Chapter 19
Gemma
The therapy session runs over.
Not because anything dramatic happened — no breakthrough, no ugly cry, no moment where Dr. Nishida hands me a tissue and says the thing that cracks me open.
Just a session that goes long because she keeps asking the right questions and I keep actually answering them, which is, apparently, what therapy is. Novel concept. Really taking to it.
I sit in my car in the parking lot after. Not falling apart. Just sitting with the lightness that comes from saying true things out loud to a professional and not needing her to fix them. My stomach growls because I forgot to eat before I came, and my phone has a text from Tommy that says:
Tommy: FYI Captain Grumpy Sunshine has checked his phone every time he thought no one was looking during end-of-shift wrap. I counted. I'm keeping a log. For science. You're welcome.
I stare at the ceiling of my car.
"Captain Grumpy Sunshine," I say out loud.
Then I drive home.
The kitchen light is on.
Beck is standing at the counter in his worn flannel shirt — the one with the loose button on the cuff that I keep meaning to sew back on and then don't — pouring creamer into his coffee.
It's late for coffee. That's not about the caffeine; that's about the ritual, the something-to-hold, the reason to stand in a lit kitchen for a few extra minutes before the quiet of the house settles in.
Through the connecting door, which I've stopped closing, the amber glow of Ivy's dinosaur nightlight seeps from her room.
Beck had texted her bedtime report in three installments: Pillow dispute resolved.
Clarence has been appointed guardian. Provisionally.
Beck looks up when I come through the door. "Good?"
"Yeah." I drop my bag on the chair. "Good."
He nods and looks back at the creamer.
I toe off my shoes. Dr. Nishida's parting words are still sitting in my chest — you're allowed to own what you feel, Gemma, you don't have to wait until it's safe — and Beck is right there, three feet away, pouring creamer, and I have been known to lose my nerve in the time it takes to cross a kitchen.
So I say:
"I love you."
Right into the middle of his pour.
Beck goes still.
The creamer hovers over his mug. He sets it down with the careful deliberateness he brings to things he's deciding how to handle — unhurried, no wasted motion, both hands flat on the counter.
His jaw moves. Not clenching. Deciding not to clench, which is different.
"I had a plan," I say, because apparently I'm not done. "There was going to be a better moment. I was going to build up to it. There was going to be context. An appropriate segue. I was definitely not going to say it while you were standing at the counter making coffee."
He turns around.
He looks at me for a long moment — that level Beck look that takes me a beat to translate because he holds everything so close.
And then his face does the thing it sometimes does: a small, almost imperceptible shift.
The tension leaving his jaw. The line of his shoulders less precise, the careful guarding of him gone somewhere for once.
"I love you too," he says.
His voice cracks. Barely. Just a fraction, right on the last syllable.
I will be thinking about that sound for the rest of my natural life.
"Your voice cracked," I say.
"No it didn't."
"Beck."
"That didn't happen."
"I have it documented," I tell him. "In my memory. Permanent record. I'm keeping it forever."
"Drop it," he says.
"Absolutely not," I say.
He crosses the kitchen — two steps, the kitchen is not large — and his hands come up to my face, both of them, thumbs against my jaw, tilting me toward him, and he kisses me like he has been meaning to and has been waiting for the right moment, which is apparently this one, post-therapy, standing in socks in his kitchen with a creamer spill risk.
I hold onto his shirt with both hands. The loose button on his cuff finally gives up and bounces off the tile, and neither of us looks down. He kisses me like he's said it a hundred times already and is simply confirming the record.
When he pulls back, I'm still holding his shirt.
"Hi," I say.
"Hi," he says.
"Come to bed," he says.
His room is dark except for the thin slice of moonlight through the curtains and the warm amber bleeding under the door, and it's enough.
We've been here before — since the meteor ridge and the drive home and everything since — but tonight is different.
More room in it, like the words made space for something that was already true.
He takes his time.
This is the thing I was not prepared for the first time: the full weight of his attention.
Beck does everything the same way — incident reports, Ivy's dinosaur questions, the loose board on the back step — with his entire attention, nothing left over.
Which means he's learned me in a way I wasn't ready for and can't deflect.
His mouth finds the curve of my neck and stays there while his hands work my shirt up and over my head, unhurried, like he has all night and intends to use it.
His palms are warm against my ribs, my waist, and when he reaches behind me and unclasps my bra and pulls it away, he just looks at me for a moment in the dark.
"Beck," I say, and then his mouth closes over my nipple and my head tips back and I stop caring about words entirely.
He knows where I make a specific sound. He knows to stay there until I make it more than once. He knows I'm impatient, and he uses this information with the completely unapologetic calm of a man who has decided patience is a tactical advantage.
"I know exactly what you're doing," I manage.
"I don't know what you mean," he says, and his mouth moves to the other side.
"You know exactly what I mean."
His hands move and I lose the argument entirely.
The flannel shirt has two buttons that stick — I've laundered it enough times to know this intimately — and I deal with them while he deals with everything else.
He's warm under my hands, the breadth of his shoulders solid and real, familiar now in the way that still makes my breath catch.
