I sweep my thumb along her cheek and grin. “I already told my landlord I wasn’t renewing the lease next month.”
Her eyes go wide, and she sits up abruptly. “What!”
I nod.
And then she hits me in the side, and an “oof” tears out of me.
“You ass. I just felt so silly asking that. I thou?—”
I curve my arm around her waist and yank her to me until she falls into a heap on top of me. “Yeah, baby, I’ll move in with you. After all the shit that went down, you think I was ever going to let you go back to that shithole? Where you weren’t safe? If you didn’t want me here, then I would’ve found another apartment or a house close by.”
It’s a big step. Sharing your space with someone, merging the aspects of your life together. Bills, insurance, maintenance.
But it doesn’t feel so big with Maisie standing beside me.
The only place where I want to be is with her, so moving in, sleeping next to her every night, forgood… It just feels right.
I feel like I’m exactly where I’m meant to be.
The irony isn’t lost on me that I spent a decade running from this city, putting as many miles as I could between me and New Orleans.
And now I’ve found a home in the very place I couldn’t get far enough away from.
I found peace.
The kind that’s settled in my bones and filled my lungs with enough air to breathe for the first time in years.
I found love.
The kind that heals you and washes your soul clean.
I found Maisie Delacroix when I didn’t even realize I’d spent my entire life searching for her.
And now that I’ve seen the sun, I can never go back to living in the dark.
EPILOGUE
WILDER
Six Months Later
“Hey, Sunshine.”
“Hi, handsome. How’d it go?” Maisie’s sweet voice filters through the speakers of my truck as the red light finally turns green.
Horrible. Like torture in the form of psychoanalyzing bullshit. Like I’m being waterboarded by memories that I want to stay buried right where the fuck they belong.
“Fine.”
There’s no one who knows me better than Maisie. Sometimes I think she knows me better than I even know myself, which is exactly why she immediately calls me on my shit.
“Wilder,” she says softly, and I know that tone, the one she uses when she’s being careful with me like she’s afraid I’ll shatter in her hands.
It wouldn’t be the first time.
“It was… less shitty than the last one,” I finally say.
This time, it’s more of the truth.
