Chapter 30 #2
“No. We really didn't.” I looked at him instead of the stars. “If you could go back and tell seventeen-year-old you what life was going to look like, what would you say?”
Rook thought about it for a long moment.
“I'd tell him it gets worse before it gets better.
That he's going to lose people and spend years trying to figure out who the fuck he is. But that eventually he finds himself. Finds hockey again in a way that matters. And finds you again, which matters even more.”
My throat went tight. “That's a good answer.”
“What about you? What would you tell seventeen-year-old Soren?”
“I'd tell him that leaving doesn't mean he stops loving you. That survival is going to cost him more than he thinks he can pay, but he'll pay it anyway because that's what he does. And that one day he gets to come back here with you and it doesn't hurt anymore. It just feels like coming home.”
Rook kissed me, soft and slow, and I could taste the chocolate gelato on his tongue. When we pulled apart he was looking at me with an expression I couldn't quite read, and then he said it.
“Move in with me.”
I went very still. “What?”
“Move in with me. Bring your stuff to the coast house and stay. Not just for a few weeks while you recover or until the legal shit is sorted. Permanently.” He squeezed my hand.
“I want you in my space. In my bed every night. I want to come home from practice and have you there. I want this to be real and official and ours.”
The words hit me harder than I'd expected, and I had to look away because the emotion was too big to hold while looking at his face.
“Rook, I—” My voice cracked and I had to stop and try again.
“Are you sure? Because I come with a lot of baggage.
Three siblings who are going to need help navigating college and life and all the shit I'm still figuring out myself.
A band that plays late-night gigs. Trauma that's going to take years to fully work through. You'd be signing up for all of that.”
“I know what I'm signing up for.” He turned my face back toward his, making me look at him.
“I'm not asking you to be easy or uncomplicated or anything other than exactly who you are.
I'm asking you to be here. With me. In the house I built to feel less alone, except now I don't want to be alone anymore. I want you.”
Fuck. I was going to cry.
“Yeah,” I managed. “Yes. I'll move in with you.”
His smile was the best thing I'd ever seen. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I kissed him once, hard and brief. “I love you. And I want to come home to you. I want all of it.”
“Good.” He stood and pulled me to my feet. “Because I wasn't taking no for an answer anyway. You can bring your siblings too.”
I laughed, and he pulled me in close — arms wrapping around me, chin dropping to the top of my head — and I pressed my face against his chest and let him hold me while the night moved quietly around us.
His heartbeat was steady under my ear. The grass was damp and the stars were out in full and the wind off the hillside smelled like it always had, like pine and cold air and the particular dark of a place nobody else knew about.
We stayed like that for a while. Long enough that the half-rotted log stopped being relevant and the cold settled into my shoulders and I didn't move anyway because I wasn't ready to be done with this yet — with the stars and the quiet and the feeling of standing in the exact place where so much of my life had split open and finding that it didn't belong to any of that anymore.
It belonged to this. To us. To whatever came next.
“Hey,” I said into his jacket.
“Hey,” he said into my hair.
Neither of us moved.
Eventually I tipped my head back to look at him, and he looked back at me, and there was nothing complicated in his face right then.
“When do you want me to move in?” I asked.
“Tomorrow.”
“That's fast.”
“I've been waiting long enough.” He pressed his mouth to my temple. “Your siblings are settled with my parents for now, and the coast house has plenty of room. Might as well make it official.”
“Okay. Tomorrow.” I grinned up at him. “You're going to regret this when I leave drumsticks all over the house and play music at weird hours.”
“Not going to regret anything.” He held my gaze, steady and sure in the way that only Rook ever was. “This is exactly what I want. You're exactly what I want.”
I believed him. That was the part I kept landing on — not with relief, not with the fragile gratitude of someone waiting to be proven wrong, but with something quiet and solid sitting in the centre of my chest. I believed him because he'd earned it.
Because he'd shown up every time it mattered, even when I'd made it difficult, even when I'd been too far gone to make it easy.
We sat back down on the log and I tucked myself under his arm and he pulled me in and we just looked at the stars for a while longer. The same stars we'd looked at when we were seventeen and broke and convinced that the best we could hope for was eventually getting out. They hadn't changed. We had.
“You know what I keep thinking about?” I said.
“What?”
“How we used to sit here and talk about the future like it was this terrifying thing happening somewhere far away.” I watched a plane track slowly across the dark. “And now it's just — this. Us. Here. And it's not terrifying at all.”
Rook was quiet for a moment. “No. It's not.”
I turned my face up to look at him, and he was already looking at me, and the expression on his face was going to live in my chest for the rest of my life.