Chapter Seventeen #2
We make it to the bed eventually, slow, unhurried despite everything in both of us that wants to rush, his bandaged arm careful between us, and every part of it feels different than it used to, less like falling back into something familiar and more like building something new out of pieces we both understand the actual weight of now.
He says my name like it matters. I let him see exactly how much I still want him, no performance, no guarding, the particular vulnerability of a woman who spent eight months protecting herself finally choosing, on her own terms, to stop.
Afterward, tangled together in sheets that still smell like the ordinary detergent of my ordinary life, his heartbeat slowing under my palm, I think about the compass rose on his forearm, faint now under fresh bandaging, four coordinates marking the exact spot where two people first found each other years ago.
"We're going to need new coordinates," I say, quiet, half-asleep already.
"What do you mean?"
"The old ones marked where we started. I think we need a second set now. Someplace new. Someplace that means we survived this instead of just where we began."
He's quiet a moment, and I feel him smile against my hair. "I'd like that. Whenever you're ready to ink it."
"Not tonight. Give me a while." I close my eyes, warm and exhausted and, for the first time in eight months, genuinely at peace. "But someday."
"What coordinates were you thinking?"
"I don't know yet. Somewhere that means something new, not just a repeat of the old spot.
Maybe the lake." I feel him go still under my cheek, and I lift my head enough to catch his expression, careful, testing whether I've misjudged how raw that particular memory still is for both of us.
"Not to erase March. To reclaim it. Make it mean something different going forward than what it meant looking backward.
I think I'd like that better than pretending it never happened. "
"I'd like that too." His voice comes out thick, something emotional moving underneath the words. "Reclaiming it instead of just surviving it. That sounds like exactly the kind of thing you'd think of and I never would have on my own."
"That's probably going to be true about a lot of things going forward. You'll get used to it."
"I'm counting on it."
We lie there a long while longer, not sleeping, just existing together in the particular quiet of two people who've finally stopped bracing for the next blow, and somewhere outside my window Larkspur settles into its ordinary Tuesday night, unaware that inside this small apartment above a tattoo shop, something quietly, permanently shifted its shape today.
"Rowan." His voice, careful, in the dark.
"Mm."
"Thank you. For choosing this. I know it wasn't owed to me."
"I know it wasn't." I press a kiss to his shoulder, right over the fresh bandage, gentle. "I chose it anyway. That's the whole point of choosing something, Wyatt. It only means anything if it wasn't guaranteed."
He doesn't answer that, just pulls me closer, careful of his injured arm, and we fall asleep like that, tangled together, the first night in eight months I don't wake once before morning.
I wake to the smell of coffee and the sound of him moving carefully around my small kitchen, favoring his bandaged arm, and I lie there a moment just listening, letting myself have this ordinary, unremarkable morning without rushing to examine it for hidden meaning.
Sunlight comes through the curtains at the same slant it always does this time of year, and somewhere below, I can hear Deb unlocking the shop, humming something off-key, oblivious or politely pretending to be oblivious to what happened upstairs.
"You're supposed to be resting that arm," I say, padding out to find him at the stove, one-handed and stubborn about it.
"I'm resting it. I'm just also making coffee. Two things can be true."
"That's not how resting works, Wyatt."
"Preacher already gave me this lecture this morning.
Called at seven to check on the stitches and then spent ten minutes telling me I'm terrible at following medical advice.
" He hands me a mug, careful, and presses a kiss to my forehead that feels different this morning, easier, less like something either of us is still testing for permission.
"I told him I had good reason to be up early. Didn't specify what kind."
"Smooth."
"I have my moments."
We sit at the small table together, sunlight warming the room, and for a while neither of us says much, just exists in the particular ease of two people who've finally stopped bracing for the next hard conversation.
I think about everything still ahead of us, unglamorous and ordinary, rebuilding trust in a thousand small daily choices rather than one dramatic gesture, and I find, watching him nurse his coffee one-handed at my kitchen table, that I'm not afraid of the unglamorous part anymore. I'm actually looking forward to it.
"What happens now?" I ask, finally, because someone has to say it out loud.
"Now we figure it out. Slow. No rushing back into the house, no pretending eight months and everything that happened in them just evaporates because we said the right words last night.
" He reaches across the table, finds my hand.
"I'd like to take you to dinner. An actual date, not a bowl of Deb's chili at a kitchen table with a countdown clock hanging over both our heads.
I'd like to do this the right way, in whatever order actually makes sense for us instead of the order the last three weeks forced on us. "
"I'd like that too." I squeeze his hand, warm, certain. "Slow sounds good. We've got time now. That's the whole point of surviving all this, isn't it. Getting the time back."
"Getting the time back," he agrees, and something in the quiet, ordinary Tuesday morning settling around us feels like the truest kind of victory either of us has actually earned.
We head down to the shop together a little later, Wyatt insisting on carrying his own coffee despite the bandaged arm, and Deb looks up from the register with an expression that tries hard to be neutral and fails completely the moment she clocks the two of us walking down together, unhurried, easy, something visibly settled between us that wasn't there yesterday.
"So," she says, drawing the word out, arms crossed, clearly deciding whether to comment. "Good talk last night?"
"Good talk," I confirm, and I don't elaborate, and something in my own restraint, the choice not to perform the moment for an audience even one as beloved as Deb, feels like its own small piece of the new ground I'm standing on.
"That's it? That's all I get after weeks of watching you two circle each other like nervous teenagers?"
"That's all you get for now." I kiss Wyatt's cheek, quick, easy, and head toward my station to open for the day, my first client due in twenty minutes. "Some things are just mine for a while before they're the whole town's business."
Deb doesn't push further, just watches us with open, unguarded happiness on her face, the particular happiness of a friend who's been rooting for something without daring to say so directly, and Wyatt heads out to his bike, back to whatever the club needs from him today, pausing at the door to look back at me one more time before he goes, like he's still checking this is real, still letting himself believe it.
I watch him ride off down Main Street, and I stand there a moment longer than the view requires, feeling something settle into place that's been unsettled for eight months straight, not relief exactly, something steadier than that, closer to arrival.
Then my first client walks through the door, and I turn back to the work that's carried me through every hard day this year, grateful, finally, to be walking into an ordinary Tuesday instead of bracing for the next one.