“You don’t want to pack,” he says. “I don’t want you to pack. That’s not complicated.”
I look at him.
He looks back.
It isn’t complicated.
That’s the terrifying part. I’ve been making everything complicated for months — the job and the secret and the guilt and the running — and he just made it simple in one sentence and I don’t even know what to do with a man who does that.
So I stop trying to figure it out.
I reach for him instead.
Slide my hand along his jaw. His skin warm under my palm. His eyes already on me. Steady. There.
I kiss him.
Not a question. Not a beginning. Not the version of a kiss that waits to see what he does back. I kiss him the way I’ve been kissing him in my head since the grocery store — fully, slowly, with my whole self in it because I am here and he is here and there is nothing left to manage.
His hand comes up to my face. Both hands. Cups my jaw like he’s holding something he doesn’t want to drop.
He kisses me back.
I don’t have to wonder if he means it.
I know he does.
That’s new.
That’s the entire new thing.
I climb into his lap.
He helps me — one hand on the small of my back, the other still at my face, settling me there like he’s been waiting a long time to feel my weight on his thighs and is going to take a second with it now that it’s happening.
I am in his lap on his couch in his house with his hand at the base of my spine and his mouth open under mine and I am here. Fully here. Not running through the exit math. Not building the wall back up. Not making a single joke in my head that puts six inches between us.
Just here.
I press my forehead to his.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi.”
“I’m staying.”
“I know.”
“I mean tonight too.”
The corner of his mouth. “Yeah. I got that.”
I kiss him again because his half-smile is a problem and I want to do something about it. His hands move — one up my back into my hair, one down to my hip, slow, learning the shape of me again like he’s never going to be in a hurry with me again.
He’s not.
That’s also new.
