroom. We barely made it off the couch.
Later, much later, we lay tangled together on the floor between the couch and the coffee table, the blanket pulled over us, the record long since ended. His hand traced slow circles on my bare shoulder, and I pressed my face against his chest and listened to his heartbeat return to something like normal.
“That was—” he started.
