He turns back to me, and his eyes are wrecked. "They gave me their time. Their patience. But none of them ever looked at me the way you used to. Like I was the only thing in focus."
The words undress me more than his hands ever could.
Silence stretches between us, hot and tight and full of ten years of ache.
"Noah." I take a breath and make myself say it. The thing I came back here terrified to face. "When we were kids... I got lost in you. I didn't know where I ended and you began. And instead of telling you that—instead of saying I need space, I need to figure out who I am separate from us—I just ran." My voice cracks. "I ran, and I never even explained why."
"Why didn't you?" His eyes don't leave mine.
"Because I was eighteen and terrified." A bitter laugh scrapes my throat. "I didn't leave because of you. I left because I didn't know how to love you that much and still be me. And I didn't have the words for it, so I just... disappeared."
He's quiet for a long moment. The fire crackles. Rain drips off the cabin eaves in a ragged rhythm.
"I held on too tight," he says finally. His voice is low, rough-edged with something that sounds like a decade of thinking about this exact conversation. "I was a scared kid who thought that if I just loved you hard enough, close enough, you'd never leave." His mouth twists. "Turns out that's exactly why you did."
The honesty of it hits me like a physical thing. My chest aches.
"We were both so young," I manage.
"Yeah." He scrubs a hand over his face. "We were. But I should've known. Should've seen you pulling away and asked what was wrong instead of just—" He stops. Starts again. "I confused intensity with intimacy. I thought if I held tight enough, it meant we were unbreakable."
"And I thought running was the only way to survive it." I shake my head. "We were a mess."
"A beautiful mess." The ghost of a smile crosses his face, and something in my chest cracks open.
"So what do we do now?" My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. "Because I'm still the woman who ran. And you're still the man who held on too tight. We haven't magically become different people."
He shifts closer. His hand finds mine and laces our fingers together, slow and deliberate, like he's choosing each point of contact.
"We have, though," he says. "I spent ten years learning how to let go of things I love. Fire teaches you that. You can't hold a blaze. You manage it. You respect it." His thumb runs acrossmy knuckles. "And you—you built a whole life on your own. You didn't need me for that. You figured out who Riley Bennett is without me in the picture."
I stare at our joined hands. "So what's different this time?"
"This time we talk." His voice is quiet, certain. "We don't run. When it gets hard—when one of us wants to bolt or shut down or hold on too tight—we stay in the room. We say the hard things.”
The simplicity of it makes my eyes sting. No grand gesture. No dramatic declaration. Just a promise to stay and be honest. The most terrifying commitment two people like us could make.
"That sounds harder than anything we've ever done," I whisper.
"It is." He squeezes my hand. "But we're not eighteen anymore."
I let out a breath I've been holding for ten years. Maybe longer.
"I won't run.” The words feel like setting down something impossibly heavy. "But Noah, this still ends. I still have a life in Chicago. A job. Deadlines. This—whatever it is—it's not forever."
His jaw tightens. I feel the conflict ripple through him, watch him wrestle with it in real time. The old Noah might have argued. Pushed. Held tighter.
This Noah nods once. Firm. Resigned. Real.
"Then I'll take what we have. Every day of it. And when it's time to say goodbye—" His eyes burn into mine, and his voice goes rough with the weight of what he's offering. "I want the chance to say it right. Not like last time."
The air between us quivers.
Neither of us speaks.
We just breathe—and in the space between his fingers and my skin, in the echo of the promise we just made and the heartbreak it carries, something infinite crackles to life.
And then—only then—he kisses me.
