Macon smiled, slow and wide, then leaned down to press his forehead to mine. “I’ve always wanted to build a house. Not a mansion. Just a place where the walls knew our story. We could pick a spot down by the river, build it up from nothing.”
The thought of it—a place that started with us, not my father, not the Steeles, not even the damn goats—sent a surge of heat through my chest.
I grabbed his face with both hands and kissed him, hard enough that his teeth scraped my lip. He didn’t complain. He just pulled me on top of him, letting my body settle where it wanted, his hands tracing the new shape of me like he was mapping something holy.
“You’re good with your hands,” I said, and he laughed, muffled under my hair.
He cupped the back of my skull, then brushed the hair from my forehead. “You make me want things I never thought I could have. You know that, right?”
I nodded against his throat, breathing in the scent of skin and sweat and the faintest trace of sawdust.
We lay there, tangled together, the rise of my belly pressed to his ribs, our legs knotted in a way that would have made a chiropractor wince. I felt his palm span the small of my back, thumb stroking lazy circles over the stretched skin.
“I love you,” I said, and didn’t flinch from it.
He squeezed me so tight I thought I’d split, then whispered, “Mine,” into the space behind my ear.
The word wasn’t a cage. It was a release.
Later, when the moon had crawled across half the sky, I found myself on my back, Macon’s hand resting over my heart, his breathing slow and even. I stared at the ceiling, at the new shadows cast by the future we’d just signed into being.
I thought of every version of myself—the one who tried to disappear in cities, the one who nearly ran away to Portugal, the one who spent an entire childhood invisible except as a punch line. None of them felt real anymore. They were just stories I used to tell myself to survive the emptiness.
This was different. This was substance. This was having someone who saw you, every broken part, and said, “I want this one. He’s the one.”
I ran my thumb over the silver band on Macon’s finger, then on mine, anchoring myself to the weight of it.
“You still awake?” he mumbled, voice half sleep, half promise.
“Yeah,” I whispered. “I don’t want to miss any of this.”
He turned, so our faces were just inches apart, and smiled. “I won’t let you.”
I closed my eyes, listening to the rain start up again outside, the soft creak of the house settling, the steady rhythm of Macon’s heartbeat under my palm.
When I finally drifted off, it was with the certainty that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Home, at last.
