Chapter 37 Let’s Be Greedy
LETS BE GREEDY
VIOLET
If someone waited long enough outside your heart, would you open the door?
SilenceInMidnight: Yes. If they stay, without pushing, without leaving.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
I lie still for a moment, convinced it’s part of some dream, but then it comes again. I push myself upright, blinking in the dark, trying to place the sound. It’s coming from the wrong direction of the door.
My gaze flies to the window, just when there’s a soft but unmistakable familiar whimper.
Echo.
I’m across the room, yanking the curtains back, and the sight that meets me stops the breath in my throat. Rowan stands in the rain, completely drenched, holding Echo bundled against his chest, rolled and wrapped in his hoodie, with only the dog’s small face peeking out.
“Rowan.” His name comes out of me in a gasp.
I push the window up immediately and step back so he can climb through. Rowan’s feet hit the floor of the bedroom where I am half asleep, half in shock, and entirely unable to think clearly.
He is here.
What does that mean?
He sets Echo down gently as they both shiver. I quietly slip out into the hallway and pull several towels from the linen closet before padding back.
I set the stack beside him without a word. Rowan takes one immediately and dries Echo. Then he folds another towel a few times into a small rectangle and tucks it beside the potted plant in the corner of the room, lowering Echo onto it.
The thoughtfulness of the gesture makes my heart twist.
He straightens and everything stops for a beat.
My heart is in my throat.
I don’t know what I’m expecting. I don’t know what I’m hoping for.
“Rowan.” I manage to whisper only his name, because then his gaze finds mine and I lose the rest of the sentence entirely.
His face is alive with so many emotions, most of them unfamiliar, unlike the restraint and distance he wears like armor.
I don’t know what I expected, but I was not prepared for his lips to come crashing down on mine.
Rowan kisses me like it’s costing him something if he doesn’t. Like the distance between us over these past days has been accumulating interest and he is done waiting to pay it. His hand finds the back of my neck, as though he’s worried that if he loosens his grip even slightly, I will disappear.
It takes me a suspended second to catch up.
He is here.
My hand shakes as I lift it to his face. I cup his jaw, cold and rain-damp beneath my palm, and he exhales into the kiss.
Since the night I came to his parents’ house, Rowan and I haven’t shared even a word. While he has been there, waiting for me to eventually give up and leave, I have been here, equally determined to show him that he is enough for me, enough for us.
Is this it?
Have I finally changed his mind?
When we pull apart, Rowan presses his forehead to mine, his eyes shut, his trembling breath against my lips.
“Rowan,” I whisper, unable to say anything more.
His eyes open slowly, finding mine in the dark. I wait, expecting him to step back, to lift his hands and sign. Instead, he releases a long, shaking exhale… and speaks.
“Violet.”
The world tilts as I hear my name from his lips. My eyes fall shut, and the tears come before I can catch them, sliding down my cheeks. I don’t have words to describe the emotions that fill me up at hearing my name in his voice, which is rough and soft at once, like weathered velvet.
“Purple.”
I know I will recognize his gravelly, barely there voice anywhere, in any crowd, in any darkness, and in any space of my life. Not because it’s different, but because it is more precious than anything I have ever been given.
These are not just words but the trust he’s given me.
I loop my arms around his neck and pull him back to me, and this time it is me who kisses him like my life depends on it.
My lips find his and I put everything into it—every day of waiting, every hopeful morning I woke up in his childhood bedroom and chose to stay, every moment I wanted to cross the distance between the two houses and couldn’t let myself.
He makes a sound low in his throat and pulls me closer.
His hands move from my neck to my waist, then to my back, like he can’t decide where to hold me and wants to hold all of me at once. I understand the feeling completely. I press closer anyway, closing what little space remains.
When we finally break apart, neither of us moves very far. His arms stay around me. Mine stay around him. We stand in the middle of his childhood bedroom in the dark, foreheads together, both of us breathing like we’ve been running.
“You’re still shivering,” I whisper.
He pulls back just enough to sign. “I know. I’m sorry. For all of it. For making you feel like you had to fight alone.”
“Rowan—”
“Let me,” he signs and then pauses, holding my hand.
His thumb moves in slow circles over my palm, as if he’s drawing strength from that motion, before his fingers move again.
