Chapter 8 #3
Her whole body tightens and she cries out my name and it ruins me. I follow her instantly, burying my face in her neck as everything inside me comes undone.
It’s too much and not enough and exactly right all at once. When the world finally stops spinning, I pull back just enough to see her.
Her hair’s stuck to her face, her lips are swollen, her chest is still rising and falling fast. And the way she’s looking at me—like I’m something she almost trusts again—hits so hard it borders on pain.
That’s when it lands: I’m fucked.
Not in the old way—the pills, the spiral I used to dig myself into—but fucked because I know I’ll never have this with anyone else. I won’t even pretend to.
Her brows pinch.
“What’s wrong?”
There’s real worry in her voice and it almost kills me.
I brush the hair off her lips with my thumb, tracing the shape of them, trying to burn every detail into memory because tomorrow this might all be gone. And she doesn’t even know she’s undoing me just by looking at me like this.
“It’s the opposite,” I whisper, my voice wrecked. “It’s right. All of it. You and me. We’re—”
“Us,” she finishes quietly.
A single word that somehow holds years of history and heartbreak and hope.
“Yeah,” I breathe. “Us.”
Her eyes glisten in the dim bedroom light, tears threatening to spill.
"Unlikely and inevitable all at once."
"Infinite," I say, the word escaping before I can examine it, raw and honest in a way I rarely allow myself to be.
"Inevitable and infinite. That's what we've always been. That's what we'll always be, no matter what."
Her fingers tighten in my hair, anchoring me to her like she’s afraid I’ll disappear if she lets go.
“We are,” she whispers. “But Nate?”
“Mm?” I murmur against her collarbone, tasting her skin—salt, sweetness, Nora.
“Tonight…” Her voice is steel wrapped in silk. “I need you to do what you just did. All over again.”
The words hit me like a punch to the ribs. Not because she wants me—God, I’ve spent years praying for that—but because her voice carries the same fear I’ve lived with since the day I realized I loved her.
That fear that this is temporary. That morning will come and she’ll remember she deserves better than the guy who spent half a decade trying not to self-destruct.
But tonight isn’t about fear. It isn’t about tomorrow.
It’s about now.
It’s about giving her everything I’ve never said out loud, poured into my hands, my mouth, my body.
So I do exactly what she asks.
I kiss her like the world is burning outside this villa. Like time owes us a debt for every silent glance and almost-confession and moment we pretended we didn’t want each other. I kiss her until she gasps my name like a prayer she’s trying not to lose faith in.
We move together again—
“Don’t stop,” she breathes, voice hitching, needy in a way that kills me.
I don’t. I can’t. Every part of her feels like something I’m meant to worship.
I trail my mouth down her body, leaving marks, kisses, soft bites that make her arch off the bed. When she drags me back up to kiss her again, I can taste everything she’s feeling—want, fear, love. It’s intoxicating. It’s devastating. It’s everything.
We make love like people who know the night has an ending but refuse to let it come quietly. Every kiss is frantic, every touch reverent, every movement a plea for one more second, one more breath, one more moment where the world consists only of us.
When we finally collapse together, still shaking, I pull her against me. Her head rests on my chest like she was carved to fit there. Her breaths slow. Her tears—quiet, warm—hit my skin, and I wrap my arms around her even tighter.
The villa is silent except for our uneven breaths and the faint rustle of sheets.
“So what happens now?” she asks, voice soft, still edged with sleep and something vulnerable.
I press a kiss to her hair, breathing in the scent of her shampoo, her skin, her everything. Before tonight, I would’ve said I didn’t know.
But I do.
“Now we stop pretending,” I murmur. “Stop running. Stop being afraid of what this is.”
She lifts her head, eyes searching mine. “And what is this?”
I tilt her chin so she’s really looking at me. “It’s us finally getting it right. It’s the beginning of everything we should’ve been all along.”
She smiles—soft, genuine, the kind of smile that feels like forgiveness—and settles back against my chest.
“I like the sound of that,” she whispers.
As she drifts into sleep in my arms, I stare up at the ceiling and try to wrap my head around the fact that she’s here.
That she’s choosing me.
I thought I’d lost her for good.
And now she’s lying on my chest, trusting me with all the parts of her I used to think I’d never earn.
Querencia is the Spanish word for the place you return to because it feels like home. The place where you’re most yourself.
I used to think I’d find that somewhere out there—in music, in recovery, in the next version of myself.
But looking at Nora, breathing softly against my chest, I realize I was wrong.
My querencia isn’t a place, it’s a person.
It’s her.
Maybe her world is painted in blue horizons and mine in green certainties, but together?
Those colors make something new.
Something that couldn’t exist without both of us—like the ocean meeting the shore. And the beauty of it isn’t in how we look.
It’s in how it feels.
And with her?
It feels like coming home.