23. Ryan
RYAN
The kiss is there when I wake up.
Not dramatized—just present. Her mouth, the restraint in her shoulders when she kissed me back, the way she pulled away first and I let her. I put it somewhere I'm not going to touch all day. Go downstairs. Make coffee. Put her mug on the counter. Go out to the rows.
I spend the day doing everything right and trying not to watch her.
I fail at the second part.
She's in the east rows with Killian at eight—her shoulder close to his, not touching, just close—and I turn back to the wire section I'm running and I count threads and think about the brix reading and I am doing extremely well.
I'm not doing well.
It's been eight days of wanting her and being allowed nothing.
Eight days of being three feet away and taking my cues from her body like reading weather—which direction she faces, whether she'll hold my eye, how long before she looks somewhere else.
The kiss is the first thing I've been given.
I know that. I'm holding it like it's enough.
It's not enough.
Dinner is the four of us. She passes the bread and Killian's hand catches hers for a second—just fingers, just contact, just the ordinary ease of two people who are already past this part.
She doesn't pull away. I put my fork down and pick it back up.
My father says something about the east section timing and I answer him.
Somewhere in my chest there's something being wrung out by its roots.
I do the dishes after. Every last one. Good, right, correct.
I wake up at two in the morning.
No reason for it—no sound, no dream, just the ceiling of my childhood bedroom and the dark and the restlessness of wanting something that's thirty feet down the hall behind a door that isn't mine to open.
I lie still for a while, doing the sensible thing, which is sleep, which is not walking down the hall.
I get up.
Not walking down the hall. Just water. There's a bathroom closer but I go toward the kitchen stairs, which takes me past the landing, which is a choice I'm making with my eyes open and not examining.
Killian's door is the second past the landing. I know because I've been counting without meaning to.
There's a light under it. Soft—low, like a lamp.
I stop.
I tell myself to keep moving. I don't keep moving.
What I hear: not what I expect. No urgency.
No competition. Her voice low and soft, saying something I can't make out—and then her laugh.
A real one, quiet, the kind she doesn't hand out.
And Killian's voice under it, lower still, something I can't hear but can feel the register of.
Patient. Not the way he is at dinner when he's keeping count—something slower. Something that costs him to let out.
I stand in the dark hallway and I'm aware of my own hands.
I'm hard. I hate that I'm hard. There's nothing I can do with that information except stand here with it in the dark.
She says something back to him and there's a pause—the weighted kind—and then she makes a sound that isn't a laugh.
Quiet. Pleased. And I understand from the register of it that she's letting him be slow.
That she's not in a hurry. That this is a version of them I haven't seen, through the door, without her face to read.
My brother being gentle with the woman I love.
I know what that means in there—my father bare, Killian bare, nothing between either of them and her. Me out here being careful like I always am.
That's the shape of tonight.
I go back to my room.
I lie in the dark and I think about what I have.
Which is: one kiss. Her voice saying when I'm ready, I'm going to be ready. The mug on the counter she picks up without saying anything. The look she gave me this morning—not warm, not civil, the version that lives between those two things and is mine alone, because of last night.
It's not nothing.
I know what nothing looks like from her.
I had two years of it. Every Sunday dinner and every row walk and every time I refilled her glass without touching her hand because I didn't know how to want something that big without flinching from it.
Two years of being afraid she was the only person I'd ever want that much, and doing nothing.
This is not that.
I lie still. Close my eyes. Think about harvest in six days and the pressing schedule Killian walked me through in the winery like it was a normal thing—like I was supposed to be there, like I was worth the hour—and I count backward from a hundred until my body gets the message.
Eventually I sleep.
Morning is the four of us at the table, October gray through the window, my father's coffee already on. She comes down, takes her mug, sits in the fourth chair. Looks at me once—the full version, the between-things version—and I look back.
I don't say anything.
She goes back to her coffee. I go back to mine.
That's the whole of it. It's everything.
I can wait.