Chapter 10 #2
Later, his mother set down her fork and looked at Savannah across the table. “That project you mentioned. The one with the community garden grant. Did you hear back?”
Savannah’s wine glass paused halfway to her lips.
She had mentioned the grant exactly once, three weeks ago, in the ten minutes of conversation she had managed to have with his mother before Lily arrived and the room’s attention pivoted.
A throwaway line about a proposal she had submitted, buried under the noise of a typical Sunday, offered to a woman who had been nodding politely while her eyes tracked something across the room.
She remembered. Savannah said to herself, inside her own head, the words forming with a clarity that made her throat tighten. She set the glass down. “I did. Last Tuesday. Full funding.”
His mother’s face broke into a smile so genuine it reached her eyes, crinkling the skin at the corners, and she raised her glass. “That’s wonderful, sweetheart. I knew you’d get it.”
The table raised their glasses. A small, unprompted toast, the kind the Hayes family offered for promotions and engagements and the ordinary victories of people they loved. Savannah lifted her wine and drank, and the warmth in her chest had nothing to do with the alcohol.
Near the end of the meal, Evan made a joke about Savannah’s driving. Nothing vicious—the kind of teasing the family traded like currency, the gentle ribbing that signaled inclusion more than mockery. He had made it before, many times.
Carter did not laugh.
He set his fork down. His face remained calm, his body relaxed in his chair, but his voice, when it came, was flat and easy and carried the weight of a man stating a boundary he had no intention of negotiating.
“Hey,” he said. “Don’t do that.”
Two words. Delivered with protectiveness. The teasing stops here.
The table went quiet for one beat. Evan’s smile faltered, then recalibrated—not into offense but into the quick, wordless adjustment of a man receiving new information about a system he thought he understood. He nodded. Once. The conversation moved on.
Savannah turned to Carter. His eyes were on his plate, his fork moving through the remains of his dinner. She reached under the table. Her hand found his knee, her palm flat against the denim of his jeans, and she left it there.
His hand came down. Warm, solid, covering hers without looking, his fingers curling around her wrist. He simply held her hand under the table while his brother told a story about a fishing trip, and the weight of his palm against hers was the only apology she needed to hear.
Dessert arrived. His mother’s apple crisp, warm from the oven, the cinnamon scent filling the dining room with its particular sweetness.
Savannah accepted a serving without calculating its size against what everyone else had taken.
She ate it slowly, the tart apples and the crumbly topping dissolving on her tongue, and she listened to the Hayes family argue about whether vanilla ice cream belonged on apple crisp or if cheddar cheese was better, and for the first time in eighteen months, the noise did not make her want to leave.
She belonged at the table. Not because she had earned it. Not because she had endured enough Sundays or passed enough bread baskets or laughed at enough jokes that weren’t funny. She belonged because Carter had chosen her, and his family had chosen him, and the math was finally that simple.
His hand was still on hers under the table. She turned her palm upward and laced her fingers through his, and he held on.
Savannah stepped through the doorway of their apartment first. Her keys found the bowl on the entry table with a soft clatter that seemed to echo in the quiet. Behind her, Carter closed the door.
She set her suitcase down just inside the front door. She left it standing by the coat closet, the handle extended, the navy fabric holding the shape of the clothes she had folded with such care in Meg’s apartment eight days ago. The suitcase said I am keeping my options open.
Carter watched her do it. His eyes tracked the suitcase from her hand to the floor, and she saw him register its placement—not in the bedroom, not put away, just inside the threshold—and she saw the understanding move across his face without defensiveness.
He nodded once, a small downward tilt of his chin, and hung her jacket on the hook by the door.
The apartment held the evidence of the week she had been gone.
The plant on the windowsill—the fern she had nursed from a four-inch starter into something that nearly reached the ceiling—had given up.
Its fronds hung brown and brittle, the soil cracked and pulling away from the edges of the pot, and neither of them had dealt with it.
