Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
EMILY
I was so tired I snoozed the whole way home.
My little power nap did the trick and we found ourselves back at ground zero, standing in Finn’s kitchen. This time he was wearing more than a kitchen towel, though, so that was new.
He’d been silent since we got home—all up in his own head.
I was scrolling through the day’s receipts on my phone, when he reached over and took it out of my hand.
“Hey, I was—”
“Em.” He set the phone on the counter behind him.
Then he looked at me with an expression that made the receipts feel very, very unimportant.
“You know what I love about you?” he asked, tipping my chin up so our gazes met.
My lips quirked, a familiar shield of wit snapping into place. “My truffles?”
“You know, humor’s a pretty common coping mechanism, I hear,” Finn said. “People use it when they haven’t fully processed the seriousness of their situation.”
“Is that so?” I asked. “And how serious is our situation?”
“As serious as a hit to my testicles.” A soft chuckle escaped him.
“That’s pretty serious,” I agreed. “But what is it you love about me? We should circle back to that.”
“You don’t play the game the way anyone expects,” he said.
“What game is that?”
“The game of life,” he said. “You’ve always thought you were so predictable. Everyone always said it, but Em… you are not predictable. And I don’t think you ever have been.”
His words chipped away at the shield. My smile didn’t vanish, but it softened.
“That’s how you win,” I whispered.
A slow nod was all he could manage, but the truth of my words settled in him. They seemed to land different this time, heavier and more real than any of the lines we’d ever fed each other.
“That’s my girl.” He smirked.
The phrase, so simple and possessive, wasn’t in our playbook. It hinted at an uncertainty we were supposed to have left behind. “Am I, really?”
The question threw him. “Huh?”
“Your girl,” I clarified, keeping my voice steady even as I searched his eyes for an answer. “Am I? Because we didn’t include any of this in our experimental rules, so we should probably clarify what our next play is.”
The mention of our old rules felt like a relic, even though it was only a few days ago when we’d last invoked them.
I held myself still, poised between the past and whatever this was.
“What do you think it should be?” he asked.
“Oh no, buddy. You don’t get to defer to me on this one.” I worried my lip, a tell he knew so well. It was hard to let go of the old defenses.
“I hate to admit that Elliott is right, but sometimes all that matters is how it looks.” His eyebrows furrowed in confusion.
Maybe I shouldn’t have given him the ball. I didn’t much like the idea of him throwing it aside. Throwing us aside.
“But other times,” he continued, moving in just enough for me to feel the warmth radiating from him, “you’re running a play you didn’t even know you were running. Until it actually works.”
His metaphor clicked into place, describing the last few weeks, the last few years, our whole lives, perfectly. My voice dropped to a near whisper. “Is that what happened with us?”
His heart thumped against his ribs. He met my gaze, and the sincerity I saw there was staggering. “Yeah, Em. It is.”
The air was dense between us. Unspoken words still stuffed inside.
Gah, I needed to hear it, just once. No games. “So what do you love about me, Finn?”
The answer was so immediate it was more of an instinct than a thought from him.
“That you’re you, Em.” He closed his eyes briefly.
“I love your mind, your heart, your ridiculous perfectionism that you apply to everything. Even the chocolate. Especially the chocolate. I love that you’re the same Emily who took notes for me in biology when I had mono and the new Emily who jumped off a cliff and built something amazing. ”
“Is that a declaration of love?” I asked.
His face broke wide open, matching mine exactly. “Are you going to hold it against me?”
“Absolutely,” I said, my tone light but my word serious. This was everything.
The relief on his face was so big it changed his whole expression. “Then yes, it is.”
“Good,” I breathed out, the sound of it making my world tilt on its axis. “Because I love you, too. And not like I did before. I love you like I want to make Elliott uncomfortable for a really long time.”
“Like forever?”
“Like forever.”
“Shit,” he said.
“What?”
“I’m gonna have to find a new agent.”
I caught his hand and held it. “But also? I love you like I want to make us work.”
The quiet after that was different from all the other quiets we’d stockpiled over the years.
There was the awkward quiet in the back of Dallas’s car when Elliott announced nothing would ever happen between us.
The heavy, suffocating quiet of Finn returning from the doctor’s office, hollowed out and gray.
The careful quiet of the lab experiment, where we both aggressively pretended we hadn’t detonated the rules of engagement.
This quiet, though? It had zero pretending in it.
I’d known this man my entire adult life. The guy who showed up to my worst, ugliest days without an invitation and believed in a dusty, empty storefront before I even fully believed in myself.
“I love you,” I said.
His breath hitched. He’d thought he was ready to hear it, but I could see the reality of the words knock the wind from his lungs. “Do you?”
“Seems that way,” I said with a shrug, but I couldn’t contain the brilliant smile that spread across my face.
