Chapter 6 #2
"I've got you," I tell her, echoing the words she said to me at two in the morning during my panic attack, except now they mean something entirely different.
I drive into her harder, chasing the exact rhythm that makes her cry out, and when she finally comes apart beneath me, it's with a sharp cry of my name and her whole body clenching tight around me, and the sight and feel of her like that — undone, trembling, mine in a way she's never been mine before — pulls me over the edge right behind her, my own release crashing through me as I bury myself deep and still inside her.
Afterward, we lie tangled together in the dark, her head on my chest, my fingers tracing slow circles on her bare shoulder.
"So," I say eventually. "Fifteen years."
"Fifteen years," she agrees, voice sleepy and content.
"Worth the wait?"
She props herself up on one elbow to look at me, and even in the dim light from the window, I can see everything I've ever wanted written plainly on her face. "You have no idea."
I pull her back down against me, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, my mind is completely, blessedly quiet — no ledgers, no Halcyon, no fifteen years of unsaid things. Just Wren, breathing steady against my chest, finally exactly where she's supposed to be.
We lie there a long time, neither of us in any hurry to move, the ancient radiator clanking softly somewhere behind the wall, the harbor visible through the crooked window, dark and quiet under a sky full of stars.
She traces idle patterns on my chest, and I memorize the weight of her against me, the exact way she fits, like some part of my body has been waiting fifteen years to learn this specific shape of comfort.
"Can I ask you something?" she says eventually, voice soft in the dark.
"Anything."
"When did you know? Really know, not just 'Rhett told me in a garage' know."
I think about it seriously, wanting to give her a real answer instead of a convenient one.
"Honestly? I think some part of me has known for years.
But the moment I couldn't argue with anymore was that night you fell asleep on my office couch during the buyout fight.
I put my jacket over you without thinking about it, and standing there watching you sleep, I remember feeling something I didn't have a name for yet.
I just knew I didn't want that feeling to stop. "
"That's a good answer."
"It's the true one." I press a kiss to the top of her head. "What about you? When did you finally let yourself hope?"
"The night you pressed your thumb to my temple in my office, over the letter.
" Her voice goes quieter, more vulnerable than I'm used to hearing from her.
"I'd spent so many years telling myself that gesture didn't mean anything more than friendship.
That night, for the first time, I let myself wonder if I'd been wrong. "
We stay tangled together until the tea she'd started earlier has long gone cold, until the stars outside the window have shifted position, until sleep finally starts pulling at both of us in the comfortable, satisfied way that follows a night like this one.
"Stay," she murmurs, already half-asleep, when I shift like I might get up.
"I'm not going anywhere," I promise, and mean it more completely than I've ever meant anything, and pull her closer against me as we both finally drift off, fifteen years of waiting resolved into something neither of us has to imagine anymore.
I wake before her, the way I usually do, morning light coming soft through the crooked window, the harbor visible beyond it painted gold with sunrise.
Wren's still asleep against my chest, one hand curled loosely against my ribs, her hair a mess across the pillow in a way that makes something warm and fierce move through me.
I lie there a long while, not wanting to move, memorizing the weight of her, the sound of her breathing, the particular miracle of waking up next to the person I've loved for fifteen years and finally being allowed to call her mine.
I think about all the mornings I've woken up alone in this same stretch of years, never once considering that this — this exact, ordinary, extraordinary scene — was available to me the whole time, if only I'd had the courage to ask for it sooner.
She stirs eventually, blinking up at me with the particular disorientation of someone surfacing slowly from a deep sleep, and then her face breaks into a smile so unguarded it takes my breath away.
"Hi," she says, voice rough with sleep.
"Hi."
"This is real."
"Very real," I confirm, brushing a strand of hair off her face. "I checked. Pinched myself twice already."
"And?"
"Still real. I'm optimistic it's going to stay that way."
She laughs, pulling herself up to kiss me, unhurried and easy in a way that feels like the most natural thing in the world, and we lie there another half hour, trading lazy kisses and quiet conversation, in no hurry at all to let the morning end.
Eventually her stomach growls loud enough that we both laugh, and she swats my chest when I tease her about it, and we finally get up to make breakfast together in her small kitchen, moving around each other with an ease that surprises neither of us — because we've always moved around each other easily, it turns out.
We just never had a reason before to call it what it actually is.
She scrambles eggs while I make coffee, both of us barefoot on her kitchen tile, and somewhere in the middle of it she catches me watching her again, the way I've apparently been doing more openly since Thursday night.
"You're doing the staring thing again."
"I told you. I'm allowed now."
"You're going to wear it out."
"I don't think that's how staring works, but I appreciate the concern."
She laughs and swats me with a dish towel, and I catch her around the waist, pulling her back against me while she protests half-heartedly about the eggs burning.
They don't burn. We eat breakfast at her small kitchen table, knees bumping under it, trading easy conversation about nothing important — her clinic schedule for the day, my plans to finally finish the presentation for Councilwoman Ortiz, small mundane details of ordinary life that feel, this morning, like the most precious things in the world.
"I have to go in soon," she says eventually, checking the clock with visible reluctance. "Dana's covering my first two appointments, but I can't leave her hanging all morning."
"I know. I've got the presentation to finish anyway."
Neither of us moves right away. We sit there a few more minutes, unwilling to let the morning end, until finally she stands and starts gathering her things, and I watch her move around the apartment with the same fond, disbelieving wonder I woke up with.
At the door, she turns back to kiss me one more time, lingering longer than the moment strictly requires.
"Same time tonight?" she asks, grinning.
"Every time, from now on," I tell her, and mean it, and watch her head down the stairs to the clinic with a lightness in my chest that stays with me the entire walk back to my truck, the entire drive to the compound, the entire rest of a day that somehow manages to feel completely different from every day that came before it.
I stop by the marina office first, needing to grab a folder before heading to work on Ortiz's presentation, and Dominic catches me in the hallway, taking one look at my face before he even says anything.
"You look like a different person," he observes.
"I feel like one."
"Good." He claps a hand on my shoulder, genuine warmth in his expression. "Dad would've liked her, you know. He always did."
"He never said anything."
"He didn't have to. I think he saw it coming even before Rhett did." Dominic smiles, something a little wistful in it. "He used to say you'd figure it out eventually. Just took you longer than the rest of us expected."
I think about my father, about the marina he built, about all the quiet, patient love he poured into this town and this club and, apparently, into watching his younger son slowly fall for his best friend over the better part of two decades.
It's a strange kind of comfort, knowing he'd seen this coming too, and I carry that thought with me through the rest of the day — through the presentation, through the meetings, through everything — with a settled, grateful kind of peace I haven't felt in longer than I can remember.
This is what I was missing, I think, right before sleep pulls me under. This is what everything was about.