"That's a 'you should have told me earlier so I could stop panicking about your departure timeline.'"
"You were panicking?"
"I've been panicking for weeks, Edie. Constantly. You have no idea how many contingency plans I've developed."
"Contingency plans for what?"
"For convincing you to stay." He pressed his forehead to hers. "I had spreadsheets."
"Of course you did." She laughed, tears pricking her eyes. "You absolute disaster of a male."
"Your disaster," he corrected. "If you'll have me."
"I think we've established that I will."
"Good." He kissed her again, softer this time. "Welcome home."
Later that night, curled up in his bed, which was blissfully free of structural hazards, she found herself unable to sleep. Not from anxiety, or from the urge to run. Just from the strangeness of feeling... settled.
"You're thinking too loud," he mumbled against her hair. "I can hear it."
"Sorry." She shifted closer, fitting herself against his side. "It's just weird."
"What is?"
"This." She gestured vaguely at the room, the bed, him. "All of it. Being somewhere I want to stay."
His arm tightened around her. "Bad weird?"
"Good weird." She traced idle patterns on his chest. "Scary good. Like I'm waiting for something to go wrong."
"Nothing's going to go wrong."
"You can't know that."
"I can know that I'm not going anywhere. And I can know that you're not either—not unless you want to." He pressed a kiss to her temple. "The rest we'll figure out as we go."
Figure it out as we go.
It sounded so simple. So reasonable.
She had spent her whole life trying to plan for every contingency, to keep her bags packed and her heart protected. She'd convinced herself that staying meant surrendering—giving up the freedom she'd fought so hard to build.
But lying here, listening to Tarmek's steady heartbeat beneath her ear, she realized something.
Staying wasn't a surrender. Staying was a choice. And choosing roots and community and a shared future didn't mean losing her freedom. It meant finding something worth staying for.
"Tarmek?"
"Hmm?"
"I think I'm happy."
Another pause. "Is that unusual?"
"Yeah." She smiled into the darkness. "Yeah, it really is."
He rolled over, pulling her beneath him, and kissed her until she forgot what she'd been worried about in the first place.
