“Fine line.”
He walked me to my door. The guest room, separate bedrooms, my terms that he’d never once argued with even though I could feel how much they cost him every night when he said goodnight and walked the thirty feet to his own door.
“Thank you for tonight,” he said.
“Thank you for cooking something that wasn’t burned.”
“Low bar.”
“You cleared it. Barely.”
He smiled, soft, reaching his eyes for once, and said goodnight and started to turn away.
I grabbed his collar.
I didn’t decide to do it. My hand moved before my brain could intervene, catching the fabric of his shirt, pulling him down to me. I kissed him.
For a split second he was frozen, surprise locking his body in place. Then his hands went to my hair, both of them, fingers sliding through it, tilting my head back, and his mouth opened against mine. Everything I’d been holding back for months crashed through me at once. The wanting, the missing, the anger, the love, the fear. All of it flooding through a crack that had been widening since the porch in Whitebrook, since the ultrasound, since the night I fell asleep on his shoulder in the reading nook.
I kissed him hard and he kissed me back harder, my back against the doorframe, his body pressing close. His hands tightened in my hair. I gripped his shirt with both fists. The baby kicked between us, right against his stomach, and neither of us stopped. He tasted like the wine from dinner and his mouth was warm and I was drowning in the scent of him, cologne, warmth, something underneath that my body recognized on a level I couldn’t explain. My brain was screaming at me to think, to be careful, to protect myself. The rest of me told my brain to shut the hell up.
I pushed him back. Both hands on his chest, feeling his heart hammering under my palms. He was breathing hard. I was breathing hard. His hands were still in my hair, mine still fisted in his shirt, six inches of charged air between us.
“Goodnight, Finneas.”
His jaw worked. I could see him fighting every instinct telling him to close the gap again. His hands slid out of my hair slowly, fingertips trailing along my jaw, and the loss of contact made me ache.
I stepped backward into my room, closed the door, leaned against it with my heart hammering so loud I was sure he could hear it through the wood.
Through the door, I heard his exhale. Long, shaky, like he’d been holding his breath for months and finally let it go. I pressed my forehead against the wood with my eyes closed, my lips tingling, the ghost of his hands in my hair still burning against my scalp. The baby was kicking, hard, like he had very strong opinions about what just happened.
I smiled. Pressed my palm flat against the door. On the other side I heard his footsteps, slow, reluctant, moving down the hall toward his room.
I stayed against the door, smiling, my hand on the wood where his back might have been.
The walls were cracking. I could feel them going. I wasn’t shoring them up this time.
38
— • —
Andrea
I took Finneas to Bonalisa on a Saturday because I’d been back in Atlanta for two weeks without seeing Mary and Peter, and the guilt was starting to feel physical.
The bell above the door chimed when we walked in. Mary was behind the counter sorting intake forms and she looked up and her face just crumpled. She came around the counter so fast she knocked a stack of papers off the edge and didn’t stop to pick them up, just crossed the floor and grabbed me.
“Five minutes,” she said into my shoulder. “I’m hugging you for five minutes. You’re not allowed to talk or move.”
“Mary...”
“Clock started.”
I held her back. She smelled like dog shampoo, the cheap coffee she kept behind the register, and my chest ached because I’d missed this. Missed her, missed the shelter and the animals and the uncomplicated warmth of a place where nobody expected me to navigate wolf politics or pack councils.
Peter appeared from the back room. His eyes went red the second he saw me and he wrapped both arms around Mary and me at the same time, the three of us standing in the entrance of the shelter holding each other while a tabby cat watched from the counter with complete disinterest.
Finneas hung back by the door. He waited until the hugging was done, then nodded at Peter and shook his hand.
