I toe off my shoes. Dr. Nishida's parting words are still sitting in my chest —you're allowed to own what you feel, Gemma, you don't have to wait until it's safe— and Beck is right there, three feet away, pouring creamer, and I have been known to lose my nerve in the time it takes to cross a kitchen.
So I say:
"I love you."
Right into the middle of his pour.
Beck goes still.
The creamer hovers over his mug. He sets it down with the careful deliberateness he brings to things he's deciding how to handle — unhurried, no wasted motion, both hands flat on the counter.
His jaw moves. Not clenching. Deciding not to clench, which is different.
"I had a plan," I say, because apparently I'm not done. "There was going to be a better moment. I was going tobuild up to it. There was going to be context. An appropriate segue. I wasdefinitely not going to say it while you were standing at the counter making coffee."
He turns around.
He looks at me for a long moment — that level Beck look that takes me a beat to translate because he holds everything so close. And then his face does the thing it sometimes does: a small, almost imperceptible shift. The tension leaving his jaw. The line of his shoulders less precise, the careful guarding of him gone somewhere for once.
"I love you too," he says.
His voice cracks. Barely. Just a fraction, right on the last syllable.
I will be thinking about that sound for the rest of my natural life.
"Your voice cracked," I say.
"No it didn't."
"Beck."
"That didn't happen."
"I have it documented," I tell him. "In my memory. Permanent record. I'm keeping it forever."
"Drop it," he says.
"Absolutely not," I say.
He crosses the kitchen — two steps, the kitchen is not large — and his hands come up to my face, both of them, thumbs against my jaw, tilting me toward him, and he kisses me like he has been meaning to and has been waiting for the right moment, which is apparently this one, post-therapy, standing in socks in his kitchen with a creamer spill risk.
I hold onto his shirt with both hands. The loose button on his cuff finally gives up and bounces off the tile, and neither of us looks down. He kisses me like he's said it a hundred times already and is simply confirming the record.
When he pulls back, I'm still holding his shirt.
"Hi," I say.
"Hi," he says.
"Come to bed," he says.
His room is dark except for the thin slice of moonlight through the curtains and the warm amber bleeding under the door, and it's enough. We've been here before — since the meteor ridge and the drive home and everything since — but tonight is different. More room in it, like the words made space for something that was already true.
He takes his time.
This is the thing I was not prepared for the first time: the full weight of his attention. Beck does everything the same way — incident reports, Ivy's dinosaur questions, the loose board on the back step — with his entire attention, nothing left over. Which means he's learned me in a way I wasn't ready for and can't deflect.
His mouth finds the curve of my neck and stays there while his hands work my shirt up and over my head, unhurried, like he has all night and intends to use it. His palms are warm against my ribs, my waist, and when he reaches behind me and unclasps my bra and pulls it away, he just looks at me for a moment in the dark.
