* * *
We settled in the living room, backs against the wall, the couch still wedged against the front door where it had been since the first night.
Silence filled the house, broken only by the faint creak of old wood and indeterminate noises from the street.
Libby looked at
me, then reached over and took my hand.
I almost pulled back—not because I didn’t want it, but because she’d never done that before. Not like this. Not outside the bedroom, where everything between us ran hot and urgent, where she opened up in ways that knocked the air out of me. This was different. Her fingers laced through mine—smaller, softer.
I squeezed them without thinking.
Three weeks.
That’s all it had been. Three weeks since I’d walked into this house with a single objective. Three weeks since Libby had been nobody to me; a stranger, a complication, a variable I hadn’t accounted for and fully intended to work around.
And now she occupied space in my head and heart I’d kept empty for years, moving through my blood at the moments I needed to be sharp, needed to be the version of myself that kept people breathing.
I almost said it out loud, but didn’t. I swallowed it back down, where it had been living for three weeks, right alongside everything else I hadn’t found a way to be honest about yet—not with her, not with myself.
She shifted beside me, leaned forward, and kissed me.
Soft. No hands. No urgency. Just her mouth against mine, unhurried, like she had nowhere else to be and nothing left to prove.
I let it happen. That was the part I couldn’t explain away—not adrenaline, not proximity. I had all of that before. I knew what that felt like, and it didn’t feel like this.
It felt like something I was going to have to reckon with.
The old reflex kicked in, the one that had kept me alone and functional for the better part of twelve years—the part of my brain that ran threat assessments on everything, that cataloged exits and variables and liabilities before I’d even registered I was doing it. My brain started screaming at me: This is how you lose focus. This is how mistakes compound. This is how—
But underneath it, completely unfazed by the calculus, was the thought that this felt right.
She started to pull away.
I didn’t let her.
My hand found the back of her neck, fingers sliding into her hair. I drew her back. She came without resistance, easy and certain, as if she’d been waiting. I guided her into my lap; she straddled my hips. I wrapped both arms around her and held on.
She pressed her face into my neck, her breath warm against my skin, and one hand gripped the front of my shirt. Neither of us spoke. The silence between us had stopped being empty sometime in the past week; it had filled itself in, grown dense with everything we hadn’t found the right words for yet.
My thumb traced a slow path along her arm without deliberate thought. She pressed closer in response.
“I don’t do this,” I said quietly.
She tilted her head just enough to look up at me, her eyes catching the thin bleed of light through the boards—dark, patient, and searching without pressure.
“Do what?”
“This. Holding someone. Staying in one place long enough for things to get—” The words caught, thick in my throat. “—like this.”
She studied my face for a long moment, unhurried.
“And yet,” she said softly.
Yeah. And yet.
I let out a breath that came close to a laugh without quite reaching it. “Yeah.”
