Chapter Twenty-Eight
Staying
Sydney
The morning is quiet in the most awful way possible.
He’s at the counter when I come down, pouring coffee.
He slides my mug across the island the way he always does, except today there’s about three extra inches of distance built into the handoff.
I take it and say thank you. He replies, “You’re welcome.
” Lily asks for waffles, and Luke asks for toast. We move through the kitchen like two people sharing a space in an airport lounge—aware of each other, careful not to collide, definitely not making eye contact.
The twins don’t notice. Or maybe they do and they’re smarter than us about it because Lily chatters through breakfast about a dream she had involving a purple horse and a swimming pool, while Luke eats his toast in triangles, reading his book without looking up.
Archer leaves for practice at eight. He pauses in the doorway as he always does, and I wait for him to say something—anything, even just a “Have a good day”—but he simply nods and walks out.
The door closes. I stand at the island, holding my coffee with both hands, staring at the spot where he was standing.
Last night, I asked for something reasonable: my own apartment, my own address, a life that doesn’t dissolve if he and I don’t work out. He heard it as goodbye.
I get the kids dressed, drive them to preschool, and hold Lily’s hand in the parking lot. I watch Luke walk himself inside; he looks back twice, and I wave both times. Afterward, I sit in the Lexus and call Lauren.
“We had a fight,” I say.
“About what?”
“I told him I want to get my own apartment.”
“Good. And?”
“And he said, ‘So you want an exit strategy,’ and it went downhill from there.”
Lauren sighs. “Men.”
“I’m not leaving him. I told him that. I just need something that’s mine, and he can’t separate that from rejection.”
“Because for him, you being in that house proves that you’re staying. You taking a step toward independence feels like a step away from him.”
“That’s not what it is.”
“I know. But that’s how it feels to a guy who’s been left before.”
I lean my head against the steering wheel. She’s right. Bree left. She moved out of this house, took half the furniture, and filed paperwork. Now I’m sitting in his car talking about getting my own place, and of course he heard it the wrong way. Of course he did.
“What do I do?” I ask.
“You go home tonight and tell him what you actually meant. Not the logistics version. The real version.”
“Which is?”
“That you want to stay. That the apartment isn’t about leaving—it’s about having something that’s your own.”
I hang up and head to the senior center to teach my class. Dolores asks if I’m okay. I say yes, but she doesn’t believe me. Still, she lets it go because Dolores understands that sometimes a woman needs to be alone with her thoughts and a Missy Elliott playlist.
The day crawls by. I pick up the twins and make dinner.
Archer comes home, and we eat with the kids between us, but nobody says anything meaningful.
The conversation revolves around logistics—bath time, bedtime, tomorrow’s schedule.
We’re co-parenting without the co, just two people managing children in parallel.
After the twins are down, he goes to his room. I hear the door close—not a slam, just the click.
I stand in the hallway, looking at his door.
I could go to the guest room, read my book, text Lauren, fall asleep alone, and wake up tomorrow to do the polite-distance thing again. Maybe by Friday, we’ll have drifted back to normal, whatever that is for us.
Or I could knock on his door.
I knock.
“Yeah.” His voice comes through the wood—low and guarded.
“Can I come in?”
A pause. “Yeah.”
I open the door. He’s sitting on the edge of his bed in sweats and a t-shirt, his phone on the nightstand, hands between his knees. He looks up at me, his face mirroring the cautious expression he wore in the hallway this morning—careful, waiting, bracing for whatever comes next.
I lean against the doorframe. “I didn’t mean I want to leave.”
“No?”
“No, Arch. It felt like you heard something I wasn’t saying.”
He rubs the back of his neck. “I heard you say you want your own apartment, and my brain turned it into you want out. I know that’s not what you said. I just—” He exhales. “I’m working on it.”
“I want to stay, Archer. I want it more than anything. I just thought having my own place would be the adult thing to do…”
“I get that. I do.” He looks at his hands.
“I just like you here. I like waking up and knowing you’re down the hall.
I like hearing you in the kitchen in the morning.
The idea of you being somewhere else, even if you’re here most of the time—” He shakes his head.
“It scares me. That’s not your problem. It’s mine. But it scares me.”
I push off the doorframe, cross the room, and sit next to him on the bed. Our shoulders touch. He’s warm through his t-shirt, and I can feel him breathing—slow, deliberate, the way he breathes when he’s trying to stay steady.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I say. “At least not right away.”
He turns his head to look at me, his eyes tired, honest, and slightly red around the edges. I wonder if he slept last night, if he lay in this bed staring at the ceiling, replaying every word the way I did in the guest room.
“Stay tonight,” he says. “Here. With me.”
“Arch—”
“Please. I want you here, honey.”
The word hits me somewhere below my ribs. Honey. He’s never called me that before—not in all the years I’ve known him, not once. It comes out soft and unplanned, like it slipped past whatever filter he usually maintains between his brain and his mouth.
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll stay.”
He exhales, and his whole body relaxes. I lean into him, and his arm wraps around me. I rest my face against his shoulder and breathe him in—laundry detergent, body wash, and beneath that, just Archer, the same way he’s always smelled.
We sit like that for a while. His hand moves up and down my arm, slow and absent, and I feel the tension from the last twenty-four hours start to drain out of me. The fight isn’t gone—we still need to talk about the apartment, about labels, about everything—but right now, in this room, it can wait.
“I’m sorry about last night,” he says into my hair.
“I know.”
“Exit strategy was a stupid thing to say.”
“It really was.”
“I panicked.”
“I know you panicked. Like a skittish polar bear.”
