Chapter 8
CRUZ
She kisses me first.
I want to be clear about that.
Not because it matters for any scorekeeping reason but because it matters to me specifically, because I asked and she said yes and then she decided, and Hannah Caldwell deciding something is not a small thing.
I felt it in the shift of her, the way she moved toward me with intention, no hesitation, all of her committed to the moment in the way she seems to do everything.
I will think about that kiss for the rest of my life.
I already know this, standing on a dark beach with salt air in my lungs and her hand finding mine in the space between us. a loose, unannounced linking of fingers that neither of us engineers, it just happens, like tide, like something inevitable that the geography of us produces naturally.
I don’t squeeze her hand. Don’t make it a declaration. Just hold it the way it arrived, easy and present, and walk her home.
Here’s what I know about Hannah after two days and one dinner and a kiss that rearranged something fundamental in my chest.
She builds cases against things she wants. It’s not fear exactly.
She’s not a fearful person. I can see that clearly.
It’s more like due diligence, like she needs to stress-test a thing before she’ll trust its structure. She put up the argument about the age gap and the mistake and I understand now that those weren’t walls, they were load-bearing assessments. She was checking whether I’d hold.
I held.
So she kissed me.
I find this so specifically, completely Hannah that I’m smiling in the dark on the way back up the beach and I can’t do anything about it.
At her door we stop and she looks up at me with an expression that’s doing several things at once— warmth and a little wariness and something underneath both of them that I think is wonder, which she’s clearly not comfortable with yet and that’s fine, she doesn’t need to be comfortable with it, she just needs to let it exist.
“Thank you for dinner,” she says.
“You’re thanking me for dinner.”
“It’s what you say at the end of dinner.”
“Hannah.” I say her name the way I mean it. Not as a correction, just as itself, just because I like saying it. “It was a good night.”
Something moves through her expression. “It was a good night,” she agrees, quieter.
I don’t push for more. I don’t angle toward the door or manufacture a reason to extend this. I just look at her for a moment in the porch light.
That face.
Those eyes.
The small gold earrings she put on tonight that I noticed immediately and said nothing about.
Then I take a step back.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” I say.
“I’ll be on the deck,” she says.
I wait until she’s inside. Until the lock turns and the light shifts behind the window.
Then I walk next door and stand on my deck in the dark for a long time.
The ache starts around midnight.
Not dramatic— it never is, which is part of what makes it easy to minimize.
Just that familiar pressure behind my sternum, the low persistent reminder that something in here is working harder than it should to do what hearts are supposed to do without effort.
I breathe through it the way I’ve learned.
In for four, out for six. The cardiologist’s voice in my head, measured and practical: manageable, not dangerous, but not something to ignore.
Sixteen days.
I have sixteen days until the procedure and I am standing on a beach deck in the Outer Banks holding the memory of Hannah Caldwell’s hand in mine and the specific, terrifying reality is that for the first time since the diagnosis, the thing I feel most acutely is not the weight of the procedure or the low hum of fear I’ve been carrying or the exhaustion of keeping it from everyone who loves me.
It’s that I want more time.
Not abstractly. Not philosophically.
With her.
Specifically, urgently, in a way that makes sixteen days feel like a countdown I didn’t consent to.
I press a hand flat against my chest. The ache is already fading, the way it does, back to the baseline that passes for normal these days.
Hold on…
I say inside my head to no one in particular, to the muscle doing its imperfect work behind my ribs.
Just a little longer. I just found something.