Dinner is perfect—bison and sweet potatoes, rich spices, everything warm and grounding. But the entire time, between bites and stolen looks, there’s this building sense inside me that something is shifting. I care. More than I ever planned to. More than is safe.
Halfway through dessert, he leans forward, voice softer than before. “I keep thinking…I really wish you could meet my family. You and Chloe. They would be cool about everything. It might be a shock to my dad for a minute, but he’s not going to hold it against you whatsoever that you’re a Granger. He’s not like that.”
My fork stills. My chest tightens.
Because there it is.
“Dylan…” My voice is thin. “I don’t know if we’re…ready for that.”
He studies me, brow creasing—maybe a little hurt, or just trying to understand. “Because of your dad?”
Even thinking about him is a weight.
My father would absolutely lose it if he knew we were dating. Not quietly. Not politely.
“Yeah,” I whisper. “Because of my dad. And because everything with us already feels so?—”
I stop.
Too much. Too fast. Too real.
He exhales, nodding slowly. “I don’t want to push. Especially not tonight, when we have so little time together. But I also don’t want to pretend that this isn’t…big. You’ve become really important to me. I want my family to get to know you and Chloe.”
That sentence hits me right in the gut.
Because that’s exactly it.
“You’re feeling this too, right?” he asks. “You and me…this is special.” He leans forward, his eyes searching. “I don’t want you to be a secret anymore. You mean too much. We can’t hide forever, can we?”
“But you knew early on that we’d have to,” I say quietly.
His brows furrow, and he leans back. “But things have progressed a lot since then.”
“It’s only been two months.”
His jaw clenches and he picks up his wine, taking a long swig. “Right. Yeah, you’re right.”
We’re quiet, and when the server asks if we’d like dessert, we decline. I don’t think I can eat anything around the lump in my throat.
“Dylan, I do feel it too,” I say, unable to bear the tension between us. “Honestly, it terrifies me how much I’m feeling for you.”
He leans forward and takes my hand again. “Really?”
“Yes.”
“If we’re still…feeling this way…in three months, can we revisit this conversation?”
I nod. “Yes. That seems fair.”
He kisses the palm of my hand, and I think we both breathe easier. Maybe for him it helps knowing there’s an end to the secret-keeping, and for me, I can put off thinking about it beyond tonight, but either way, it’s enough to lighten the mood between us again.
After dinner, we walk along the river path, snow crunching under our feet, the lights from the bridge stretching across the water. He pulls me close, his coat warm around me, and for a minute I let myself imagine what it would feel like if he weren’t a Whitman and I weren’t a Granger.
Later, back at my place, we barely sleep. Every time we drift off, one of us reaches for the other. It’s slow and sweet and wild and everything in between. At one point, he whispers my name against my skin like it means something sacred, and I swear my heart almost breaks with how much I crave every part of him. In the early hours, when the sky is beginning to lighten with daybreak, he flips me on top of him.
His eyes, his hands, his mouth…worship me.
We haven’t said the L-word out loud yet, but it feels like every touch and every look is screaming it.
