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Something in my chest cracks in a direction I wasn't braced for.

"Then why," I say, "did you stand away for six months and say nothing?"

"Because the second I said it, you'd have had to live with it." His voice drops. "You'd have had a reason for every good thing. Every fixed step. Every conversation. You'd have looked back at all of it and asked which parts were the job."

"I did that anyway."

"I know." He looks at his hands. The burns across his palms are pink now, days of healing packed into hours, and I can't stop looking at them either. "I got it wrong. I'm aware."

"What were you waiting for?"

"For you to want it" he says, “without anybody standing behind you telling you that you should."

There's a whole shape underneath that sentence. I can feel the edges of it, the way you feel furniture in a dark room.

"Want what?"

He doesn't answer.

"That's the second thing you won't say."

"It is."

"Why?"

"My father forced what he wanted and called it love." He says it to the floor. "I watched what that cost, every morning, for twenty-two years. So no. Not like that. Not from me."

The kitchen light flickers.

I don't reach for it, don't touch a switch, don't do anything but sit on my own floor and feel my ribs go tight, and every cabinet door in the room swings open at once and cracks against the frames.

The one that sticks swings the widest.

Gage doesn't flinch. He moves toward me and gets down on his heels close enough that I have to decide what to do with my eyes.

"Breathe out," he says.

"I'm fine."

"You're vibrating."

He puts one hand flat on the floor beside my knee. Not on me. Near me. Close enough that the heat of him crosses the two inches between us and settles under my skin like a swallow of something strong, and every door in the room stops rattling at once.

Six months of pretending I don't notice this man, and my own magic has been keeping score the entire time.

"Better," he says.

"Don't be smug."

"I wasn't."

"You were thinking about it."

We both look at the cabinet.

"Well," Gage says. "That one's been asking for it."

I laugh. It comes out cracked and half a sob and entirely real, and he watches me like it's the best thing that's happened to him all week.