Chapter 14
HAZEL
The porch swing kept its lazy rhythm when I turned toward him, the chains whispering our yes back and forth. “What took you so long?” I’d asked, and his answering grin went slow and wicked like a tide deciding to come all the way in.
He didn’t reply with words. He stood, and the swing rocked empty behind him as he scooped me up—one arm under my knees, the other at my back. I made a startled sound that turned into a laugh against his throat.
“Gideon—”
“I’ve got you,” he said, and he did. He lifted me as if I were feathers, an easy heft that didn’t strain. Muscle bunched under my palms where I clutched at his shoulders. He barely shifted his balance.
I’d thought of him as stone and heat and danger. I hadn’t accounted for gentleness inside all that strength.
The porch screen sighed closed. The hallway yawned and narrowed, moon and lamplight laying stripes across the runner, the house holding its breath like it approved of this procession. He carried me past the photographs that had watched decades of beginnings and endings.
At the top of the stairs, I glanced down at his forearms—veins roped, tendons defined, power applied without hurry. I had the strangest urge to cry for no reason except that some part of me had never been carried—never, not like this, not with care as a given rather than a prize you had to earn.
His door gave under his boot like it remembered us.
He set me on the bed slow, letting the mattress take my weight inch by inch, hands a lingering heat at my waist as if reluctant to lose contact.
He stood over me and the low bedside lamp turned him sculptural: chest broad, shadows carving his ribs, the dark map of hair that arrowed down his stomach where his shirt had ridden up.
Copper flashed in his beard when he tipped his head, studying my face.
“Hi,” I said again, because sometimes the small words were the ones that fit.
He huffed a laugh, then bent to kiss me. It started soft—meaningful like the kind of prayer you say with your forehead against a door frame. But heat crept in quick, familiar as the path between us now. The world blurred to scent and mouth and the rasp of his palm on my thigh.
“Wait,” I whispered against his lips, and he froze, all that command and control redirected into stillness for me. It made my breath go strange.
“Too much?” His voice fell to gravel.
“No.” I framed his face with both hands. “I just—before we forget how to use words. Maude.”
He stilled another beat, then a smile tugged one corner of his mouth, small and helpless. “We don’t have to hide,” he said. “She told us so. Solid oak headboard and all.”
Laughter punched out of me, bright and ridiculous. “She did say that.”
“Then we’ll give the furniture a sporting chance,” he said solemnly, and the seriousness of it undid me.
I pulled him down. The kiss changed from amused to aching.
We undressed in pauses and looks, like we had hours.
Maybe we did. He was careful with me even after careful wasn’t strictly necessary, thumbs at my hips, mouth at my shoulder, the weight of him a shelter.
When he entered this time, it felt less like being taken and more like being received.
My body met his like it had been designed for this, like it had been waiting.
We didn’t reach for frenzy. We settled, an exhale after a long, long inhalation.
His forehead pressed to mine, breath mingling.
He moved inside me with a relentless patience—measured, attentive, sure of the result because he was present for every small sign that guided him there.
He mapped me with hands and mouth and hips like he truly knew how to listen.
I held his face, my thumbs tracing the grooves time had cut beside his mouth. “We can touch in daylight,” I said between kisses, a little amazed. “We can hold hands while we fix the shutters. We can kiss in the kitchen while Maude tells stories.”
He groaned into my mouth, a sound that felt like agreement and desire at once. “I’m going to kiss you everywhere,” he said. “Kitchen. Porch. Front steps. While you’re lecturing me on epoxy ratios.”
“I’ll never lecture you on epoxy ratios,” I said, “because I don’t know anything about them.”
“You’ll learn, and you will,” he said fondly, shifting his angle until pleasure lanced up and my toes curled. “And I’ll deserve it.”
We laughed into each other’s mouths, and then the laughter collapsed into the kind of quiet that only bodies can keep.
I clung, I opened, I let him see. The world telescoped to the heat at the point where we met, the way his hands spread my ribs when I arched, the way his voice dropped rough when he said my name like it was a thing he was allowed to keep.
I came slow, unwinding like a ribbon, hips rolling up to meet him as the sweetness built and built until it tipped and everything inside me spilled into his waiting hands. He followed with a shudder I felt all the way through, eyes dark and soft, a low yes torn out of him like honesty.
