I stopped.
"I'm not offering to run your company," he said. "I'm not offering to be your CEO or your public face or whatever the hell Callum was pretending to be. I'm offering you space. The studio has an extra drafting room that nobody's used in six months. You can work there while you figure out the rest. You can use my name on the permits if you need to, or you can use your own. I don't care which." He paused. "I care that you do the work you want to do. The rest is logistics."
I felt something shift in me, the way a door that's been painted shut will sometimes move in its frame when the pressure on the other side finally equalizes. It wasn't relief. Itwasn't gratitude. It was something simpler than either of those things. It was the feeling of being seen by someone who wasn't trying to use what he saw.
"You'd do that?" I asked.
"I'd do that regardless. You're the best designer I've ever worked with. The fact that Callum spent seven years pretending otherwise doesn't change what I know."
"And what do you know?"
He picked up the pencil and held it loosely, not writing anything, just turning it end over end. "The cantilever competition. Junior year. You finished in half the time and spent the rest of it refining details nobody was grading." He set it down. "The Morrison lakefront was yours from the first line. Callum was in a meeting about a meeting. The Thompson substrate— you caught that before the soil report even came back. And the Alden fix." He paused. "Laura was still reading your notes when she walked into that room. You kept shrinking yourself down to fit inside someone else's idea of what you were supposed to be. That's over now."
I didn't answer. I couldn't. The words were all there, but they were stuck somewhere behind my ribs, and if I opened my mouth they'd come out in the wrong order.
"Holland." He said my name the way he always said it, like it was a complete sentence. "You don't have to decide anything right now. The drafting room will be there tomorrow. The offer doesn't expire."
"I know."
"Do you?"
The morning light was doing something to his face—catching the line of his jaw, the gray coming in at his temples—and I found myself thinking about the night before. The couch. His arm around me in the dark. I thought about every time I'd dialed his number with a load calculation in front of me and told myselfthat was all it was. I thought about how he never let it go to voicemail.
"I know," I said again. "I've known for a while. I just didn't let myself?—"
"Admit it?"
"Act on it."
He didn't move toward me. He let me close the distance myself, and for the first time, an open space felt like an invitation. I put my hand on his chest, just below his collarbone, and felt the steady beat of his heart through the thin cotton of his shirt.
"I need you to know," I said, my voice quiet but firm. "This isn't about Callum, or about filling a space he left. This is about you. It was always you, underneath everything else.
"I know what it is."
"Then tell me."
He put his hand over mine, his fingers warm and his grip light. "It's you finally seeing me the way I've been seeing you for ten years. It's not new. It's finally happening."
I kissed him.
It wasn't like the night before. That had been about breaking something open, about the months of tension and the years of silence and the gala and the adrenaline and the need to feel something other than the weight of what I'd just done. This was different. This was slow and certain, his hand coming up to cup the back of my head and his mouth moving against mine like we had all the time in the world and neither of us was going anywhere.
He pulled back just enough to look at me. "You sure?"
"I've never been more sure of anything."
He kissed me again, and this time there was no hesitation in it. His hands found my waist and pulled me closer, and I let him. I let my body press against his and I let my fingers findthe hem of his shirt and I let myself want him without running a cost-benefit analysis in the back of my mind. There was no calculation. There was no strategy. There was just Finn, solid and warm and exactly where he'd always been, waiting for me to finally turn around and see him.
We moved back toward the couch, and he laid me down against the cushions with a care that made my throat tighten. He didn't rush. He didn't fumble. He took his time, his mouth tracing a line from my collarbone to my shoulder while his hand worked the buttons of my shirt—his shirt, the one he'd given me last night. When the fabric fell open, he paused and looked at me.
"You're beautiful," he said. "You know that?"
"You've mentioned it."
"I don't think I've mentioned it enough."
His hand slid across my stomach, and I arched into the touch without meaning to. He smiled, just slightly, and then he bent his head and kissed the hollow of my throat, and the only thing left in my head was the warmth of his mouth and the sound of my own breath.