He laughs—low, short, real. His arm tightens around me, and I tilt my face up; he’s right there—close, warm, looking at me with an expression I could stare at for the rest of my life.
I kiss him—soft, slow, my hand on his jaw, his stubble rough under my fingers.
He kisses me back, and his hand slides from my arm to my waist. I shift until I’m facing him on the bed, my knees tucked under me, and his hands find my hips and pull me closer.
We’re kissing on his bed, in his room, and this is the first time we’ve been in a bed together since we were teenagers. Everything about it is different.
He’s different. His hands are sure where they used to hesitate.
His mouth is deliberate where it used to search.
He kisses me like he knows exactly what he’s doing, like the years between seventeen and now taught him how to slow down, how to pay attention, how to make every point of contact feel intentional.
At seventeen, he was sweet and nervous, trying so hard not to hurt me. At thirty-one, he’s unhurried and thorough; the confidence is devastating.
His mouth moves to my neck, and I tilt my head back as his hand slides under my shirt, palm flat against my stomach. The warmth of his hand on my bare skin makes me gasp. He pulls back.
“Is this okay?”
“Yeah. Don’t stop.”
He doesn’t stop. His mouth finds the spot below my ear that makes my breath catch, and he learns it immediately—kissing it again, slower.
My fingers grip his shirt, pulling him closer.
He eases me back onto the bed, hovering over me, his weight braced on one arm.
I look up at him, and his gray eyes are dark and focused.
“You’re staring,” I whisper.
“I’m looking at you.” His thumb traces my hip bone above the waistband of my leggings. “I’ve wanted to look at you like this for a long time, and I’m not going to rush it.”
His mouth returns to mine, deeper now, his tongue against mine. I arch up into him, and he groans as his hips press against me. I can feel him—every part of him—and the sound I make is embarrassing, but I don’t care.
He pulls my shirt over my head. I’m in a bra and leggings while he’s still fully dressed, which feels unfair, so I tug at his shirt.
He sits up and pulls it off, revealing his broad chest and flat stomach, along with the bruise on his ribs.
I run my hands up his abs, and he shudders under my touch.
After two years of no one touching him, my hands on his skin make him shake.
“Syd.” My name comes out of his mouth, rough and low.
I pull him back down to me. We kiss, and his hand moves up my side, his thumb brushing the underside of my bra.
I reach behind my back and unhook it because I’m done being patient.
He draws it off slowly. And the way he looks at me—like I’m the answer to every question he’s ever been afraid to ask—makes my eyes sting.
His mouth moves down, exploring my collarbone, my chest, the valley between my breasts, my stomach. He takes his time, his lips and hands mapping every inch of me. When his fingers hook into the waistband of my leggings, he looks up at me.
“Can I?”
“Yes.”
He pulls them down slowly and presses his mouth to my hip, then to the inside of my thigh, and finally to the tattoo—the paper airplane. The fact that he kisses the tattoo first, before anything else, makes my chest crack open.
Then his mouth moves lower, and I stop thinking.
He is nothing like the boy I remember. That boy was careful and uncertain, and he finished before I did.
The man is patient and focused; he knows exactly where to be and how long to stay there.
The sounds I’m making are not sounds I’ve made before with anyone, ever, and my hands are in his hair, my back is arching off his mattress.
He doesn’t rush or stop, and when I come apart, it’s with his name on my lips and his hands on my hips holding me steady.
He kisses his way back up my body—my stomach, my ribs, my throat. He’s breathing hard, his eyes dark, and when he settles beside me, I lay my head on his chest. His arms wrap around me as I lie there shaking, listening to his heartbeat, which is racing just as fast as mine.
“You okay?” he murmurs against my hair.
“I—” I laugh, breathless. “Yeah. I’m very okay.”
“Good.”
I pull back to look at him. His hair is a mess from my hands, his lips are swollen, and he’s looking at me with something so naked and unguarded that I have to close my eyes for a moment.
I reach for his waistband, and he catches my hand.
“You don’t have to—”
“Archer.” I raise an eyebrow. “Shut up.”
He falls silent.
I show him what it feels like to be on the other side of that—to be touched by someone who has been thinking about it for half her life, who knows him, who isn’t going anywhere.
He’s not quiet. That’s what I learn about him tonight.
He tries to be—pressing his face into the pillow, biting his fist—but the sounds come anyway, low and rough and involuntary, and every single one sends a current through me.
When he finishes, his hand grips the sheet, his breath is ragged, and he says my name in a way I’ve never heard before—wrecked, grateful, and mine.
We lie in his bed afterward, my head on his chest, his arm around me, the house dark and quiet around us. The twins are asleep down the hall. The guest room door is open and empty.
I trace the paper airplane on his bicep with my fingertip.
“We were so young,” I say.
“We were.”
I press my lips to the tattoo. “We’re better at this now.”
“We really are.” His arm tightens around me. “Syd?”
“Hmm?”
“Are you sure you need the apartment?” He pushes the hair off my face, his fingers trailing along my temple. “Because we’ve waited so long. I want you in this room. I want you with me. The guest room is twenty feet away, and that’s already too far.”
I lift my head and look at him. His eyes are half-closed, and his warm hand rests on my face as he gazes at me like I’m the only thing in the world that matters. I think about getting a lease and having an address with my name on it, but none of it feels as urgent as it did twenty-four hours ago.
“I’ll think about it,” I say. “I like being here too.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, Arch. Of course I like being here.”
His thumb traces my cheekbone, and he pulls me closer. I rest my head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat, and I think, maybe I don’t need a safety net. Maybe the net is him. Maybe it’s always been him. Maybe it’s okay to fall.
I’ll think about it tomorrow. Tonight, I’m exactly where I want to be.