Chapter Twenty-Four #3
“He did,” I whisper. “So fucking much. He saw you, Thorne. Even when you were too busy fighting yourself to see any of it.”
A shudder moves through him, hard enough that I feel it everywhere we’re touching. His hands tighten around my waist and pull me closer until there’s barely any space left between us.
“I loved him too,” he says, voice breaking around the words. “Fuck, Echo, I loved him so bloody much.”
His forehead drops against mine.
“And now he’s gone, and I haven’t got a fucking clue what I’m supposed to do with all of that.”
My chest caves in because I don’t either.
So I hold his face between my hands and keep moving slowly against him.
“Neither do I.”
His eyes open.
Thorne swallows hard, tears caught in his lashes as gaze slips past my shoulder and catches on the room around us, on the bed, the walls, all the little pieces of Wolfe that still make this place feel like his.
I see the guilt hit him almost immediately, the way his jaw tightens and his eyes go somewhere far away even though he’s still holding me.
I cup his face and turn him back to me.
“Don’t.”
His eyes meet mine.
“Don’t go somewhere else right now. Stay here with me.”
His brow pulls together, but I keep my hands on him, thumbs brushing slowly beneath his eyes.
“Focus on me. On this. On what’s between us.” My voice softens. “I’m here, Thorne. I’m not going anywhere.”
His throat works when he swallows. “You don’t know that.”
“I know what I’m choosing.” I lean closer until our foreheads touch. “And I’m choosing you. I’m choosing this. You’re not losing me.”
Something in his face cracks, and for a second he just looks at me like grief has made every promise harder to believe.
So I kiss him.
Slowly.
“You’ve got me,” I whisper against his mouth.
His hands tighten around me. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Stay with me.”
That finally brings him back. His eyes stay on mine now, and when we begin moving together again, it’s with the same slow rhythm we started with, neither of us trying to rush toward anything.
I keep one hand against his chest, feeling his heartbeat speed beneath my palm while his arms hold me close enough that every breath belongs to both of us.
The emotion builds with everything else, tangled so tightly together that I can’t separate one from the other anymore. Grief, relief, love, fear, the unbearable comfort of having him here when Wolfe isn’t.
Thorne’s composure goes first.
His forehead presses harder against mine, breath breaking as his fingers dig into my back, and my name leaves him rough and quiet.
“Echo.”
“I’m here.”
He says my name again.
I kiss him and hold on, and when the tension finally gives way, it rolls through both of us slowly instead of crashing, leaving us clinging to each other while our bodies shake and neither of us has enough breath left for anything except the other’s name.
For a long moment afterward, we don’t move.
We just sit there wrapped around each other, foreheads still touching, breathing the same air while everything settles.
Thorne’s eyes stay closed.
Mine probably should too, but I keep looking at him.
At the flush in his cheeks. The wetness caught in his lashes. The way his hands haven’t loosened from me even a little.
Alive.
Here.
Mine to hold.
His eyes finally open.
“You still with me?”
My throat tightens.
“Yeah.”
His forehead presses to mine again.
“Good.”
I let out a shaky breath and close my eyes.
Neither of us says anything else for a while.
We don’t need to.
The quiet returns and I look around the bedroom.
At the little pieces of Wolfe still sitting where he left them.
For days, every reminder of him has felt like being cut open again.
Tonight is different.
He’s still everywhere, and it still hurts, but lying here with Thorne makes the cabin feel less like a place Wolfe abandoned and more like something he left behind.
Not just the house.
Us.
Wolfe changed both of us.
He taught Thorne that loving someone didn’t have to come with shame or panic attached to it, even if it took him forever to believe that.
He taught me that being wanted didn’t require constantly proving I deserved to stay.
Pieces of him are threaded through who we are now.
That doesn’t make losing him easier.
It just means death didn’t get everything.
I press my cheek back against Thorne’s chest.
His arm tightens around me automatically.
“This place is going to hurt for a while,” he murmurs.
“Yeah.”
“You still want it?”
I look toward the bedroom doorway, beyond it to the rest of the cabin that somehow belongs to me now.
The coffee.
The books.
The half-dead plant.
His boots.
All of it.
“I think I need it,” I reply, “I think we both do.”
Thorne nods against my hair and I close my eyes.
The cabin is quiet around us, but for once the silence doesn’t feel empty.
Wolfe isn’t here.
Nothing will make that less true.
But tonight I’m lying in the home he left behind with someone he loved, holding onto pieces of a life none of us were ready to lose.
And for the first time since we came home, being surrounded by Wolfe doesn’t only feel like grief.
It feels like love too.