25. Jenna
JENNA
The twins pile into my mother's car with enough overnight bags to suggest a much longer trip than two days, Josie already narrating the weekend's planned activities before she's even buckled in, Eli clutching a chess set my mother bought him for exactly this purpose because she claims, with total confidence, that she's going to finally beat him.
"You're not going to beat him," I tell her through the open window. "Nobody's beaten him since the leaves turned."
"I taught myself chess from a library book in nineteen eighty-two. I have reserves he doesn't know about."
"Good luck with that."
"We don't need luck. We need a distracted eight-year-old and a plate of cookies at the right moment." She winks, entirely serious, and pulls away from the curb with both twins waving out the back window until the car turns the corner and disappears toward the highway.
And then it's quiet. Genuinely, thoroughly quiet, the kind of quiet the cabin hasn't held since before the divorce, and I stand in the driveway for a second just listening to it before Rafe's truck pulls in behind where my mother's car used to be.
"Two days," he says, leaning out the window like he still can't quite believe the math. "No twins. No schedule. Nothing on the calendar but whatever we decide to put there."
"Try not to sound too suspicious about it. It's supposed to be a good thing."
"I'm not suspicious. I'm recalibrating." He climbs out, and something in the easy way he crosses the driveway toward me, unhurried, no glance at his watch, no mental countdown running behind his eyes, tells me he means it. "First time since the fireworks we've had more than a few stolen hours."
"Don't waste it standing in my driveway, then."
We end up back at the loft because it's closer to the brewery and because some unspoken agreement decided a while ago that the loft is ours now, not just his, and the first thing we do with two entire unscheduled days is attempt to cook a meal neither of us actually knows how to make.
"The recipe says to fold in the egg whites," I tell him, staring at a bowl of egg whites that have gone from promising to deflated in the time it took me to read the next instruction.
"Fold how? Like laundry?"
"I don't know. Gently, I assume."
"There's nothing gentle about anything I do in a kitchen.
That's not a skill set I was issued." He pokes at the bowl with a spatula like it might explain itself, and between the two of us we manage to turn what was supposed to be a soufflé into something closer to a very sad omelet, and we eat it anyway, sitting on the counter because the table felt too formal for a meal this ridiculous.
"This is terrible," he says, taking another bite.
"It's not terrible. It's rustic."
"It's terrible, Jenna. I've eaten field rations that had better structural integrity."
"Fine. You win. But we made it together, so it counts as a bonding experience regardless of the outcome."
"By that logic we should set the kitchen on fire next. Really bond."
"I would not put it past you to actually try that."
We clean up the wreckage of dinner and end up at the small table with a deck of cards Gunny left behind months ago, and Rafe teaches me a version of gin rummy with rules that seem to change slightly every hand, always in his favor, until I catch him at it on the fourth round.
"You just made that rule up."
"I didn't. That's a standard variant."
"There is no standard variant where you get to discard and draw in the same turn. You're cheating a woman who balances your payroll for a living."
"I'm not cheating. I'm optimizing."
"That's cheating with better branding." I throw a card at him, which he catches without looking, infuriatingly, and something about this whole ridiculous argument over a game neither of us actually cares about winning is the most relaxed I've seen him since I've known him.
"Fine. No more invented rules." He gathers the cards, shuffling them with more precision than a card game strictly requires. "We play it straight."
"Try to contain your disappointment."
"I'm devastated. Truly." He deals a new hand, quick and even, and I watch his hands do it, steady in a way that still catches me off guard sometimes, the same careful precision he brings to inventory sheets and hazard checklists now sorting a deck of cards like the stakes are actually real.
"You take this far more seriously than the game deserves."
"Everything gets the same setting from me. It's not really something I can turn off."
"I've noticed. I mostly find it endearing now instead of alarming."
"Progress." He glances up at me over his cards, something warm sitting behind the usual focus, and the low firelight and the quiet and the fact that neither of us has anywhere else to be shift the whole evening sideways, easy in a way that feels less like a decision and more like gravity finally getting its way.
We don't finish the hand. I don't remember exactly when the cards end up forgotten on the table, or when I end up against his side on the couch instead of across from him, only that at some point his arm settles around me and I settle into it, and the fire's the only light left in the room, throwing gold across everything it touches.
"You're staring," he says, quiet, not moving.
"I'm allowed to stare. You're worth staring at."
"That's a dangerous amount of honesty for this early in the evening."
"I've been saving it up." I tip my head back to look at him properly, and whatever teasing either of us had left dissolves somewhere in the space between us. "I just wanted to say it."
He kisses me slow, patient in a way nothing about our first time together was, nothing but the two of us choosing this on purpose tonight, no crisis forcing our hand, just two people who've earned the right to take exactly as long as they want to get here.
His hands find my waist, gentle in a way I've stopped bracing against, the same carefulness that once read like a warning now reading only as tenderness, and when he pulls back enough to look at me there's a question in his eyes he doesn't need to ask out loud.
"Yes," I tell him anyway, because some things deserve saying regardless. "All of it. Slow, though. I don't want to rush a single second of tonight."
"I wasn't planning on rushing anything." His voice has gone low and rough in a way that undoes something low in my stomach. "I've got nowhere else to be for two days. Neither do you. I intend to take advantage of that fact thoroughly."
We move to the rug in front of the fire because the couch suddenly feels too small for what tonight wants to be, and everything unfolds slower than our first time did, more deliberate, both of us further along now in trusting this is real and not something that vanishes if we blink.