His breathing has gone uneven and I drag my hands down his stomach and feel the muscles jump under my fingers.
I like being the thing that does that to him.
He works his way down my body, mouth tracing my sternum, my stomach, and when he hooks his fingers into my underwear and pulls it down I lift my hips to help him.
His hands settle warm on the inside of my thighs, holding me still in that patient, deliberate way, and he takes his time until I'm pulling at his shoulders and saying his name in a way that isn't a question and isn't quite a sentence either.
When I reach for him he goes still for a moment, forehead against my hip, just breathing.
"Hey," I say quietly, the same thing I said the first time. "It's okay to want this."
His exhale is unsteady. He lifts his head and looks at me in the dark — really looks — and then he moves up my body and I feel him there, and I pull him closer, and when he pushes inside me I make a sound into his shoulder that he catches with his hand gentle against my mouth because Ivy is home and we are being careful.
We're quieter than usual for exactly that reason, which makes everything slower and more deliberate and somehow more intimate.
He moves with the same unhurried attention he gives everything, and I match him, and the room holds us both.
His mouth finds mine. When he shifts the angle I feel it everywhere and my fingers curl into his back and his breath comes out ragged against my jaw, and that — the sound of his control slipping — gets to me every single time.
He knows what I need before I ask. He knows the difference between when I want slow and when slow is going to make me absolutely insane, and his hand slides between us and he acts on that knowledge without being asked.
My whole body tightens. I press my face into his neck and come apart as quietly as I can manage, and he follows me there not long after, his forehead dropping to mine, his hips stilling, my name low in his throat like it's the only word he has left.
There is a graceless moment afterward — the rearrangement of two people and a quilt — and it's fine, it's good, it's us. His knee finds mine. I shift and he shifts and his mouth is warm on my jaw.
And then his elbow finds the headboard.
Not hard. Just connects with it. A quiet, flat thud.
"Ow," he says.
The exact tone he uses when Clarence knocks something off the counter in the night and he hears it from the bedroom.
I lose it completely.
The laugh works up from my chest and I have no defense against it; I press my face into his neck and shake. He waits with the patience of a man who has been waited out by a stubborn six-year-old on the subject of whether dinosaurs need their own dinnerware.
Outside, the pine trees do their thing.
His hand reaches up and very deliberately locates the headboard. Taking its exact measure. Logging the information.
"Are you done?" he asks.
"Probably not," I manage.
He waits.
"Okay," I say. "Now I am."
He comes back to me and the laughing dissolves into something warmer and I'm still smiling when his mouth finds mine and he takes the smile too.
That's us right there — the elbow and the laugh and the keeping going anyway — wanting someone this much and not minding the graceless parts because they're part of it too.
Afterward, the house is quiet and the sheets are tangled and I'm on my back with his arm warm across my stomach and the ceiling is doing nothing interesting and I don't mind at all.
I reach up and trace his jaw. This is what I notice first: how unclenched it is after. The muscle that lives there the rest of the time, that he holds so precisely — it's simply gone. Just the line of his face, in the dark, at rest.
He lets me trace it.
"You're doing something," he says.
"Replicating my earlier research."
"Into what."
"Into whether you have an actual jaw under all that clenching, or whether it's been structural tension this entire time."
"Inconclusive," he says.
"I'll need to run the study again."
His chest moves in the way that isn't quite a laugh but is the closest Beck gets to one when he's not ready to admit he finds something funny. In the Beck metric, that's a standing ovation.
I settle back. His arm is a warm weight.
Through the wall, the nightlight holds its amber glow. Steady, small, exactly the color Ivy informed us was correct for sleeping purposes because T-Rex's vision was adapted to low-light conditions and she has done the research.
Then, from the dresser — the baby monitor Beck still keeps because Ivy went through a sleepwalking phase and he'd rather know — there's a rustle and a small shuffling sound. Then a voice, thick with sleep and absolute authority:
"Dino. Move over."
A pause.
"I said move over."
Beck's chest goes completely motionless under my hand. He has stopped breathing entirely. Managing, apparently.
More rustling. Then, with the certainty of a person who has reached a satisfying conclusion at three-quarters asleep:
"Gemma's staying forever. Daddy said so."
I go still.
Beck goes very still.
On the monitor: one more shuffle, and then the deeper, steadier rhythm of sleep. She's out. T-Rex has, apparently, complied.
Something presses up behind my sternum. I press my face into Beck's shoulder and just breathe for a moment, because my eyes are doing something they don't have authorization for and I'd like to manage that without an audience.
"Forever's a big word," I say. It comes out less steady than I'd like.
Beck's arm tightens around me. Just that. No fanfare.
"She's not wrong," he says.
The nightlight glows amber through the wall.
I said it first, into the wrong moment, without the right context or the appropriate segue, the way I do everything I actually mean — clumsy and scared and not quite able to stop myself.
And I would do it again.
I don't want to exit. Not because it's easy or leaving is hard. Because it's this. This room, this arm, this amber light through the wall, this child who has announced her conclusions to a stuffed dinosaur with complete conviction and gone back to sleep.
Because it's this.
I close my eyes.
The house holds us, and I stay.