She didn’t know if Olivia would stay or if she would come back or if the world waiting outside the desert would devour everything they’d built between these wooden walls.
But she knew this: tonight mattered.
Emma turned her head, pressing a slow kiss to Olivia’s forehead, lingering there, lips against skin, trying to memorize the rhythm of peace. She let her fingers tangle in Olivia’s hair, the softness anchoring her in the moment.
She could worry tomorrow.
Tonight, she would simply feel.
And as her eyes finally drifted closed, Olivia breathing slow and steady in her arms, Emma let herself surrender to the quietest truth of all.
She was ready. Ready for the unknown, ready to trust herself, ready to love—messy, loud, aching love.
Even if it meant letting go.
15
Chapter Fifteen - Olivia
The first thing Olivia noticed was the quiet.
Not the kind of silence she used to crave between back-to-back surgeries or in the muted hum of hospital corridors, but the soft, sacred kind that stretched across the desert like silk. Outside the open window, the world was wrapped in gold. The sky was still pink at the edges, the sun barely breaking over the horizon. A breeze stirred the gauzy curtains and slipped across her bare skin like a parting kiss.
She blinked slowly, her body tangled in sun-warmed sheets, and for a long moment, she didn’t move.
Emma was still asleep beside her, one arm draped over Olivia’s waist, her breath slow and even. Her skin, golden and warm, smelled like sage and sex and something Olivia could never name but never wanted to live without.
Olivia turned onto her side, watching her.
The way a stray brown curl had fallen over Emma’s cheek. The faint crease at the edge of her mouth that only deepened when she smiled.
Her heart twisted, not with regret, but with something heavier. Something she didn’t have words for yet.
It was her last day.
She closed her eyes for a moment and let the ache settle in her chest. She didn’t want to ruin the peace by naming it, but it pulsed there anyway, low and deep.
She would be gone tomorrow.
The thought didn’t feel real. It felt like something that might happen to another version of her, a woman in a fitted white coat, hair pulled back, eyes tired from too much responsibility and not enough rest. The woman she used to be. The one who’d first stepped off the shuttle weeks ago with clenched fists and a clenched jaw, armed with nothing but a title and a suitcase full of things that no longer mattered.
That Olivia was already a ghost.
She turned her face toward Emma’s shoulder and breathed her in, heart steadying and grounding.
And it felt like enough.
After a while, she slipped out of bed without waking Emma and wrapped herself in one of her shirts. Well, technically, it was Emma’s. It smelled like yesterday, like the garden and laughter and the low, teasing growl Emma made when Olivia had tugged the shirt over her damp body and said, “Guess I’m keeping this.”
Barefoot, she padded onto the porch, the wood cool beneath her soles. The sun was climbing now, the desert beginning to blush with heat. In the distance, a jackrabbit bounded between brush, and somewhere closer, the porch dog let out a lazy, approving bark before settling back to sleep.
Olivia stood there, letting it all wrap around her—the heat, the dust, the light, and the knowledge that everything she was feeling was proof that something inside her had shifted.
She was no longer just a doctor.
She was a woman who had learned how to wake up with desire instead of dread. A woman who had learned the feel of morning air against her bare thighs, who had learned what it was to be held without expectation, to be seen without armor.
Today would be her last full day at the retreat, and she was going to feel every second of it.