He undresses me first, unhurried, pressing a kiss to every new inch he uncovers like he's committing it to memory before moving to the next, and by the time he's finished I'm trembling under his hands for reasons that have nothing to do with the fire being too far away.
"You keep doing that," I tell him, breathless, when his mouth finds the curve of my shoulder and lingers there.
"Doing what?"
"Making it feel like you've been waiting your whole life to get here."
"Maybe I have." He says it simply, no performance in it, and the honesty of it does more to me than the kiss did.
I pull his shirt over his head so I can do the same to him, tracing the scars I already know by heart and finding I love them more each time instead of less, proof of a man who survived himself long enough to end up here with me, and when my palm flattens over his heart I feel it slamming against his ribs like he's been running.
"Tell me if this is too slow," he murmurs against my collarbone, working his way lower with maddening patience, and I laugh, breathless, threading my fingers through his hair to keep from grabbing at something more urgent.
"There's no such thing as too slow tonight."
"Good. Because I intend to take my time learning every single thing that makes you sound like that.
" He proves it, unhurried, his mouth finding places I didn't know could ache for attention.
I stop thinking in words at some point, lost to the drag of his mouth and the weight of him, my hips lifting toward him before I've decided to move at all.
"Rafe." His name comes out of me more plea than sentence, and he lifts his head just enough to look at me, something wrecked and pleased in equal measure behind his eyes.
"I know." He kisses his way back up my body, taking his time, until his mouth finds mine again, and the low sound he makes against my lips when I arch up into him is the single most undone I have ever heard him. "I know exactly what you need. I'm getting there."
"You're going to kill me getting there."
"I can live with that outcome." He settles his weight over me, both of us bare in the firelight with nothing left between us but breath and the last thin thread of anticipation, and pauses long enough to look at me, really look, like he's checking one more time that I'm still choosing this.
"I'm right here," I tell him, answering the question he hasn't asked out loud. "I'm not going anywhere. Please, Rafe."
"Neither am I." He says it like a vow, low and certain, and then he finally, finally fills the space between us, slow enough that I feel every single inch of it, both of us going still for a long, shaking second just to hold onto how much it means before either of us can move again. "You feel like coming home."
Words fail me completely beyond his name, broken and reverent, and he takes that as permission to move, savoring every inch of it at first, his forehead against mine and his breath ragged against my mouth.
His hands find mine and pin them gently to the rug on either side of my head, lacing our fingers together like he needs the anchor as much as I do, and I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper, chasing the same building heat he's chasing, both of us climbing toward it together instead of one waiting on the other.
"Look at me," he says, rough, and I do, holding his gaze through every second of it even when my whole body wants to close my eyes against the intensity of it. "Stay right here with me."
"I'm here. I'm not going anywhere, I promise."
We find a rhythm that builds and builds, nothing slow left in it now, until something wilder takes over completely, my name breaking out of him in pieces he doesn't seem able to help.
When I finally shatter underneath him it isn't a small thing.
It's total, every part of me pulling taut and then dissolving at once.
He follows me over that same edge only seconds later, groaning my name against my throat like it's the only word he has left in him.
We stay locked together through the last of it, both of us shaking, both of us holding on through it like letting go might mean losing something neither of us can get back.
Afterward we stay tangled on the rug, blanket pulled down from the couch and thrown over both of us, the fire burned low to embers that paint everything the warm color of a sunset.
His fingers trace lazy lines along my spine, and I trace the scar at his ribs the way I have every time since the first, and neither of us seems in any hurry to move or speak or do anything but exist in the quiet together.
"I keep thinking about how close I came to never doing this," he says eventually, voice rough with something more than exhaustion.
"Not just tonight. Any of it. If I'd stayed in Denver another year, or taken the job Gunny tried to talk me out of, or a hundred other small decisions that could've gone differently. "
"Don't do that to yourself. You're here. That's what matters."
"I know. I still think about it." He tightens his arm around me, like proving the point to himself as much as to me.
"I don't know how to explain what these last few months have done to me.
I spent six years building a life that only had to hold my own weight, and now there's you and the twins, and I can't imagine going back. "
"That's either the most romantic or the most structural thing anyone's ever said to me."
"Probably both. I contain multitudes, remember."
I laugh, soft, and press closer against him, close enough to feel his heartbeat slow gradually under my palm, steady and real and entirely mine for tonight if nothing else.
The fire pops once, settling, and for a long moment neither of us says anything else, content just to lie there in the glow of it, his hand tracing lazy patterns against my hip, my head tucked under his chin like it was built for exactly that spot.
"Jenna." He says my name quiet, testing it, like he's working up to something bigger sitting just behind it.
"Yeah?"
"I..."
He stops. I feel the word catch somewhere in his chest before it fully forms, feel the exact moment he decides not to finish it, and instead of saying whatever it was he leans down and presses a slow kiss to my temple, warm and lingering, saying everything the sentence didn't get to.
It isn't the first swallowed sentence this family's carried around lately.
I think of Eli in the driveway after sledding, red to the ears over a word he never let himself finish, and here's Rafe doing the exact same thing on a rug in front of the fire, and I can't help wondering if it's the same word circling both of them, or if I'm just hopeful enough tonight to want it to be.
I don't ask him to finish it. I don't push, don't fill the silence the way some old, anxious part of me still wants to. I heard it anyway, even unfinished. Some things don't need the whole sentence to be understood.
I let the hope sit there instead, quiet and unspoken beside me in the firelight, and close my eyes against his shoulder, entirely certain that whatever he almost said, we'll get there eventually, in our own time, the same unhurried way we got here.