Chapter 10 #2
“I thought I wanted apology,” I say, eyes on the page. “I thought that’s what would let me breathe.”
“And?” His thumb strokes my wrist again, slow.
“I wanted to know I wasn’t the only one who kept living inside that night.” I turn my head and look at him full-on. “I wanted to know it mattered to you the way it mattered to me, and that you didn’t let go. You didn’t.”
“No,” he says. “I didn’t.”
“Why didn’t you send them?”
He inhales like he’s lifting something. “Because every letter felt like asking you to stand in the ash with me. Because I didn’t know how to love you without making you carry my ghosts.”
“You could have asked.” My mouth twists. “I’m good at triage.”
He huffs. A ghost of a grin. “Yeah. You are.”
We sit. The fire eats quietly. The river continues its dark hum. The lights overhead swing and steady and swing again.
“Savannah,” he says after a while, voice the shape of a confession. “I was going to wipe your tears.”
“I saw.” I tighten my fingers around his because I can’t put my mouth where I want it, not yet. “This is better.”
His breath stutters. He stares at our hands like they’re something sacred and dangerous. “If I touch your face, I won’t stop there.”
“Good,” I say before I can stop the word. Heat climbs my neck. I add, softer, “Soon.”
He curses into his chest, gentle and filthy. My toes curl in my boots.
“Okay,” he says on a hard exhale. “Soon.”
I lift the box and shuffle deeper, strings of dates and months passing under my thumb—proof that time is a real thing and not an enemy we invented to explain our losses.
“Pick one,” I say, offering the stack to him.
His head jerks. “No. They’re yours.”
“Pick one,” I insist. “Read it to me.”
His eyes search mine for the trap. He doesn’t find one. He plucks a medium envelope from the middle, the paper wrinkled from being carried around.
He clears his throat. The firelight warms the words as they come.
September 2
I saw a girl in a red raincoat on the ridge and thought it was you coming home in weather like a dare.
I followed her too far and felt like a fool when she turned and wasn’t you.
I apologized in my head like that counts.
It doesn’t. I miss you. I started running in the mornings.
It doesn’t help and I keep doing it. I think about putting new wiring in every old house in town with my bare hands until the skin peels as if that’s how you fix the part of a night that doesn’t have edges.
I wish you were here to tell me to eat. I wish I’d told you to stay.
His voice breaks on the last line. Not much. Enough to make me want to turn this bench into a bed and let him rough his hands up on my spine just to unwind that sound out of him with something better.
“Ax,” I say softly.
He blows a breath out and tips his head back to look at the slice of stars between branches. “I keep thinking there’s a right thing to say,” he murmurs. “There isn’t.”
“There’s the true thing.”
His head comes down. “Which is?”
“I remember the smell of your shirts in winter,” I say.
“I remember the sound you make right before you laugh, like it hurts to admit you’re about to.
I remember the way you held me when the doctor told us my mom was out of time.
I remember the river in your eyes when you watched my house burn and how I stopped being afraid when I found your face in that smoke.
I remember wanting you at sixteen in a way that felt like a house being built and a fire at the same time.
I remember leaving and hating myself and loving my choice and wishing choices didn’t tear people in half. ”
His fingers flex around mine like I pulled a wire tight under his skin. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t need to.
“Tonight,” I say, “I remember this.”
He watches me like I stole his breath and he doesn’t want it back. “This?”
“This,” I repeat, squeezing his hand. “The part where we stop pretending the night is the only thing we share.”
He nods like a man hearing his sentence commuted. The relief on his face is terrible and beautiful; it makes my ribs hurt in a way I understand.
“Savannah,” he says, reverent and hoarse.
Life is short and sometimes mean; it stole yesterday already. I won’t let it take tonight.
“Come here,” I say, and there’s no tremor in it anymore.
He doesn’t stumble. He doesn’t surge. He just steps into me and his hands slide to my waist—firm, careful; possession restrained by reverence. My palms tighten at his jaw. We hang there for one suspended heartbeat in the thin air between past and whatever this is about to be.
“Tell me to stop,” he says, because he’s him and he’d rather burn than take what I didn’t put in his hands.
I rise on my toes. “I’m telling you to start.”
His mouth finds mine.
It’s not gentle. It isn’t cruel, either.
It’s honest. It’s ten years of prayers snapped like dry tinder.
Heat arches up my spine so fast I have to grip his shoulders to stay put.
He tastes like winter and coffee and the ghost of smoke, like the night we were fifteen under the Phantom River bridge when he kissed me with wet hair and shaky hands and said, I’m going to marry you someday, don’t laugh.
He kisses me now like he’s answering himself across time.
I open for him and it gets worse, better, both—his tongue sliding against mine, a slow stroke that steals thought and leaves appetite.
A sound escapes me, unpretty and right; he swallows it like he’s starved.
His hands tighten on my waist, pull me to him, full to full, chest to chest, the length of him boxing me against heat.
My fingers slide back into his hair, fist there, anchor.
He groans into my mouth and the noise detonates low in my body.
“Savannah,” he breathes between kisses, as if he can’t stop saying my name and breathing at the same time. “God. Say—”
“Yes.” I don’t know what he asked. It doesn’t matter. My answer will always be yes.
He tilts my chin and changes the angle and the world tilts with it.
The kiss goes deeper, messier, a hungry drag that says everything the letters said and everything they didn’t.
His mouth claims and yields, demands and gives, a rhythm we used to know in a different language and are fluent in, still.
He breaks for air and I chase him; I retreat and he follows.
Cold air licks the strip of skin at my lower back where my sweater rides up under his hand.
