CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Freddie went back on his word, in that he was resorting to written words again, but only because they were the only thing that had worked. And once again, Wren let his written words inside. The moment she lifted her hand to unlock the door, Freddie was already in motion.
He had not brought anything. His pockets contained his keys and his phone, and nothing else.
"The first letter was a stupid, sleep-deprived impulse. I couldn't stop thinking about you after the birthday party. I had all these words I wanted to say to you, but I couldn't get a single one out on the ranch. I went home, and wrote a letter because I didn't know what else to do with it. Every letter was true. Every word of every letter was true. They were not enough, and they were not the right way to do it, and both of those things are also true."
He was aware of his own heartbeat. Not unpleasantly—just present, the physical fact of being alive.
"I have been afraid of being known for most of my life. I have managed it by being useful and quiet and knowing what other people need. You are the first person I have ever wanted to beknown by. Not the letters. Not the version on paper. Me. The actual…"
Freddie stopped. There were so many words and he was out of breath. Yet he had to keep going. But he stopped and looked at her.
Wren was in the rust-orange cardigan—the one that did things to the color of her hair—and her glasses were straight for once, and she had her arms crossed over her chest. She was looking at him with an expression he had no category for because it was new.
It was not a closed expression. That was the thing. He had been afraid of closed and, despite her arms being crossed, she was not closed off to him. She was looking at him with an open expression.
"Go on," she said. "Keep talking."
He held her gaze. "I love you."
Three words, in his own voice. No preamble. No book reference. No careful construction of context. Just the thing, said plainly, with his name already on it because he said it directly to her face.
Something moved across her face.
"I know I…" He stopped. His jaw did the thing it did. The words were there, right there. "When I'm near you, the feelings are…they are very…"
Now was the wrong time for the words to start failing him. Freddie looked at her steadily, refusing to look away from his own inadequacy. "I get tongue-tied. I have always been better on paper. I am working on this."
Wren looked at him for a long moment. Then the corner of her mouth moved.
"Okay," she said. "I'll accept more letters." A pause, precise and deliberate. "But you have to sign your name. Every time."
Something happened in his chest that was not a medical event. He smiled. Freddie did not smile often. It was not an expression he deployed casually, and he was aware that this made it, on the occasions it arrived, somewhat more than a routine signal. This one arrived completely and without consultation, the full thing. From ear to ear. He watched her see it, watched her expression shift in response to it, the way things shifted when something they'd been waiting for arrived.
"I'll sign my name," he said. "Every time."
Wren stepped forward. Her hands found the front of his jacket. She tilted her face up, and he brought his down. And then they were kissing in the amber morning light of Pages & Prose with the door still standing open on the cold October street and the whole complicated territory of the last eight weeks arriving at this: her, him, the glass finally gone.
Freddie held her with both arms. Properly. The way he had in this room once before, except that now there was no deception under it. Nothing on the wrong side of the glass. Nothing held back. Nothing that existed only on paper.
She was warm against him and entirely herself, and she kissed him with complete commitment. She kissed him with no half-measures. He kissed her back in the same way.
Something wound around his ankle. Freddie broke the kiss and looked down.
Heathcliff had descended from the window display and was making his deliberate, unhurried progress around both of their feet. Wren's ankles, then his, then Wren's again. The cat did this with the air of performing a completion. A circuit. The behavior of an animal that was satisfied with an outcome and was making its satisfaction physically legible.
"I get the sense Heathcliff's been waiting for this longer than we have," Wren said.
"He has better instincts."
"He has the benefit of not being complicated about things."
Freddie looked at Heathcliff, who had completed his circuit and was now sitting at their feet, looking up at them with the expression of a cat who had done everything that was required and expected to be credited for it.
Freddie looked at Wren.
She was looking at him—at his face, the full look, and whatever she found in it appeared to be sufficient, because something in her own face settled into the expression he had seen once or twice and not been able to name. He could name it now, standing inside the glass, in the amber morning light of her shop, with the letters open on the table. It was the expression of someone who was home.
He felt it in his own chest; the same thing, the feeling he had been circling for eight weeks from the wrong side of a pane of glass.
"It's you," she said.
"Hi," he said. "I'm Freddie Gallagher, your secret admirer."
Wren leaned up and kissed him again; softer this time, brief and certain, the kiss of two people who had established something and could afford to be unhurried about it now. Then she tucked herself against his side, her head at his shoulder, and they stood in the amber morning of Pages & Prose while Heathcliff resumed his position in the window and the main street outside began its day, and Freddie held her with both arms, without a pen in his pocket or a notebook in his jacket.
There was nothing between them anymore. The threshold was behind him. He had crossed it.
He was, for the first time in a very long time, exactly where he had meant to end up.
