Chapter 16
Naomi
We didn't talk much on the drive back.
Quinn had one hand on the wheel and the other resting open on the console between us, and I'd threaded my fingers through his somewhere around the second light. His thumb moved over my knuckles the way it always did when he was thinking.
My wrist still carried the faint memory of Aaron's grip.
But that wasn't the thing my body kept returning to. What it kept returning to was the other moment — the half-second before Marcus ever moved, when Quinn had simply been there, between me and harm, without my asking, without any ulterior motives I could see. He’d been there so fast that I hadn't even had time to be afraid.
I didn't know what to do with that.
And then there was me, finally laying the details out in front of everybody. I was certain they’d all gotten Aaron or Tia’s version. And in it, I was sure I was the crazy one. But now they know.
Back at my place, Quinn moved through it the way he always did now, comfortably, kicking his shoes off by the door. He belonged here. That had happened gradually and then all at once, the way everything with Quinn seemed to.
"Thank you," I said. "For tonight."
"You don't have to thank me for that."
"I know. That's sort of the point." I sat down on the couch, exhausted. "You never make me thank you. You just show up. Every time."
He was quiet for a moment, looking at me across the kitchen with an expression I couldn't quite read — something building behind his usual careful stillness.
"Naomi." He set his own glass down. "There's something I've been holding onto for a while. And after tonight I don't want to hold it anymore."
My heart picked up. "Okay."
"I love you." He said it simply, no flourish, like it was the most settled fact he knew.
"I have for longer than I probably should admit.
Since before there was ever a phone call about a house I needed decorated.
Long before our first fake date." He took a breath.
"I would have gone on loving you exactly like that for the rest of my life and counted myself lucky.
I need you to know that. No matter what you say back. "
He'd said it first. After everything — after all the months I'd spent guarding the words like they might cost me something — he'd just laid his down on the counter between us, unafraid, and left them there for me to do with what I wanted.There was nothing to do with them but answer.
"I love you too," I said.
Whatever he'd been holding in check finally broke loose across his face. "Yeah?"
"Yeah." I crossed the kitchen to him and took his face in my hands, the way he was always doing to me. "I know it’s been a whirlwind. And for a while I thought maybe it was all in my mind. But after today, I know it’s true. I love you, Quinn. That's the whole truth of it."
He kissed me then, his hands sliding into my hair, tilting my face up to his.
Slow at first, deliberate, savoring, and then deeper as I pressed into him, my fingers curling into the front of his shirt.
I felt his breath catch against my mouth, felt the low sound he made when I parted my lips for him, and every careful, guarded inch of me simply dissolved.
He backed me gently against the counter, one arm sliding around the small of my back to pull me flush against him, and I let him, arching into the warmth of him, greedy for it now.
There was no performance left in either of us.
Just his mouth on mine, his heartbeat racing under my palm, and the dizzying certainty that this was the only thing that had ever been real.
Later, with the house dark and quiet around us, his heartbeat slow under my ear, I lay awake in my newly decorated bedroom, feeling happier than I’d been in a very long time. Satisfied too. Bone deeply satisfied.
"I love you," Quinn murmured into my hair, like he was making up for lost time, like he intended to keep saying it until neither of us could remember a version of our lives without it.
"I love you too," I said.
And I did. Without a single wall left standing, in my own home, beside the man who'd been waiting at the edge of my whole life for me to finally turn and see him, I said it, and I meant it. And I fell asleep knowing I'd get to say it again tomorrow.