He slides his palm there, hot, protective, a brand and a blessing.
I arch; his breath breaks on a curse that’s more worship than sin.
He kisses the corner of my mouth, my jaw, the spot under my ear that made me useless when I was sixteen and incinerates me now.
“You’re shaking,” he murmurs against my skin.
“You do that,” I say, ruthless with honesty.
He lifts his head, eyes black with want and wet with everything else. “Tell me if I’m moving too fast.”
“You’re ten years late,” I say. “Catch up.”
He laughs against my mouth, wrecked and beautiful, and kisses me like a man who has no intention of ever being slow again.
The world narrows to heat and pressure and the way his thumb draws a slow, destroying line at my waist. I feel giant and small, solid and new.
I feel fifteen and unscarred and twenty-six and aware and all the ages of me at once.
I pull back enough to see him properly. His hair is a mess from my hand. His lower lip is red from my teeth. “I meant what I said,” I remind him.
His face softens at the edges, something tender under the heat like snow collapsed over a river—quiet, deep, moving. “I heard you.”
“Say it back,” I ask, because I want to hear him speak the sentence that will change his shape on the inside.
He holds my gaze like it’s a decision. Then he nods once. “It wasn’t my fault,” he says, voice rough but steady. “It was his love.”
The sentence lands between us and inside him like weight and like a lift.
His shoulders drop a fraction. His breath evens just enough to carry us to the next thing.
I feel something unclench in my own chest I didn’t know I had been holding, a spring releasing that had been coiled since the night everything split.
I lay my forehead to his and close my eyes.
We don’t rush the silence that follows. We let it stretch its legs around us; we let the fire do the talking. When I shiver, he doesn’t ask permission with his eyes—he just opens his jacket and shifts closer, and I slide into the space like the answer I’ve been saving up for too long.
His arm comes around me, heavy and sure.
Our joined hands settle on my thigh, heat bled from his palm to my skin until I can’t tell which is which.
The box of letters sits on my other side like a witness or a pastor or a pile of tinder we’re not going to burn because we’re done using flame to prove our love exists.
“I’m going to make this right,” he murmurs, not an oath so much as an intention. “Not with some grand gesture. Not with penance. With… breakfast. With rides. With standing where you need me. With showing my face when it’s hard.”
“I don’t want a martyr,” I say into his jacket. “I want a man.”
“Good,” he says, voice rough and oddly light. “I’m more useful as that.”
I laugh, helpless and glad. The sound floats up into the dark. He shifts just enough to see my face. He doesn’t kiss me. He doesn’t have to. His eyes do it—slow, reverent, unashamed. My lips part on instinct and he groans under his breath.
“Soon,” he says.
“Soon,” I echo.
We sit like that for a long time—hands linked, shoulders pressed, fire warming our shins. I read a few more letters. The café lights sway overhead. A fox slips along the ridge line, pauses, watches us with the weary curiosity of a neighbor, and ghosts away.
I slide the last letter of the night back into its envelope and tuck it under the stack with care.
“Thank you,” I tell him.
He shakes his head. “Don’t thank me for making you cry.”
“I’m thanking you for letting me see you.” I squeeze our joined hands. “And for not running when you saw me again.”
His mouth curves. “I’ve never been fast enough to outrun you.”
“You never tried.”
“Fair.”
We stand when the fire dials down to orange bones.
“Want me to walk you home?” he asks, like we’re thirteen and our mothers are waiting.
“Yes.”
The night leans in around us as we go. The snow creaks. Our boots find the same rhythm we used to have.
“I’ll bring pancakes the next morning we both have off.” He grins.
“Bossy,” I laugh, just to feel his eyes darken.
“You love it,” he says, and for the first time in a decade, I don’t flinch at a future tense.
His hands slide up my ribs and then stop. “If I take you inside,” he says, words careful, breath not, “I’m not promising to stop at the door.”
My body goes liquid with the image—his mouth, my back to the wall, the sound I’d make inside my throat where he could hear it and nobody else could. I sway. I catch myself on his shoulders, grip, admit nothing out loud and everything with my fingers.
“Axel,” I say, a warning and a plea.
He steps back one inch. One. His control is obscene. It turns me on and makes me want to throw it into the snow and stomp it.
“Soon,” he repeats. “No more running?” he asks.
“I’ve done enough of that,” I answer. “Besides.” I tilt my head up and lick my lower lip just to watch his pupils track the movement. “You’re very efficient at catching.”
“Don’t test me,” he murmurs.
“I plan to.”
He huffs out a laugh and squeezes my hand like a promise. Axel releases my hand with a last stroke of his thumb across my knuckles that I will feel for hours. He nods once, soldier-precise, then tips his head toward the dark sky a moment before turning to leave.
My mouth still tastes like him. My chest feels lighter and tighter at once. And somewhere in my stomach, a coal I’d let go cold wakes and glows and refuses to go out.
Inside, I lock the door, lean my forehead to the wood, breathe, and listen. His footsteps fade. My hands still smell like smoke and paper and him.
On the kitchen table, I put one letter down under the salt shaker so I can see it when I wake. May 27. I do the dishes. I brush my teeth. I stand at the window and watch the path the two of us made melt into darkness.
My heart doesn’t feel like a siren anymore. It feels like a metronome ticking toward soon.
When I finally crawl into bed, I close my eyes and see his thumb against my wrist, the box, the line I love you written like he couldn’t hide it anymore.
I sleep. For the first time in years, I don’t dream of flames. I dream of letters with stamps on them, actual stamps, and of blueberry cinnamon pancakes at my door, and the look on his face when I say yes.