Chapter Twenty-Eight #3
He takes one step out of the Chapel, and his eyes find me immediately.
The way they always do.
As if the line between us has never once been in doubt.
My feet carry me to him before I’ve consciously decided to move. The room tilts into motion around us, sound, bodies, and laughter rising again after the gravity of the Chapel, but it all feels distant, like something happening on the other side of glass.
He holds out his hand.
I take it.
The second his fingers close around mine, something inside me gives way all at once. Two years of careful distance, of restraint, of timing and rules, and everything we told ourselves we had to survive before we could have this. It all rushes out of my system in one violent, breath-stealing wave.
He pulls me in, my face pressed against the leather of his cut, and his arm wraps around me with a solidity that feels like an answer to every question I’ve ever had about where I belong.
I feel the weight of the patch under my cheek, the warmth of him beneath it, the slow, grounded rhythm of his heartbeat.
“Anchor,” I murmur into the leather.
“Yeah,” he says softly above my head.
“It suits you.”
His arm tightens just enough to make my lungs stutter.
I lift my head.
There’s a moment, a suspended, electric second, where everything narrows down to the space between our mouths.
His gaze drops to mine, dark, steady, and completely wrecked, like the control he’s carried for years has finally split straight down the middle.
Something sparks low in my stomach. Something wild, relieved, and long overdue.
His hand comes up, rough and sure as it frames my jaw, holding me there. “Mine,” he says, low and certain. Not a question. Not even close. The word hits like a pulse through me, sharp and immediate, something in my chest opening so fast it almost hurts.
His thumb brushes once beneath my eye, catching the last of the tears I didn’t know were still there. “You’re my Old Lady.”
It lands deeper than the word before it. Something inside me that has been braced for so long finally gives way all at once, a release so sudden it steals the air from my lungs.
Relief.
Relief so deep it feels like I’ve been holding my breath for so long and only just now remembered how to let it go. My hand fists in the front of his cut, gripping the leather like I need to anchor myself to the reality of it.
To him.
To this.
To us.
I lean into him without thinking, my forehead brushing his, my breath unsteady, and I don’t even try to hide it.
“Yes,” I whisper, the word soft but absolute. And the way my chest settles, the way everything inside me goes certain, tells me this is exactly where I was always meant to end up.
I don’t think, neither does he.
We collide somewhere in the middle.
It’s not soft, or tentative, or the careful, measured kind of kiss we have allowed ourselves before. This is release, heat, all the built-up gravity of two people who have been orbiting each other for so long that the impact feels inevitable.
His hand slides up the back of my neck, fingers threading into my hair, anchoring me there as his mouth takes mine with an almost startling hunger.
I feel the room react around us, the sharp intake of breath, the laughter starting somewhere behind my shoulder, someone swearing in delight, but it barely registers.
My hands fist in his cut, gripping the leather as if it’s the only solid thing left in the world, while his tongue sweeps into my mouth and I answer him instinctively, desperately, as if we are finally allowed to stop pretending we don’t belong here.
It feels like fireworks.
Like oxygen.
Like something breaking open and healing at the exact same time.
He makes a low, rough sound against my lips that goes straight through me, and I feel him shift closer, his body crowding mine, unapologetic, grounding, entirely himself now that he doesn’t have to hold back.
When we finally drag apart, it’s not graceful. It’s breathless, messy, and real, our foreheads knocking lightly together as we both try to remember how to exist in a room that has suddenly become very aware of us.
His thumb brushes my cheek. “Been waiting a long time for that,” he murmurs.
“So have I,” I admit, still half-dizzy.
Somewhere behind us, someone whoops, someone else claps. Deek swears loudly about finally getting some peace from the tension.
I don’t look away from Will.
Not now.
Not when he finally has everything he fought for stitched onto his back and standing right in front of him.
I turn in Will’s hold to look back at him, keeping his hand in mine, and Dad is watching us from his chair with an expression I have only seen on his face a handful of times in my life.
It’s not happiness, exactly, though happiness is inside it.
There is something larger than happiness.
An expression he’s been carrying for years and has finally found a place safe enough to let it go.
He looks at Will.
Something passes between them, two men who have sat at kitchen tables, eaten eggs, passed the butter, and said the important things in the only language Dad has ever really used for them, the language of presence, of showing up and being counted.
Will nods once.
My father’s eyes close briefly, and when they open again, they find me.
He smiles. It is the smile I have been keeping in the most protected part of myself for nineteen years, the one he has given me from the beginning, from the earliest memory I have of being loved by him. It is complete, certain, and full of everything he hasn’t said and doesn’t need to.
I hold onto it.
Hold onto it hard because I know moments like this don’t come around often, and some part of me already wants to memorize exactly how it feels before it’s gone.
Will’s hand is warm in mine.
My father is watching.
And for this one held breath of a moment, between everything that has been and everything that is coming, it is enough.
It is more than enough.
It is everything.