19. Leah
LEAH
The walk back to my cabin took longer than it should have, not because the distance was far but because neither of us seemed to be in any hurry to get there, snow falling steady and quiet around us, catching in Derek's eyelashes and melting almost instantly against the warmth of his skin.
He hadn't let go of my hand since the square, and I hadn't tried to take it back, our fingers laced together inside his coat pocket where neither of us had to fight the cold for it.
Behind us the whole town square still glowed faint and gold through the trees, the last of the crowd breaking off toward their cars, and I couldn't stop replaying that first unsteady second when the tree lit up and his mouth found mine.
"You're staring," I said, because he was, sideways, every few steps, like he couldn't quite help himself.
"I'm allowed to stare. I just kissed you in front of half the county."
"Twice."
"I'm aware of the math."
"Sarge is never going to let you live this down."
"Sarge already has three different versions of tonight circulating by now. I'd put money on one of them involving a proposal."
"Please tell me you're joking."
"I never joke about Sarge's gossip network. It's the most efficient operation in this town, county grants included."
I laughed, the sound coming out brighter than I meant it to, fogging white in the air between us, and Ember trotted ahead of us on his leash with the particular self-satisfied energy of a dog who considered himself entirely responsible for tonight's outcome, snow catching in his fur, tail sweeping back and forth like a happy little broom.
Neither of us said much for a while after that, content just to walk, snow catching gold in every porch light we passed, the whole town gone quiet and glittering behind us.
My hand stayed wrapped in his the entire way, warm despite the cold biting at everything else, and every few steps our shoulders knocked together like neither of us could quite manage a straight line.
"He rode the whole way here in your truck for safety," I said, glancing down at him. "Whose safety, exactly?"
"Mine, probably. Chaperone." Derek didn't look at the dog. He was looking at me, something steady and unguarded in his face that hadn't been there a week ago, and the joke died somewhere between us before either of us finished laughing at it.
We reached my porch steps too soon and not soon enough, the porch light throwing a small gold circle over the snow, and I fished my keys out of my coat pocket with fingers gone clumsy from the cold, or maybe from something that had nothing to do with the cold at all.
"Careful," Derek said, steadying my hand around the key before I dropped it twice. "You're shaking."
"I'm cold."
"You're really not."
He wasn't wrong, but I let the door take the blame anyway, working the lock loose, and the second it swung open Ember shoved past both our legs like he'd been waiting all night for exactly this chance, bolting straight for the couch and turning three full circles before collapsing onto it with a satisfied grunt, claiming it the way he claimed everything, completely and without apology.
He gave one last disgruntled huff, buried his nose under one paw, and went instantly, deeply, obnoxiously asleep, as if the whole evening had personally exhausted him more than either of us.
My living room still looked more like a stopover than a home, moving boxes stacked along one wall that I kept meaning to unpack and kept not getting around to, but none of that seemed to matter anymore with Derek standing in the middle of it, snow still melting off his shoulders, looking at me like I was the only finished thing in the whole room.
I stood there a second, staring at ninety pounds of dog now fully horizontal across my only couch. "Some chaperone."
"He takes his job seriously."
I shut the door behind him.
The click of the latch sounded louder than it should have in the quiet.
The fire I'd lit that morning had burned down to a low bed of orange embers, throwing just enough light to see him by.
For a second neither of us moved. We'd both apparently run out of anything clever to say.
Snow ticked soft against the window glass behind us, and somewhere under the hush I could hear my own pulse working overtime, loud enough that I half expected him to hear it too.
Derek's hand found my jaw the way it almost had once before, days ago, in the snow outside the station, right before he'd caught himself and stepped back like touching me was a line he wasn't allowed to cross yet. He didn't stop himself this time.
"Tell me if..." he started, low, right against my ear, his voice rougher than I'd ever heard it.
I didn't let him finish. I pulled him down to me instead, both hands fisted in the collar of his coat, still cold from outside.
"Derek. I already told you what I want."
Something in him broke loose at that, all his usual restraint giving way at once, and he kissed me like a man who'd spent two years building walls around exactly this kind of wanting and had finally run out of reasons to keep building them.
His coat came off first, unbuttoned slow and clumsy between kisses because neither of us wanted to stop long enough to do it properly, the fabric still holding the cold of the night even as his mouth against mine burned through every bit of it.
I got the last button loose and pushed the coat off his shoulders.
The shock of his skin under my palms, hot against all that cold, made my whole chest ache.
"You're freezing," he murmured against my throat, hands finding the zipper of my own coat with a care that didn't match the urgency underneath it, as if some part of him refused to rush no matter how badly he wanted me.
