I pressed my forehead against hers. Our breath mingled, hot and ragged, and I could see her eyes even this close, unfocused and dark and wild with something that was the opposite of fear.
"Let go," I said, and my voice was barely recognizable. Just scraped raw, shaking, stripped of every layer of control I'd ever built. "I've got you. Let go."
She shattered.
It hit her like a wave I felt before I saw it, the sudden, convulsive tightening around me, the way her whole body locked and then released in a rush that bowed her spine off the mattress and tore a sound from her throat that lit something up inside me that had been dark for a long time, and hearing it now—in this context, in this moment, with her body pulsing underneath me, was the most perfect moment of my entire life.
Chapter Thirteen
Xavier
I held her.
That was all I could do for a long time, hold her against my chest with both arms wrapped around her so tightly that I could feel the aftershocks still rippling through her body. Her face was pressed into the curve of my neck, her breath coming in hot, ragged bursts against my pulse point, and my own breathing was no better. Deep, shuddering draws of air that felt like the first real breaths I'd taken in eight weeks, like I'd been breathing through gauze this entire time and someone had finally ripped it away.
Her heart was hammering against mine. I could feel it through the press of her chest, the twin percussion of two hearts running at the same desperate tempo, gradually beginning to slow. My hand found the back of her head, cradling it the way I always did, fingers threaded into the damp tangles of her hair, and I pressed my lips to her temple and just breathed her in. Salt and lavender and sex and the mint toothpaste she'd chosen herself, and underneath all of it, the scent that was just Molly. The one I'd been cataloging since day one, the one that meant everything.
"Breathe," I murmured against her hair, and the irony wasn't lost on me. Telling her to breathe when my own lungs were still staging a rebellion, when every exhale came out shaking and every inhale tasted like her. "In for four. Hold for four."
She laughed. Weakly, breathlessly, her body vibrating against mine with it. "You're giving me breathing instructions right now?"
"Habit." My arms tightened. "Apparently I default to caretaking even when I can barely remember my own name."
"Your name is Xavier," she said, her lips moving against my throat as she spoke, and the sensation sent a residual shudder through me that had nothing to do with the cooling air on damp skin. "Xavier Moreno. You're in your house. It's Thursday. And the banana pieces are still too small."
She was echoing my note. The note I'd left on the nightstand weeks ago, the one I'd written at five in the morning with a sandwich diagram in the other hand. She'd memorized it. Kept it. Turned it into a language between us, an anchor, proof that the small things survived.
We lay there. Minutes passed. I didn't count them, which was a first, because I'd spent weeks counting everything: her breaths, her bites, her hours of sleep, the days since the rooftop. But right now, the counting felt irrelevant, replaced by something more immediate and more consuming: the weight of her bodyon mine, the slowing cadence of her heartbeat, the way her fingers traced idle, aimless patterns on my collarbone like she was writing something only her fingertips understood. The same thing she'd done that night when I'd laid out the terms and she'd listened and I'd thought I knew what patience meant.
I hadn't known anything.
Eventually, reluctantly, the practical part of my brain flickered back to life with the persistent, unsexy reminder that there was a condom that needed to be dealt with. I pressed one more kiss to her forehead, not a redirect this time, not a substitute, just a kiss because I could, and eased her off my chest.
I sat up. Swung my legs over the edge of the bed. Dealt with the condom with the efficient, unglamorous practicality the task required, tying it off and reaching for the wastebasket by the nightstand. My body was still humming. A low, pervasive vibration that felt less like afterglow and more like recalibration around the new reality that I'd kissed her and she'd kissed me, we'd crossed the line, and the world hadn't ended. It had, in fact, begun.
I was already planning the rest of the night. Pull the covers up. Get her water because she needed to hydrate, especially after the bath, especially after this. Dinner. Then back in bed. Her head on my chest. My arm along her spine. The weighted blanket over both of us this time. No barrier, no separation, no top-of-the-covers discipline. Just us, in the bed we'd been sharing for two months, finally sharing it the way I'd wanted to since the first day when she'd said Daddy and I'd known with terrible, crystalline certainty that I was ruined.
I turned to tell her this. To say something about water and dinner and the rest of our lives, or at least the rest of the night, which at this moment felt like the same thing.
And then I saw the suitcase.
It was in the corner of the room. Near the closet. A medium-sized roller bag that I didn't recognize. It was packed. Zipped closed. Standing upright with the handle extended, the posture of a bag that was ready to move. Next to it, stacked with the neat precision of someone who'd organized it deliberately, was a shopping bag from what looked like a grocery store.
The world tilted.
Not dramatically the way it had tilted on the rooftop or in the moments after the kiss so many weeks ago. This was subtler. A failure of the ground beneath me, the kind of shift that happens when you realized the surface you'd been standing on wasn't solid at all but a thin crust over something hollow, and the hollow had been there the whole time, and you just hadn’t looked down.
I stared at the suitcase. My brain, which had been running on endorphins and the lingering electricity of her body against mine, performed a rapid and devastating series of calculations. The tidied living room. The cleared surfaces. The put-away coloring books. The slippers gone from beside the couch. The chamomile mug not on the counter because the chamomile mug had been packed. Everything I'd registered when I walked in, the absence quiet, the staged photograph quality of rooms stripped of habitation, hadn't been cleaning.
It had been leaving.
She'd been packing while I was at work. She'd been organizing her departure with the same careful, deliberate actions she'd brought to everything over the past four weeks. The therapy, the independence, the slow and systematic dismantling of every thread that tied her daily existence to mine. Saying my name, but Xavier not Daddy. And then I'd come home and panicked, burst through the door, and she'd been standing there in a towel and we'd—
The cold that moved through me had nothing to do with the air on my bare skin. It started in my chest and radiated outward, a spreading numbness that reached my fingertips and my toes and the back of my throat simultaneously, and for a long, terrible moment, I couldn't move. Couldn't turn around. Couldn't look at her lying in the bed we'd just—
"Xavier?"
Her voice. Soft. Cautious. The voice of someone who'd seen me see the suitcase and was watching the detonation happen in real time.
