Chapter 6
Barrett
The strangest part of being with Wren isn't how new it feels. It's how little actually changes, and how much that terrifies me in the best possible way.
We already know everything about each other.
I know she takes her coffee with too much cream and not enough sugar, that she steals the blanket in her sleep no matter how many she starts with, that she hums off-key when she's nervous and doesn't realize she's doing it.
She knows I leave cabinet doors open, that I run cold at night and hot during arguments, that I've never once in my life admitted I was wrong without also explaining, at length, why I was almost right.
None of that is new information. What's new is the weight underneath it — the fact that all those small, familiar things now belong to something bigger than friendship, something with stakes I've never had to calculate before.
The first official date happens two nights after the confession, dinner at the little Italian place on the harbor that's been there since we were kids, run by the same family for three generations.
We get the corner table by the window, the one we've sat at a dozen times before as friends, except tonight everything feels charged differently — the way she laughs at my jokes, the way I find excuses to reach across the table and touch her hand, both of us hyperaware of every accidental brush of fingers like teenagers instead of two thirty-year-olds who've known each other since kindergarten.
"This is strange," she admits, halfway through the meal, smiling into her wine glass.
"Good strange or bad strange?"
"Good strange. Just — different. I keep waiting for it to feel normal, and it doesn't yet. It feels like the first day of something enormous."
"It is the first day of something enormous," I tell her, and mean it more than I've meant almost anything in my life.
Because this isn't a woman I'm dating. This is Wren.
If I lose her, I don't just lose a girlfriend.
I lose the center of my entire life, the person every other relationship in it has been built around.
The stakes are astronomical, and some nights that thought keeps me up longer than the Halcyon fight ever did.
I find myself, in quiet moments, cataloguing every possible way this could go wrong — a fight neither of us knows how to come back from, a slow drift the way relationships sometimes drift, the particular disaster of losing not just a partner but a best friend, a confidante, twenty-five years of shared history, all in one blow.
I've never had this much to lose with anyone before.
Every previous relationship came with a built-in safety net — if it ended, I'd still have my life, my routines, my people, largely intact.
If this ends, there's no safety net. Wren isn't a piece of my life I can lose and rebuild around. She is the architecture.
I mention some version of this to Rhett, who listens with more patience than I expect and then shrugs in the particular unbothered way he does when he thinks I'm overcomplicating something simple.
"You're going to lose sleep over hypotheticals," he says, "or you're going to actually be with her. Pick one. The hypotheticals aren't going to protect you from anything. They're just going to steal time you could be spending happy."
It's annoyingly good advice, delivered with his usual lack of tact, and I think about it more than I probably should over the following days.
We take it slow, exactly once — that one dinner at the harbor restaurant is the whole of "slow" that either of us manages.
Then we stop taking it slow, because a twenty-five-year lead-up doesn't leave much patience in reserve.
It happens three nights later, at her apartment above the clinic, the one with the crooked window that looks out over the harbor and the ancient radiator that clanks all winter.
She's making tea — peppermint, the same kind she's had every evening since I've known her — and I'm standing in her kitchen doorway watching her with an intensity I don't try to hide anymore.
"You're staring," she says, without turning around.
"I'm allowed to stare now."
She turns, and whatever she sees on my face makes her set the kettle down without finishing what she was doing. "Barrett."
"I've been in love with you for fifteen years," I say, crossing the kitchen. "I'd like to stop standing in doorways."
She meets me halfway, and the kiss that follows is nothing tentative — it's twenty-five years of friendship and fifteen years of buried want finally allowed to combust into something neither of us is holding back anymore.
She tastes like peppermint and something underneath that's just her, familiar and electric at once, and the combination makes my head spin in a way I wasn't prepared for.
We move to her bedroom slowly, unhurried despite everything, because some part of both of us wants to savor this — the first time, the only first time we'll ever get with each other.
I peel her sweater off carefully, and she works the buttons of my shirt with hands that shake slightly, and I catch her wrist gently.
"Hey," I murmur. "We can stop. Anytime."
"I don't want to stop," she says, and the certainty in her voice undoes something in my chest.
We stand there a moment longer, foreheads touching, both of us catching our breath before anything else happens, letting the weight of the moment settle instead of rushing past it.
The bedroom is small, familiar — I've seen this room a hundred times before, dropped off groceries when she was sick, sat on the edge of that same bed while she vented about a hard day at the clinic.
Tonight it looks entirely different, cast in the soft light of her bedside lamp, every ordinary object in it somehow transformed by what's about to happen here.
"I've imagined this," she admits quietly, "more times than I probably should admit."
"Good," I tell her. "Because I've been catching up fast, and I intend to make up for lost time."
She laughs, some of the nervous energy in the room easing, and it's that laugh — easy, familiar, entirely hers — that finally settles whatever hesitation either of us had left.
I know her body the way I know her handwriting — not because I've had her this way before, but because I've known her my whole life, watched her grow from a girl who couldn't swim into a woman who delivers babies with steady hands.
I know the small white scar above her eyebrow from when she fell off her bike at nine.
I know the freckle pattern across her shoulders from a hundred summers at the marina.
I know the story behind every mark on her skin.
But touching them now, as a lover instead of a friend, rewrites everything my hands thought they understood about her.
I lay her back against the pillows and take my time undressing her the rest of the way, pressing my mouth to every inch of skin I uncover — the curve of her collarbone, the soft plane of her stomach, the sensitive crease where her hip meets her thigh.
She gasps when my lips find that spot, fingers tightening in my hair, and the sound goes straight through me.
"Barrett—"
"I know." I press another kiss lower, deliberate, feeling her whole body go tight with anticipation. "I've got fifteen years to make up for. Let me take my time."
She doesn't argue. Her breath comes faster as I work my way down her body, my hands mapping every curve, learning exactly what makes her back arch and what makes her breath catch and hold.
When my mouth finally settles between her thighs, she makes a sound I've never heard from her before — raw, unguarded, my name breaking apart in her throat — and her hands fist in the sheets as I take my time there too, unhurried, savoring the way she shakes and pulls at my hair and says my name like a plea.
She comes apart under my mouth first, hips lifting off the bed, a cry she muffles against her own arm, and I don't stop until the last tremor has worked its way out of her.
"Barrett," she gasps, pulling at my shoulders, "I need you. Now."
I kiss my way back up her body and settle over her, skin against skin, her eyes hold mine with a steadiness that undoes me completely.
There's no nervousness left in either of us, just the quiet certainty of two people who've spent a decade and a half circling each other and have finally, finally arrived.
I push inside her slowly, both of us groaning at the fit of it, the way her body stretches to take me, and for a second neither of us moves at all — just breathing each other in, foreheads pressed together, adjusting to the reality of this new shape of us.
"Move," she breathes against my mouth. "Barrett, please, move."
I do, slow at first, watching her face for every flicker of pleasure, every small catch of breath. She wraps her legs around me, heels digging into my lower back, pulling me deeper, and the sound she makes against my ear — half whimper, half moan — sends heat rushing through my whole body.
"More," she whispers, and I give her more — deeper, harder, my forehead pressed to hers so I can watch every second of it, so I don't miss a single moment of finally having this. Her nails drag down my back, sharp enough to sting, and the sting only pulls me deeper into her.
She says my name again, differently each time, breathless and wrecked, like she's testing out all the ways she's wanted to say it for fifteen years and finally gets to.
My hands find hers, fingers lacing together against the pillow, and I feel her tighten around me, her whole body drawing taut, her back arching off the mattress.
"I'm — Barrett, I'm—"