10. Beck
TEN
BECK
I woke before she did.
November light came through the window, thin, silver, the color of a sky deciding whether to give the day clouds or clarity. It fell across the bed in a pale wash that caught the copper in Lila's hair, spread across the pillow like something a painter would have killed to capture.
She slept on her stomach. One arm tucked under the pillow, the other stretched toward my side of the bed.
The double wedding ring quilt was tangled around her legs, and the bandage on her shoulder was visible, white against freckled skin, a reminder that I'd almost lost her before I'd figured out how to have her.
I lay on my side and watched her breathe. The rise and fall of her back. The small sound she made on the exhale, not quite a sigh, more like a hum. Even in sleep, she hummed.
For two years, I'd woken up to silence. My apartment was clean and quiet and organized, every surface clear, every item in its place, the kind of order that looked like discipline but was actually emptiness. No mess because no life. No noise because no one.
This was noise. Her phone charging on the floor because the nightstand didn't have enough outlets.
A glass of water on the bedside table with a lipstick smudge on the rim.
The book on the dresser, spine cracked, facedown.
The faint smell of her shampoo, rosemary and something sweet, mixing with the lingering ghost of smoke that would take another shower to fully erase.
I was terrified.
Not of her. Not anymore. Of the size of what I felt.
It was vast, a landscape I hadn't known existed inside me, opened up overnight like the mountains had shifted and revealed a valley I'd never seen.
And in that valley was everything I'd told myself I didn't want and couldn't have.
The right to reach for someone in the dark and find them there.
Lila stirred. Her hand moved across the sheet, searching, finding my arm, curling around my wrist. Her eyes opened slowly. Hazel, sleep-soft, focusing on me by degrees.
"Hi," she said. Her voice was rough with morning.
"Hi."
"You're staring at me."
"Yes."
"That's either sweet or creepy."
"Which one do you prefer?"
A smile spread across her face. Not the public one, not the bright, everyone-gets-a-version smile she wore at Rosie's and at the station and at festivals. This was the private one. Slow and unguarded and real.
"Sweet," she said. "Definitely sweet."
I leaned down and kissed her forehead. Her nose. The freckle below her left ear that I'd been thinking about since September.
"How's your shoulder?"
She rotated it experimentally. Winced, but only slightly. "Stiff. Fine. I've had worse from pickup basketball with the crew in Charlotte."
She stretched, and the quilt slipped. My hand found her hip under the covers and followed the curve of it. Her breath caught.
"Stay," I said. Not a question, exactly. Something between a request and an admission.
"I'm not going anywhere, Beck."
I should have been nervous about how fast this was moving. About the implications, the seriousness of it, the statement it made. Instead, I felt something I hadn't felt in so long that it took me a moment to recognize it.
Looking forward. The feeling of orienting toward the future instead of being pinned to the past.
We got up slowly. There was no rush. It was our day off, a rare alignment of schedules that felt like a gift from whatever deity managed firehouse shift rotations.
Lila made eggs in her tiny kitchen, scrambled, with hot sauce, wearing my gray T-shirt and nothing else, and I sat at her two-person table and drank coffee and felt the ordinary miracle of a morning shared.
"We have to talk about the station," she said, sliding a plate in front of me.
"I know."
"I'm not going to hide this."
"I'm not asking you to."
She paused. Spatula in hand. Looking at me with those hazel eyes that saw through every wall I'd ever built. "Are you sure? Because if we walk in there together, it's real. The crew will know. Captain Harding will know. It changes things."
"Things are already changed, Lila."
She smiled. Set down the spatula. Came around the table and sat on my lap with a casual ease that suggested she intended to do this regularly, and I pulled her close, pressing my face into her neck, breathing in rosemary.
"Okay," she said. "Together."
We walked into Station 7 at 07:45 the next morning. Not holding hands, we weren't teenagers, but close enough that the space between us told its own story. Close enough that when we came through the common room door, side by side, the crew didn't need a press release.
Ty saw us first. His eyes went wide. Then his face split into a grin so large it was practically architectural.
"No way."
"Ty—" I started.
