For one suspended second, there’s no sound except the wind moving through the trees.
Then Grayson lets go of my hand—not to pull away, but to slide his fingers gently under my chin and tip my face up to his.
There’s no hesitation in him now. No guardedness. Just feeling, wide open and impossible to miss.
“If I want that?” he repeats, voice rough.
A tear slips free, and his thumb catches it before it can fall far.
“Harlow,” he says, and there’s so much in my name when he says it that my whole chest aches. “Since the first day you walked into our apartment, I wanted to know you.Reallyknow you. I have never felt pulled toward someone the way I was pulled toward you.” His throat moves like he has to swallow around the words. “There is nothing I want more than you.”
That does it.
The tears come harder, and I let out a soft, embarrassed laugh as I wipe at my face with my free hand.
His expression crumples a little around the edges.
“Hey,” he murmurs. “No, don’t cry, love. That’s the last thing I want.”
That broken little laugh escapes me again. “They’re happy tears.”
He exhales, some of the tension finally leaving him. “You sure?”
“Mostly.” I sniff and try to smile. “There was a part of me that worried me disappearing on you for a few days might’ve changed things.”
His whole face shifts.
Not angry. Not offended.
Just firm in that quiet, Grayson way that never feels loud but somehow always feels absolute.
“Never,” he says.
The word hits me deep.
“I mean it,” he adds. “If you need space, you take it. If you need time to figure something out, you take that too. Whatever makes you feel safe, whatever helps you protect yourself—you do it.” His hand slides from my chin to cup the side of my face. “I’ll take whatever comes with that.”
I don’t even think before moving.
I go straight into him, arms wrapping around his neck as I climb halfway onto his lap on the bench like I need to prove to my body that he’s real and here and still mine to reach for.
He catches me instantly.
His arms come around me tight and warm, one hand spanning the middle of my back, the other settling at the base of my skull like he doesn’t ever want to let me go again.
And maybe he doesn’t.
I press my face into his neck and breathe him in.
He smells like detergent and cold air and something that is just him, something my body recognizes before my brain does. His chest rises and falls beneath mine, slow and solid and steady enough to anchor me.
“I missed you,” he says into my hair.
The quiet ache in his voice nearly wrecks me.
“I missed you too.”
We stay like that for a long moment, neither of us rushing it. He doesn’t fill the silence with words just because it exists. He just holds me like he knows that sometimes being held is its own kind of language.
