Chapter Twenty-Seven #2
She looks down at her plate for just a moment, then back up. And what is in her face when she looks up, the combination of fear, love, and fierce determination not to fall apart, hits somewhere so specific and deep that briefly looking away is necessary.
“Remy stays here while I’m gone. You won’t be alone.”
She nods. Once with quiet acceptance.
“Sophia…”
“Don’t,” she says gently. “Don’t apologize. This is who you are. This is your world… I know that.”
I look at her. “The last two days…”
“Changed everything,” she finishes. Quietly and with complete certainty. “For me.” Her eyes are steady on mine. “Did it for you?”
“Yes,” I agree without hesitation.
She holds my gaze for a long moment. “Then come back to me.” Her voice is steady and certain. “Not for Ryan. Not for a promise you made to him.” Her eyes are on mine. “For me. Come back for me.”
Reaching across the table, I put my hand over hers. “With everything in my power, I will come back to you.”
She turns her hand over beneath mine and holds on.
Sitting like that in the candlelight, the desert quiet outside, the weight of two days sitting between us, and underneath it is something warm, certain, and real, and saying nothing else because everything that needs saying has been said.
Sophia
Two days.
That was all we had.
It wasn’t uncomfortable between us, just the quiet of two people who have said everything that needs saying and are sitting with the weight of it.
He clears the plates. I blow out the candles. Somewhere in the ordinary small movements of the end of an evening, we both understand that tonight is different from every other night in this house.
I go to the bathroom first.
Standing at the sink for a moment, I really look at myself in the mirror the way you do when you need to locate something true in your own face before you walk back out into the world.
My pajamas are on the hook behind the door, and I don’t put them on.
Instead, I cross to his side of the closet, find one of his T-shirts, and pull it over my head.
It falls to mid-thigh.
It smells like him.
I pull in a slow breath.
Then walk back out.
He is already in bed, sitting up against the headboard, and he looks up when I come out of the bathroom, and his eyes move over me, the T-shirt, his T-shirt, falling loose around my shoulders, and something shifts in his expression that he doesn’t try to contain.
He smiles.
But it is different from last night’s smile—the smile of a man who is storing something.
I look at him for a moment, at the green eyes, his jaw, and his tattoos. This man, who has shown up every single day and kept every promise, is leaving in two days for something I am terrified of. I feel something move through me that is too large, complicated, and real to look at directly.
So I cross to the bed.
And get in beside him.
He reaches for me in the dark.
Not urgently, the way the first night was. That was a desperate release of two people finally giving in to something they’d been fighting for months. This is different. Slower. More deliberate. Like he is paying attention in a way that goes beyond the moment.
His hands move over me with a careful, unhurried intention, learning and memorizing, the focus of a man who is storing something he is afraid of losing—every curve, breath, and small, involuntary sound that can’t be controlled and stops being tried to.
I pull him closer.
Not because I need him to hurry, but because I need him close. As close as two people can be. Close enough that two days feels farther away than it actually is.
I close my eyes and feel everything, including the warmth of his mouth, the heat of his skin against mine, and the way he says my name, quietly and roughly, like it means something specific in his mouth that it doesn’t mean anywhere else.
It does.
I know it does.
It builds slowly.
Neither of us is in a hurry. That is the difference from the first night, the urgency replaced by something slower and more deliberate, the care of two people who understand that this moment is borrowed time and are choosing to spend every second of it fully.
His hands and mouth say everything he hasn’t put into words…
that this matters, that I matter. That whatever has grown between us in this house over these months is real, has roots, and isn’t going anywhere.
The farewell underneath the tenderness.
The just in case sitting quietly in everything he does.
Letting myself feel all of it, the fear, the love, and the desperate wanting and grief of something beautiful existing right next to the possibility of losing it, because he deserves that.
He deserves me to be completely present, and his on the night before he rides toward something I can’t follow him into.
When I finally come apart, it is with his name on my lips. A tear rolls down my face that hadn’t been planned and can’t be stopped.
He feels it before he sees it. His thumb finds my cheek in the dark, gentle, certain, and catches it. Just that. No words. No explanation, apology, or reassurance. Just his thumb against my cheek and his eyes finding mine in the dark.
And something in his expression says everything words would have cheapened.
“Come back to me, Tate,” I say quietly.
He looks at me.
And says nothing.
Because some things don’t need saying.
Instead, he pulls me closer with his arm around me, my face against his chest, his heartbeat under my palm, slow, steady, and real, and lying there in the darkness of his room with the desert quiet outside, feeling the rightness of this.
Of him. Of whatever this is that has grown between us in the months since arriving in his house with grief, a laptop, and boxes of books.
Not knowing what to call it yet.
Only knowing I don’t want to lose it.
He falls asleep before me.
The moment it happens is clear with the shift in his breathing, the weight of his arm becoming heavier, and the small unconscious sound he makes as he goes under.
Lying there, I listen to him breathe. I look at the ceiling above us, the pool light moving slowly across it, pale and quiet, the way it always does in this room at night, and letting myself have exactly this much.
Just this.
His heartbeat under my palm.
His arm around me.
The desert stillness outside.
And one more night before everything changes.