My eyes sting.
“And I know enough to know that love is not about control,” he adds. “It’s notYou must stay in this town and only sleep with me or it doesn’t count.It’sI want you exactly as you are, even when it scares me.So if you want to keep traveling the world and kissing and fucking other people and writing about it while I’m on my laptop in the corner making sure VPNs are up to date, I would like very much to do that.Withyou. For as long as you’ll have me.”
Something in me, knotted tight for years, starts to loosen. Carefully. Achingly.
I take a step closer, until our chests are almost touching. My hands find his shirt, twisting lightly in the fabric. “Jacob.”
“Yes?”
“Tell me yes,” I whisper. “I don’t want to be without you.”
His eyes go molten. “Yes,” he says, without even the ghost of hesitation. “Yes, Tippi. I will come with you. I will adapt. I will share you. I will probably complain about airplane food. But I am in, wholeheartedly, for as long as you’ll let me stay.”
My laugh breaks on a sob. “OK,” I say, because my vocabulary seems to have deserted me. “OK.”
I reach up and kiss him, slow and deep and grateful. He makes a soft sound against my mouth, hands coming up to bracket my face like I’m something precious. The sofa bumps the backs of my knees and we sink down together, half-clinging, half-laughing softly into each other’s lips.
From the monitor, one of the twins lets out a sleepy little squawk.
We break apart, foreheads pressed together, both breathing hard for reasons that have nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the terror and relief of choosing someone.
My phone vibrates violently again on the console, trying to get my attention with the force of a thousand horny TikTok users. I reach over and flip it face down without looking.
“They’re going to lose their minds when you tell them,” Jacob says dryly.
I grin against his mouth. “Oh, sweetheart,” I say. “I’m not telling them. I’m taking them with us.”
He groans, but there’s a smile in it, and when he kisses me again I taste laughter and salt and the wild, terrifying possibility of a life where I don’t have to choose between loving the world and loving this man.
For the first time, the thought of staying isn’t ‘settling down’.
It’s building something we can take on the road together.
Epilogue
Jacob
If someone had shown seventeen-year-old me a map and told him he’d one day live out of a suitcase, he would have fainted clean away. And yet, here I am, typing up a cybersecurity report on a shaded balcony in Hoi An. Humidity is hugging my skin like a damp second shirt, lemongrass perfumes the air and drifts in through the open shutters, and Tippi is humming tunelessly as she edits footage of an interview she conducted at a queer-friendly café this morning.
Seven days. That’s our limit. On day eight she gets restless; on day nine she gets irritable; by day ten she starts pacing the walls and contemplating shaving her head for the sheer drama of it.
So we move.
And as it turns out…
I love moving.
Tippi calls it “our rolling residence.” I call it “a logistical nightmare requiring three colour-coded spreadsheets.” The truth lives somewhere squarely between the two, and, unusually for me, I adore the compromise.
She changed my life. Not by dragging me into the whirlwind of hers, but by giving me the space tobuildmy own wings.
I set my laptop aside and look at her.
Her hair is up in a messy knot she stabbed together with two chopsticks. Her freckles are warm from the sun. She’s wearing the tiny gold and diamond eternity ring I found for her in Florence lastmonth. Not an engagement ring, notofficially, but the symbolism is close enough that my brain and heart both recognise it meaningmine forever.
She insists she’s “not the marrying type.”
I, however, am confidently and cunningly biding my time.
