Chapter 7 #3
He laughed, delighted, the sound rumbling warm under my ear. "You love my sense of humor."
"I tolerate your sense of humor."
"You laughed at the cat thing."
"The cat thing was objectively funny and I'll deny it in court."
"You laughed at the honey lid thing too. And the corner-joint argument with Hawk and Diesel. And roughly forty other things over the last two months that you've pretended not to find funny while very obviously finding them funny."
"I have a reputation to maintain."
"Your reputation's already ruined, Hazel. Ruth's collecting on a bet right now, probably, somewhere, about exactly this outcome. I'd let the reputation go. It's not coming back from tonight."
I laughed again, and he tipped my chin up and kissed me, slow and sure, and I smiled into it — actually smiled, unguarded, the whole soft shape of it — and understood, lying there in the honey-scented dark with a man who'd waited two patient months for exactly this, that I was done hiding the smile.
Had been done, probably, for weeks now, and simply hadn't let myself admit it until tonight gave me no choice but to stop pretending.
The bees hummed on beyond the window, steady and unbothered, doing what they'd always done. For the first time since I was twelve years old, I understood that I could be exactly like them — reliable, industrious, guarded in my own particular way — and still, somehow, not be alone in it.
It was, I thought, drifting toward sleep with Finn's arms warm around me and the whole rescued farm settling into quiet beyond the walls, the best night of my entire life.
I had a feeling, even then, half-asleep and thoroughly undone, that it wouldn't be the last one that felt that way.
I woke before dawn, the way I always do, twenty-two years of hive schedules built too deep into my body to sleep past first light no matter what the night before had held.
Finn was still asleep beside me, one arm thrown loose across my waist, golden hair a mess against the pillow, and for a long moment I simply lay there and watched him, allowing myself the specific luxury of looking at someone without needing an excuse to look away.
I thought about all the mornings I'd woken alone in this room, in this bed my grandmother had slept in, my mother too, before whatever had broken in her broke past fixing.
I thought about how certain I'd been, for twenty years, that alone was simply the shape my mornings would always take, and how strange it felt now to have that certainty dissolved so completely, so fast.
Mustard nosed the bedroom door open sometime after that, tags jingling, and hopped up onto the end of the bed with the settled confidence of a dog who considered the arrangement entirely reasonable.
Finn stirred at the sound, blinking awake slow, and caught me watching him with an expression I hadn't managed to guard in time.
"Morning," he said, voice rough with sleep, smile already forming before he was even fully awake.
"Morning."
"You're staring."
"I'm allowed to stare. It's my house."
"Very true. Excellent legal argument. I withdraw the observation."
I laughed, and he pulled me back down against his chest, and for a while neither of us moved, just lay there in the gray early light with the bees starting their first slow circuits beyond the window, and I understood, held loose and warm in his arms with my dog snoring at our feet, that this — exactly this, ordinary and unhurried and entirely unguarded — was what I had been protecting myself from for twenty years.
I was glad, finally, to have lost that particular fight.
Downstairs, later, over coffee neither of us was in any hurry to finish, Finn caught my hand across the table, thumb tracing slow circles over my knuckles, and I let him, no longer bracing for the moment to end, no longer counting down some internal clock toward the inevitable withdrawal.
There wasn't going to be one. I was only just beginning to believe that, but I believed it a little more with every ordinary, unhurried minute like this one.
"Penny for them," Finn said, watching me watch him.
"I'm just thinking about how ordinary this feels. Coffee. A quiet kitchen. You, still here. I keep waiting for it to feel strange, and it doesn't. It just feels like — mine. Like it was always supposed to be like this and I just didn't know it yet."
"That's the whole trick of it, I think. The extraordinary stuff — the storms, the grand gestures — that's not actually where love lives, not really. It lives in the ordinary Tuesday mornings. The coffee that goes cold because you're too busy talking. That's the part that lasts, if you let it."
I looked at him across my grandmother's kitchen table, sunlight starting to slant gold through the window behind him, and thought that I could get used to this.
That I already had, faster than I'd ever believed possible, and that getting used to it didn't scare me nearly as much as I'd expected it to.
Outside, the bees kept humming, steady and unbothered, exactly as they always had, exactly as they always would.