“Then are you going to move in with me?” he asked.
“I already did,” I said, deadpan.
“But are you going to stay?” The playful tone in his voice vanished. A sudden stillness fell over me as the question laid itself bare and vulnerable between us.
My pulse kicked hard as I posed the question back to him. “Are you going to ask me to?”
His Adam’s apple bobbed, and my own breath hitched, waiting. The word, when he said it, was simple and solid. “Yes.”
The single syllable settled every fear I held onto.
A shaky breath escaped my lips. “Then I’m totally going to stay.”
“Good.” A hint of his smile touched his lips. “Also, I have something for you.”
“What are you talking about?”
He held up his hands. “I know it’s not a football field and I know the whole team’s not here—because, you know, away game tonight. But…” He grabbed a pen and the notepad by the fridge, wrote something on it, and held it above his head like it was a poster board and I was Patty.
The words? They didn’t read ‘Prom?’
No, they read, ‘Dinner?’
I shook my head, closing the space between us.
My hands found his neck, and I pulled him down to me, kissing him hard. The kiss turned searingly hot in an instant, a flash of heat that stole the air from my lungs. He broke away just enough to speak, his lips still against mine. “You’ve got to say yes or no. It’s an important part.”
“Yes, you goof. Always, yes.”
“You were never just my best friend’s little sister,” Finn confessed. “And I was never just in the friend zone. I was in the waiting room. It just took me until now to realize what I was waiting for.”
We closed the last bit of distance between us then, and the kiss that followed was more than heat. It was commitment.
And in that moment, everything went clear.
I could have the shop I built on my own terms, a future that was secure because I knew how to secure it.
“Do you want to go watch the guys play at Mike’s?” he asked, pulling away a little. “Or something fancy. I can go either way.”
I grinned. “I mean, hot wings are better than cold justice.”
“All day, every day,” he agreed.
An old question, one I’d buried for years, finally bubbled to the surface. My chest tightened as I asked, “Why didn’t you ask me to prom when we were kids? Was it because I was a freshman?”
“Nope.”
His quick, simple denial made my first theory deflate. I braced for the one that always carried a familiar sting. “It was because I was Elliott’s sister, wasn’t it?”
“Em,” he said, and his tone softened, instantly dissolving the tension in my shoulders. “It was because the timing wasn’t right. I guess, maybe I knew that when I got you, you had to be ready or it wouldn’t work.”
“You were worried you’d break my heart?” I asked.
“No, that you’d break my heart.”
That last part landed squarely in my chest.
The unexpected vulnerability sent a flutter through my stomach, and I shielded myself with humor. A teasing smile pulled at my lips. “You’re pretty fragile like that, huh?”
He snorted, the serious moment passing. “I mean, you were also a freshman.”
The old excuses became our new inside joke.
“And Elliott’s sister,” we said at the same time. The shared rhythm of the words a lock clicking into place between us.
We didn’t go to Mike’s.
We ordered in instead, ate on the couch, and let life settle between us without poking at it.
Later, with the TV on and neither of us watching, Finn said, “No framework. No rules.”
“I mean, maybe a few rules,” I said.
He nodded. “That we get to change along the way?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
And I kissed him.
Then he kissed the hell out of me.
His hands were slow. Deliberate. He unbuttoned my shirt one button at a time, his mouth on my neck, my collarbone, the dip between my breasts. Each button a question. Each kiss an answer.
I pulled his shirt over his head and ran my palms flat across his chest, his ribs, the hard line of muscle at his hip.
I knew this body by touch—I’d had my hands on him for weeks.
But tonight I memorized everything. I traced the scar on his shoulder.
Pressed my thumb into the groove above his hip bone.
We moved to the bedroom—our bedroom—and he set me on the bed with a care that made something behind my sternum go tight.
We shed the rest of our clothes without rushing. And when he slid inside me, I held his face between my hands.
His eyes were open. Mine were open.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Always with you.”
We moved together. Slow. His hand braced beside my head, his thumb brushing my temple. The rhythm of him was steady and unhurried and so deliberate it made my eyes sting.
When I came, it was hushed—my back arching, a breath pulled from somewhere deep, his mouth pressed to my temple like he was keeping me from floating away. When he followed, he said my name against my hair.
Afterward, I lay with my head on his chest. His heartbeat was slowing under my ear. His arm was heavy around my shoulders.
“Finn?”
“Yeah?”
“This is the part where we freak out.”
He considered that. “Are you freaking out?”
“No.” The surprise of it made me pause. “Not even a little.”
“Me neither.” He pulled me tighter.
The love between us was just there, taking up the whole room.
His breathing evened out, and I matched it.
I closed my eyes and let myself have it all. The shop I built on my own terms. A future I knew how to secure because I’d secured it myself. And Finn.
I could have Finn, too.