Fact: Maya slept in Jace's room last night. I heard them come in from the hot tub. I was reading in my room. I heard his door close. I heard her laugh, quiet and real, through the wall. I put my book down and stared at the ceiling for two hours.
Fact: She was intimate with Reid on the ridge three days ago. I saw them walking back. I saw Reid's face. I have never seen Reid's face look like that and I have known the man for fourteen years.
Fact: I have wanted Maya Reeves since the moment I saw her.
Fact: I am sitting in a truck on a hill watching a lit window like a man who has mistaken observation for participation and I am thirty years old and I am tired of it.
My phone buzzes.
I look at the screen.
JACE:Don't make it weird.
Three words. Classic Jace: blunt, warm, completely insufficient as emotional guidance and somehow exactly enough.
Don't make it weird. Meaning, stop overthinking.
I start the truck.
The engine rumbles through the frame and into my hands on the wheel and I pull onto the access road and I drive. Not the measured, considered approach I use for everything. I drive with the accelerator down and the gravel spraying behind me and my pulse high and steady in my ears because I have made a decision and I am not going back.
I am done being the one who watches.
I am done being careful. I am done waiting for the right conditions, the right moment, the right configuration ofcircumstances that will make vulnerability feel safe. It will never feel safe.
The truck skids to a stop in the gravel. I kill the engine. I don't take my jacket off. I walk to the house, through the door, down the hall.
The office door is closed.
I stop.
One breath. In my chest I feel the accumulated weight of every moment I held back. Every near-touch. Every time I set coffee in front of her without speaking. Every night I lay in bed knowing she was twenty feet away and did nothing about it. Every time she looked at me and I looked back and then I left the room because staying would have meant reaching for her.
I open the door.
Not gently. The handle gives and I push and the door swings wide and there she is.
Sitting at her desk. The afternoon light coming through the window behind her, catching the edges of her hair, turning the loose strands gold. Her pencil is moving across the tablet with the focused, fluid precision that I have watched a hundred times without her knowing. She's in a soft grey sweater, sleeves pushed to her elbows. Her lips are slightly parted, the way they do when she's concentrating.
She looks up.
Everything stops.
The pencil frozen mid-stroke. And then something shifts in her expression as she registers that it's me, and the shift is not alarm.
She stands. The pencil clatters against the tablet. She doesn't pick it up.
My heart is slamming against my ribs, a heavy, metered beat that I feel in my throat and my wrists and the tips of my fingers.
Two seconds. Three.
I cross the office.
My hands hold her face, fingers sliding into her hair. Her eyes are wide and searching and I watch them change from surprise to want. And I kiss her.
Not carefully. I kiss her like a man who has run out of reasons not to, and the taste of her mouth, warm and sweet and slightly coffee-bitter, short-circuits every analytical system I have.
She kisses me back.