“I have been so convinced that the best thing I could do for you was to let you go. But… how can it be… when neither of us is happy?” There’s another long pause. “Echo ran into the forest tonight.”
My heart trips over itself. The forest, the rain, the cold—everything would have been a perfect reminder of the night Rowan got shot.
“Before I found him, there was a moment when it felt like I was back in that day, the one I have spent a very long time trying not to revisit.”
I don’t speak. I just hold on.
“And when I came back, reminding myself that I’m no longer the helpless eight-year-old, the first thing I thought about was you. I have lost so much due to my fear, and I’m not willing to risk losing you, while you’re here, fighting for us.”
My throat tightens.
“I have spent my whole life believing that the kindest thing I could do for the people I love was to make myself smaller. To need less. To ask for less. To be”—he exhales, his hands pausing for a beat before moving again—“less.”
“Rowan.”
“I know.” His forehead drops back to mine for a second. “I know. I don’t want to live like this anymore, Violet. I want to work on it. With you, if you’ll still have me. All of me. The parts that have”—he pauses, and something in the pause feels enormous—“learned to believe that they are less.”
I cup his face in both hands.
“While you’ve been worried you’re less, all my life I’ve been worried I’m too much for someone to love me.” I brush my thumbs along his cheekbones. “The reality is, even if we’re not perfect alone, we’re both perfect together.”
He closes his eyes. For a long moment he simply stands there, letting the words settle. When he opens his eyes again, they’re bright. “So, this is… it? We are…”
“Perfect soulmates,” I whisper and smile.
He pulls me back in, but before our lips can touch, he pushes me away and sneezes. Once. Twice. And when he sneezes a third time, I take a step toward the door.
“Your clothes are wet. Let me quickly borrow something from your dad.”
But before I can leave, Rowan grabs my hand and pulls me back, shaking his head before he signs, “Don’t go. Let’s have one night just for us. This is okay for you, if I’m not able to speak every time? Out loud?”
“Rowan, your voice is a gift.” I pause, watching his eyes widen. “Whenever you’re willing and able to give it to me, I’ll treasure it. But your words in any form—written, signed, or spoken—are always enough for me.”
A small smile starts to form on his lips. Before it can fully bloom, he sneezes again.
“Okay,” I say firmly. “You need to get out of these wet clothes before you get sick.” Without thinking, I reach for the hem of his wet T-shirt and pull it up… and then I pause. His chest is right there.
When our eyes meet, there’s a small smile on his lips, and without losing contact, he takes off his T-shirt and stands in the middle of his bedroom under the soft light of the night light.
He is all lean muscle and quiet strength, his skin still cold and damp from the rain, and there is his scar, silvered and permanent, sitting at the base of his neck like a punctuation mark on a sentence that almost ended too soon.
On impulse, I press my lips to it, and he goes completely still.
My mouth rests there for a moment, not quite a kiss, more like a promise. I see this and I am not going anywhere. I feel the slight movement in his throat when he speaks.
“Violet.”
“I love you,” I whisper against his skin.
His arms come around me, pulling me against him. His heartbeat beneath my ear. My hands flat against the warmth of his back. Then he tips my chin up and kisses me, slowly and thoroughly.
His hands find the hem of my sleep shirt and pause, a question without words. I answer it by reaching down and pulling it over my head myself. I’m not wearing a bra. When I went to sleep, I wasn’t expecting a late-night visit from Rowan.
My breath leaves my body under his gaze, which tonight holds no hesitation, only reverence and ownership.
“You are—” His voice, rough and fractured and more devastating for it, begins and then stops. He clears his throat. “You are so beautiful.”
I reach up and take his face in both hands, feeling the prick of his light beard, which has grown in the days we’ve been apart. “Hey.” I wait until his eyes find mine. “We have time. We don’t have to—”
“I want to. I don’t want to wait at all to be yours.” He signs before his hands settle on my waist.
“I can’t wait to be yours,” I whisper back, and I mean it in every possible way.
Rowan walks me backward toward the bed, his eyes never leaving mine. The expression on his face reaches places inside me I wasn’t expecting to feel tonight.
“Tell me what you want,” I say quietly.
He reaches out and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. Then he slowly traces the line of my jaw, my neck, the curve of my collarbone, like a man learning a language he intends to become fluent in.
“You,” he signs. “Just you.”