Chapter Thirty-Eight
I DON'T SAY YES. NOT that night.
I let him stand in the rain, and I get in my cab, and I make him do exactly what he said he'd do because a year of hurt doesn't rinse off in one storm and I'm done being the only brave one.
So he comes back. The next night, and the night after, dry now, patient, always across the alley, always just my name like a question. And little by little, one night at a time, the girl who forgives too fast lets herself forgive at the right speed instead.
It takes three weeks.
On the last night I walk across the alley instead of to my cab, and I stop in front of him, close enough to count the ways he's terrified I'll change my mind, and I ask him the only question that's left.
"So." I tip my face up, the way I did on the very first night, outside a different door, a whole life ago. "What does H stand for now?"
Something moves through his face, and for once he doesn't lock it down. He lets me watch it. He smiles, that rare accidental smile, except this time it's on purpose, and it's shaking, and it's for me.
"Hopeless."
"Hopeless?"
"Hopelessly in love with Jassy Beale." His voice doesn't waver on my name, not even a little. "It never stood for anything else. I just wasn't brave enough to spell it out."
And I've waited a year and a lifetime and one long storm for this, and I'm not about to wait through a single second more.
And I do what I've wanted to do since an alley and a diner and a booth full of stolen dumplings.
I kiss him first. And I take my time about it.
A whole year of wanting him poured slow into one kiss, no script to read from, no lesson to hide inside, no page number left between us and nothing held back.
For one breath he goes still against me, the old reflex, the wall coming up out of pure habit.
Then it comes down, and this time it stays down.
Mine, he thinks, the word breaking loose in him at last, the one he'd swallowed a thousand times and never once let himself keep.
Me, crossing a cold alley to kiss him first, a year of hurt behind us and not one wall left standing between.
And that, more than the kiss, is the thing that undoes him.
His arms come around me like he's been drowning and I'm the first air in two years, and he kisses me back like a man who's finally, finally stopped guarding the door and walked all the way through it.
He kisses me like he has the rest of his life to do it and every intention of spending all of it right here.
Slow. Sure. Like he's learning me by heart and is never once going to need the notes again.
Right there in the alley. In the cold. Under the ugly buzzing light.
The best kiss of my life, and I've had lessons.