"Then warm me up."
He laughed, low and rough, the sound vibrating against my skin, and did exactly that. It was unhurried in a way that should have felt unbearable and instead felt like the only thing I'd wanted in weeks. His hands were slow and deliberate, the same total attention he brought to everything.
"You're smiling," I said at one point, breathless, my fingers working the buttons of his shirt loose one at a time.
"I'm allowed to smile."
"You never smile."
"I'm making an exception." His mouth found my collarbone, unhurried, deliberate. "Don't get used to it."
"Too late."
Somewhere between there and the couch, which Ember had already vetoed simply by existing on it, we ended up tangled against the arm of the chair instead, both of us laughing too hard to accomplish anything for a solid minute, foreheads pressed together, grinning like idiots.
We didn't make it past the living room. The quilt came off the armchair somewhere along the way, and we ended up on the floor in front of the dying fire, clothes ending up scattered somewhere between my unopened moving boxes and the hearth, one sleeve of my sweater landing squarely across a box still labeled KITCHEN in marker six weeks after I'd carried it in.
Somewhere in the slow, fumbling business of learning each other by firelight, every ounce of hesitation either of us had been carrying finally burned itself out.
"Still good?" he murmured once, forehead against mine, and I answered by pulling him closer instead of wasting breath on words, which seemed to satisfy him a good deal more than an answer would have.
He asked again after that, low against my ear or my collarbone, some new shape of the same question every time, and I gave him some new shape of the same answer, urgent and wordless and entirely certain.
The second round was slower, quieter, no less devastating for it.
He kept his eyes open the whole time, steady on mine like looking away wasn't an option he was willing to consider, and something about being seen that completely, held that carefully, undid me more thoroughly than anything urgent ever could have.
Somewhere in the middle of it I lost track of where my heartbeat ended and his began.
He said my name once, quiet and rough, like it was the only word that still made sense to him, and hearing it like that undid the last careful thing I'd been holding onto all night.
By the time we finally went still, tangled together in that quilt on the floor with the fire burned down to nothing but a faint orange glow, both of us were spent in the very best way, his breathing still uneven against my hair, one of his hands tracing slow, absent circles against my bare shoulder like he couldn't quite stop touching me now that there was nothing left to prove.
"I have no idea how I'm supposed to function tomorrow," he said eventually, voice wrecked and quiet, more confession than complaint.
"Welcome to my morning briefing."
"I'm serious. I have a budget meeting at nine."
"You'll live."
"I'm not sure I will."
"You say that like it's my fault."
"It's entirely your fault."
"I plead the fifth."
"Chief doesn't get to plead anything. Chief has a budget meeting."
I laughed against his chest, the sound coming out soft and a little disbelieving, like some part of me still couldn't fully process that this was real, that Derek Walsh was lying on my living room floor with his heartbeat slowing under my ear and an actual, unguarded laugh in his voice.
Curled against him with the fire nearly out and the snow still falling against the windows, I listened to his heartbeat settle into something slow and even, and thought, half terrified and half glad, oh no. I actually like him.
Not that I had any intention of doing anything about that thought tonight, tangled up in him with the fire gone to embers and the whole cabin hushed around us like it belonged that way now.
This wasn't the safe kind of liking either, not the kind I could talk myself out of over coffee in the morning.
It was the real kind, the kind that had apparently been assembling itself piece by piece right alongside whatever he'd been building, without my permission and entirely without my noticing until it was already finished.
Two years of careful distance from Denver, from Trevor, from ever trusting my own judgment about a man again, and somehow none of it had been enough to keep this particular fire chief out.
I must have drifted somewhere close to sleep after that, warm and wrapped in him and the quilt both, because the next thing I knew the fire had gone from orange embers to nothing at all, and Derek was still awake beside me, staring up at the ceiling with an expression I couldn't quite read in the dark, something resolved and certain settling deeper into his face the longer he lay there.
His arm tightened around me once, slow and sure, like punctuation on some sentence he hadn't said out loud, and whatever he was thinking, he kept it to himself, quiet and contained in the dark the way he seemed to keep most things that mattered.
I let myself sink back into him and closer to sleep, heavy and thoroughly undone and, for the first time in longer than I could remember, not scared of a single thing that came next.
Outside the wind had finally settled, and the only sound left in the whole cabin was the two of us breathing, slow and even, matched without either of us trying. It was the kind of quiet I used to fill with worry, back before Pinewood Ridge, back before him. Tonight it just felt like rest.