Carter had over watered it, probably. She could see the dark ring near the base where water had pooled and evaporated and pooled again, but the plant had made its decision somewhere in the seven days she was gone, and now it stood on the sill as a small, dry monument to neglect neither of them had the energy to address tonight.
“I know I have more forgiveness to earn,” Carter said.
His voice was low. He stood with his hands at his sides, his weight evenly distributed, and he did not move toward her. He left the space between them exactly as wide as she had made it.
“Yes,” Savannah said. “You do.”
The word landed between them. Yes. Not softened. Not qualified. The simple acknowledgment of a debt that would take time to repay, delivered by a woman who had stopped performing generosity because performance was what had nearly cost her everything.
She looked at him. Really looked at him. He held her gaze the way a man holds something fragile.
“I’ll try again,” she said. Her voice was steady. The voice of a woman who had weighed something in private and arrived at a decision that required no dramatic announcement. “Not that it’s over. Not that I forgive you. Not yet. But I’m willing to try. That’s what I have right now.”
Carter nodded. The motion was small, deliberate, the nod of a man receiving a gift he had not expected and would not presume to deserve.
He stood very still, and the stillness was its own answer: I hear you.
I will not ask for more than you’re willing to give. I will be here for whatever comes next.
The space between them was approximately four feet. The width of the entryway, the distance from the front door to the edge of the living room carpet.
She crossed it.
Her hands found his chest—palms flat against the cotton of his shirt, fingers spreading wide over his sternum where his heart beat steady and strong beneath the fabric. The contact was deliberate.
Not forgiveness, exactly. Something adjacent to it.
Choosing.
The active, present-tense work of placing her hands on the man she had married and allowing herself to feel the warmth of him through the thin barrier of his clothes.
Carter’s breath caught. The exhalation of a man who had been holding himself very still and could not maintain the stillness with her hands on his chest. His own hands came up—slow, telegraphing every movement—and found her face.
His palms cupped her jaw, his thumbs brushing the hollows beneath her cheekbones, and the touch was so gentle she felt her eyes burn.
“Savannah,” he said. Her name. Not babe, not sweetheart, not the casual endearments he dropped into conversation without thinking.
Her name, spoken with the full weight of its syllables, and the sound of it traveled through her body like something warm and liquid, pooling in the places that had been cold for months.
She pulled him closer. Her fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt, and she drew him toward her until his body met hers, chest to chest, the solid warmth of him against her from shoulder to knee.
His hands moved into her hair, fingers threading through the strands at the base of her skull, and he held her.
His mouth found hers. Slow. Deliberate. The kiss of a man who had all the time in the world and intended to use it.
Savannah’s lips parted under his, and the taste of him was familiar and new at once, the particular flavor of Carter Hayes that she had memorized through a thousand kisses and had almost convinced herself she could live without.
They did not make it to the bed. Not immediately. His back hit the wall beside the entryway, the plaster cool against his shoulder blades, and Savannah pressed into him with a urgency that surprised them both.
Her fingers trembled as they gripped the hem of his shirt, yanking it upward with a urgency that bordered on desperation.
The fabric bunched beneath her hands as she dragged it over the taut muscles of his stomach, the ridges of his ribs, the broad expanse of his chest. His skin was scorching beneath her touch, a stark contrast to the cool air of the apartment.
Carter’s hands were everywhere—tangling in her hair, gripping her waist, slipping beneath the soft wool of her sweater to trace the delicate curve of her spine with a worshipful precision that made her breath hitch in her throat.
“Savannah,” he murmured against the sensitive skin of her throat, her name a benediction, a vow, a plea all at once. She arched into him, her body responding to his touch with a hunger that had been simmering for months, a fire that now threatened to consume them both.
They stumbled toward the bedroom, a trail of discarded clothing marking their path—his shirt crumpled on the hallway floor, her sweater abandoned near the kitchen island.
Her hands fumbled with the buckle of his belt, the leather hissing as it slid through the loops, the sound obscenely loud in the quiet of the apartment.
His hands joined hers, shoving his jeans down his hips, kicking them aside with an impatience that mirrored her own.