After, we didn’t move for a while. He stayed over me on his forearms, then slid carefully to the side and tugged me into the curve of his chest. The ocean laid its hush through the cracked window. The house relaxed around us like it had been clenching for years and finally remembered how to rest.
“Stay,” I said, throat thick before I could file the word down to something less raw.
“I wasn’t going anywhere,” he said, immediate, no room for doubt.
I tucked my face against him and felt his smile in the way his chest moved, the way his arm tightened around me. “Are you—can you help me more?” I asked into his skin, the question so plain it scared me. “With the inn. I know you’re … you have a job. But if you’re here—”
“I have an assignment in Charleston,” he said, honest and uncomplicated. He stroked his palm down my back once, slow. “No details yet. While I’m on standby, I’m yours as long as I can be.”
Mine. It fit.
“Good,” I said, quietly.
“Hazel.” He tipped my chin so I’d look at him.
The lamp found the changeable gray in his eyes, and for a second I saw the boy he must have been—the one who learned early how to keep his face still while storms blew through.
“We won’t hide from Maude. But more than that—we don’t hide from each other.
” He paused, searching. “Whatever this is, however long I get, I’m showing up for it. ”
I wanted to argue with time—bargain like a gambler—but instead I nodded, because I knew better than most that nothing in this life came with a guarantee.
“Okay,” I whispered. My chest felt tight and open all at once.
“We’ll do it loud and soft. Hand holding and hedge trimming. Kisses and caulk guns.”
He laughed into my hair, whole body involved. “You make that sound filthy.”
“It is filthy,” I said primly, then yelped when he nipped my shoulder, smiling.
We fell asleep folded together, ankles tangled, his breath a steady tide at the back of my neck.
Happiness—real, unadorned—slid through me like warm light.
I had the thought that maybe joy had muscles and this was how it held you: not with force, but with steadiness, with weight you could lean against and not topple.
The dream came like a switch flipped in the dark.
I was twelve again, the hall light too bright, the apartment too quiet in the wrong way.
Mom’s voice traveled from the kitchen—raised, not at me.
The sink ran and wouldn’t stop. The floor was wet under my socks.
“Hazel!” she called, but when I ran, rooms elongated and doors refused to open.
“Baby—” she said, and then it wasn’t words, it was sound, and it turned into the ocean and then into sirens and then into nothing at all.
My feet wouldn’t find purchase. I couldn’t get to her.
She was always just beyond the next corner, every corner multiplying like a cruel math problem.
“Help,” she said, and I did everything a twelve-year-old could do, which was not enough. Which was never enough.
I woke with my mouth open on that word and no sound coming out, nails biting into Gideon’s forearm where I’d grabbed him in the dark.
He was already moving. “Hazel.” Calm. Not the bark of command; the anchor of it.
A hand on my sternum, firm but gentle, pushing me back from a sit-up I hadn’t decided to make.
The lamp clicked on low. The room returned in pieces—the cracked plaster, the knot in the wood floor, the steady breathing that wasn’t mine.
He framed my face like he had earlier, thumbs sure at my jaw. “You’re here,” he said. “With me.”
I dragged air in like it hurt. My heart slammed against his palm, wild and wrong.
“Breathe with me,” he said, and we did. In for four. Out for six. Again. Again. He didn’t rush me past it. He stood in it with me until the edges stopped vibrating, until the room settled back into a room and not a trap.
“Sorry,” I said eventually, a word I hated landing between us like a dropped plate.
“Don’t apologize to me for having a nightmare,” he said, and the steadiness of his voice was a kindness so large it made my eyes burn.
“I don’t—” I closed my eyes. Opened them.
He waited. “My mom died when I was twelve,” I said, the sentence so practiced and flat it had lost all its blood years ago.
“I have dreams. They’re always the same.
She’s yelling. She needs help. I can’t find her.
” My throat closed. I swallowed hard. “I can’t save her. ”
The muscle in his jaw ticked. I watched the information land in him—not just the fact of the dead mother, but the shape of the child who had learned early that being small didn’t excuse you from trying to hold back oceans.