Ben was doing the same thing. Six months of carrying something he wouldn't name, holding his feelings back like he was protecting me from them. Like it was his call to make.
I was done being loved in silence.
I crossed the room.
He heard my footsteps and looked up, and I could see him already preparing something—an apology, or another careful, considered, completely maddening attempt to say the right thing. I didn't want to hear it. I was done with others deciding for me.
"Liv—"
"Shut up, Ben."
I took his face in my hands and kissed him.
Chapter 34
Ben
She kissed me like she'd made a decision and wasn't interested in appeals.
I didn't move for a half-second. That half-second where your whole understanding of the room rearranges itself and you're not quite sure if you're still in the same one. Then her hands were still on my face and she was still here, and I stopped thinking entirely.
I reached up and covered her hands with mine.
When she finally pulled back, we were both very still. Her eyes were open, watching me with that direct, unflinching look she'd used on delivery manifests and county inspectors and apparently on me.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay," she said.
She laughed, short and a little undone, and I felt it move through my chest like a frame settling into true.
I stood up slowly, and she didn't step back to give me room, so we ended up closer than we'd been. I could see the fine paint-dust still caught at her temple. Four months of early mornings. Four months of standing six inches away from this.
"I'm sorry," I said. "For before."
"Stop."
"Liv—"
"Ben." She said my name with the same patience she used when Collins said something that didn't need a response. "We're past it."
Fair enough.
I brushed the side of her face with my thumb, just once, the way you'd touch something you'd been looking at for a long time and finally had permission to reach for. She turned into it slightly, almost involuntarily, like she hadn't expected the gentleness.
I kissed her back slowly, the way the last light goes out of a room. Gradual, then complete, then nothing left but the dark and whatever you brought into it with you.
When we finally broke apart she exhaled against my cheek, and I felt the last of it go. Not Ryan— Ryan would always be somewhere in the room, in the joinery above our heads, in the bones of this house. That wasn't going away. But the guilt, the case I'd been building against myself, the long internal argument I'd been losing for months… that went. Just like that. Like it had been waiting for permission.
I pulled back far enough to look at her.
She looked back. Just Liv, a little undone, paint-dust at her temple, her hands still resting against my chest.
"I should've done this sooner," I said.
"Yes."
"I kept telling myself?—"