"NO WAY." He stood up from the couch with the energy of a man who'd just won a bet, which, knowing Ty, he probably had. "COLE! COLE, GET IN HERE!"
Cole appeared from the kitchen, dish towel over his shoulder, and took one look at us. His face didn't change much, a slight uptick at the corner of his mouth, a warmth in his eyes. He nodded at me. Just once. The nod said: Good. About time. Don't screw it up.
Sadie was sitting at the table with her coffee. She looked at Lila. Looked at me. Rolled her eyes with a fondness so deep it might as well have been a hug.
"Finally," she said. "The awkward pining was killing my appetite."
"There was no pining," I said.
"Beckett, you literally saved her a seat at breakfast for three weeks straight. That's pining."
"It was proximity management."
"It was pining," everyone in the room said, more or less simultaneously.
Lila was laughing, that real laugh, the one that came from her whole body, the one I'd been hearing across the station for weeks and pretending didn't affect me. She looked at me with eyes that were bright and wet and full of something I didn't have a name for yet but intended to learn.
Captain Harding emerged from his office. He took in the scene, Ty practically bouncing, Cole's quiet grin, Sadie's eye-roll, Lila and me standing together in a way that left zero room for interpretation.
"About damn time," he said.
Then he handed me a stack of incident reports and told me to file them before noon, because love didn't exempt a man from paperwork.
“This better not become a problem though,” He said with a second thought.
“It won’t,” I reply.
He gave me a nod and went back into his office.
At the end of shift, I took Lila to the rooftop deck.
The station roof had been my place for two years, the place I went when the bunk room walls pressed in and the grief sat too heavy.
I'd spent hundreds of hours up there, in the metal chair that creaked, watching the mountains do whatever mountains do when no one's watching.
I'd talked to Jake up there, or to the version of Jake that lived in the silence.
The November sunset was turning the sky into something indecent, orange and gold and deep purple, the mountains silhouetted like a jaw set against the coming dark.
The air smelled like wood smoke and cold.
Lila leaned against the railing, and the last light caught her face, and I committed it to memory alongside every other thing about her that I'd been filing away since September.
I came up behind her. Put my arms around her waist. She leaned back into me, and the weight of her against my chest was the opposite of the weight I'd been carrying. This weight I wanted.
"It's beautiful up here," she said.
"I used to come up here alone."
"I know. I heard you that first night. The night I came to the station for water."
I froze. "You heard me?"
"I heard the chair. I almost came up." She turned in my arms, facing me. "I didn't. You weren't ready."
"No. I wasn't."
She put her hands on my chest. Over my heart, which was beating in a rhythm that had rearranged itself over the past eight weeks to include her.
"And now?" she asked.
I looked at her. Lila Webber, with her loose braid and her freckles and her hazel eyes and her stubborn, radiant refusal to be diminished. The woman who'd walked into my station and my life and my carefully constructed emptiness and made it full.
"I'm not good at this," I said.
"I know."
"I don't know how to be easy. Open. I don't know how to stop holding back."
"I know that too."
"I'm going to try anyway."
She smiled. That private one. The real one. And I kissed her, there on the rooftop with the sunset dying behind the mountains and the town settled into its evening quiet below us. I kissed her and felt something I thought I'd lost with Jake, the belief that the future was a place worth going.
She pulled back from the kiss and looked at me, and something in her expression shifted. Not desire, or not only desire. Something quieter. A question and an answer at the same time.
At the end of our shift, we drove to her apartment in my truck. Her hand on my knee the whole way, and neither of us spoke because the silence between us had become its own language.
Her apartment was warm and dim and smelled like rosemary. The double wedding ring quilt was spread across the bed. The mountains were dark in the window.
This was different from the first time. The first time had been desperate, a collision, both of us crashing through the walls we'd spent weeks constructing. This was deliberate. I closed the door and turned to her and took my time.
I kissed the hollow of her throat. The line of her collarbone. The freckle below her left ear that had been occupying my thoughts since the day she'd leaned across the engine bay to hand me a wrench and her hair had fallen forward and I'd had to look away.