You Did Nothing Wrong

SEVEN

She loves the house best when Bren is home to fill it, when the weekend stretches warm and languid before them with nothing to do but follow their own tangled whims. They’ll lie in bed for hours with morning light pooling in their collarbones and slipping between their fingers like ribbons, and they’ll talk and plan and dream together.

About the house and the future and each other.

Something about those early hours makes her feel wrapped in an interminably peaceful cocoon, as if time is an amorphous thing, rich and endless, and it is no sin to waste it when she’s in his arms. His fingers are in her hair, his mouth on her throat, a worshipful tenderness in the way he promises to put the moon on a stick like a candied apple so she can crack it open with her teeth.