Chapter 7 #3
"I've had time to think about it. It's a good answer because it's true, not because I rehearsed it." I propped myself up on one elbow to look at him properly, firelight throwing warm shadows across his face. "Does it feel strange to you? Being with someone who watched you at your most fragile?"
"No," he said, without hesitation. "If anything, it's the opposite.
I don't have to pretend with you. I never really got the chance to build the mask in the first place, not fully, not with you — you saw underneath it before I even knew I wanted you to.
That's not a burden. That's the whole reason I trust you the way I do. "
"Good answer yourself."
"I've had some practice with honesty lately. Good teacher." He kissed my shoulder, unhurried, content. "What happens now? Practically. Do I walk you home in the rain, very dramatically, or do you stay?"
"I'm not walking home in this rain. I'll ruin my shoes and catch a cold and you'll feel obligated to nurse me back to health, and honestly, at that point we might as well just skip ahead to the part where I stay."
"Efficient. I like it. Very medic of you, cutting straight to the practical solution."
"I learned from the best."
He pulled me back against his chest, rain still falling steady outside, the candle finally guttering out entirely, leaving just the low glow of the dying fire and the sound of the storm settling into something gentler, something that felt less like weather and more like the world exhaling alongside both of us.
"Stay," he said again, softer this time, less an invitation and more a certainty. "Every Thursday, if you want. Every day, eventually, if you'll let me ask that properly somewhere down the road."
"That's a big ask for someone who just made me dinner for the second time in a month."
"I contain multitudes too, apparently. Turns out I caught it from you."
"Terrible joke."
"You love it."
"I do," I admitted, laughing against his chest, feeling the low rumble of his own laugh underneath my palm. "God help me, I really do."
Outside, the rain finally began to ease, softening from a steady patter into something lighter, more like mist, and through the cracked window I could smell the whole spring night settling into itself — wet grass, new growth, the particular green smell of a season determined to keep proving that things come back after hard winters, given enough time and enough care.
I thought, drifting toward sleep against his chest, that we'd both had our hard winters.
Longer than one season, in both our cases.
But lying there in the dying firelight, his heartbeat steady under my palm, his breath evening out into sleep beside me, I let myself believe — fully, without hedging — that we'd finally found our spring.
I woke once in the night, briefly, to find him still holding me, one hand resting protectively over mine where it lay against his chest, even in sleep unwilling to let the distance between us grow, even by inches.
I watched him for a while in the near-dark, the steady rise and fall of his breathing, the peaceful, unguarded slackness of his face that I'd never once seen during our sessions, not even on his best days.
This is what healing actually looks like, I thought. Not the absence of scars. Just a man finally at rest inside his own skin, trusting the room enough to close his eyes completely.
I pressed a soft kiss to his shoulder, careful not to wake him, and let myself drift back to sleep beside him, rain finally stopped outside, the whole spring night settling into a quiet that felt, for the first time in longer than I could remember, entirely safe.
In the morning, sunlight instead of rain slanted through the curtains, and I woke to the smell of coffee and the sound of him moving quietly around the kitchen, careful not to wake me, a courtesy I decided to reward by staying exactly where I was a few minutes longer, listening to him hum something tuneless and content under his breath.
Some healing looks like grand gestures. Some of it, I was learning, looked exactly like this — an ordinary morning, an ordinary man humming badly in an ordinary kitchen, both of us finally, quietly, unremarkably happy.
I got up eventually, wrapping myself in his old flannel shirt from the chair, and padded barefoot into the kitchen to find him at the stove, hair still mussed from sleep, humming that same tuneless nothing while he flipped what looked suspiciously like an attempt at pancakes.
"You're smiling," he said, glancing over at me.
"I'm allowed. I had a very good night."
"Just the night?"
"The night. The dinner. The dish-towel-free chicken. The company." I stole a piece of bacon off the plate beside the stove before he could stop me. "The company especially."
"High praise, considering the competition is a plant collection and a redemption cactus."
"You're holding your own against the cactus. Barely."
He laughed, low and easy, and pulled me in for a kiss that tasted like coffee and something that felt, unmistakably, like the beginning of every ordinary morning we had left to build together.