I leaned back against the wall, pressing a hand to my chest as I exhaled. “I thought I was going to have a heart attack.”
“You handled it fine,” he said, stepping closer, his movements unhurried, calm in a way that grounded me.
“I was two seconds from climbing out the window.”
A huff of laughter left him, his hand brushing my hip as he passed.
“You okay?” he asked.
I nodded, the last of the adrenaline fading. “Yeah.”
His gaze dipped briefly to my mouth before lifting again, something softer settling there. He leaned in, pressing a slow, lingering kiss to my lips.
“You stayin’?” he murmured.
“I’m staying,” I echoed, the words coming easier than they should have.
And as I stepped into the hallway, Harper’s humming drifted toward the kitchen, something eased—quiet, unwavering, and real.
Standing there in the morning light, I realized something I hadn’t fully let myself acknowledge before.
Whatever came next—
I wasn’t waking up alone anymore.
???
The days that followed didn’t change all at once. Reality crept back in the way it always does. Emails piling up, deadlines flashing, my apartment reminding me I’d been gone too long. I told myself it was time to re-balance, to step back into the life I had paused for Harper.
So I tried.
The first week, I went home every night. I cooked real meals, answered calls, slept in my own bed and did everything I was supposed to do. But something about it felt off. Thinner. Like I was moving through the motions of a life that no longer fit the way it used to.
By the second week, we stopped pretending there was space where there wasn’t. A movie night turned into staying. Dinner turned into not leaving. Harper’s “mission-ready obstacle course” somehow stretched into an entire afternoon in the backyard, Logan muttering about safety violations while still helping her build it anyway.
The time I spent away shortened without discussion, while the time I spent there expanded naturally, until somewhere along the way, it stopped feeling like I was stepping in and started feeling like I was coming back.
We found time for ourselves, too— romantic dinners, long walks, nights where I convinced him to watch reality TV, and silence didn’t need to be filled. Logan unwound in ways that weren’t loud but were impossible to miss. His laughter came quicker, lighter. The guarded edges of him softened, not disappearing, but shifting.
Falling in love with him wasn’t loud.
It was steady.
It was the way my shoulders relaxed when he walked into a room. The way I stopped second-guessing myself mid-sentence. The way I laughed without filtering it first. He never asked me to be anything other than who I already was.
Neither did Harper.
There were no expectations, no measuring, no unspoken pressure to prove myself. Just being met where I was, exactly as I was.
And maybe, from the outside, it looked like I brought light into Logan’s life. Like I softened him, and gave him something back.
But the truth was, they did the same for me.
They reminded me how to live without overthinking every step, how to choose joy without questioning if I deserved it, how to be loved without feeling like it was conditional.
I wasn’t losing myself in them.
I was finding parts of myself I didn’t realize I’d let go.
