24. Hadley
Chapter Twenty-Four
HADLEY
The strange thing about emotional conflict with someone you truly love is that the world doesn’t stop afterward.
You still wake up together. Still reach for each other half asleep. Still know exactly how they take their coffee. And that normalcy makes everything feel even more fragile.
As I stood barefoot in Nolan’s kitchen on Saturday morning, watching him concentrate on the stove, it all gently came to me.
Sunlight pours gold through the windows overlooking Back Bay while gulls drift lazily above the docks below.
The storm damage from earlier in the week already looks less severe in daylight—repair crews moving steadily across the western slips, tourists wandering the marina again like life naturally reassembles itself after chaos.
I wish relationships worked that way.
Nolan glances over his shoulder while flipping pancakes.
“Why are you staring at me like I personally offended your breakfast?” he asks lightly.
Warmth flickers instinctively beneath my ribs.
“I’m thinking,” I answer.
“That’s usually concerning.”
I move toward him until my arms slide around his waist from behind.
Nolan stills, then exhales. Like touch still calms him before anything else does.
His hand settles automatically over mine just as a sudden wave of grief flickers unexpectedly through my chest.
“You okay?” Nolan asks.
I rest my cheek lightly against his back.
“Yeah.”
The answer sounds more believable today. Not because everything’s fixed, but because we finally said the hard things out loud. The silence between us no longer feels confusing.
Nolan flips the burner off before turning in my arms. The exhaustion in his face still hasn’t fully faded. Dark circles beneath his eyes. Tension lingers around his mouth. The slight stiffness in his shoulders from overworking himself all week.
He’s running on determination and caffeine and fear. And still trying to love me well through it all.
My fingers slide lightly along his jaw.
“You need sleep.”
One corner of his mouth lifts.
“You sound like Lark,” he says of his best friend and my soon-to-be sister-in-law.
“That should scare you.”
“It does.”
A small laugh escapes me despite everything.
Nolan studies my face for a moment afterward.
“I’m sorry about this week.”
The gentle caress of his voice nearly shatters me because he means it. Every word.
“I know.”
His eyes search mine carefully.
“No, Hads.” Emotion roughens his voice. “I mean it.”
The honesty lands directly in my chest, leaving me with an understanding of something important. Nolan’s greatest fear right now isn’t the marina failing. It’s failing the people he loves.
The pain of this realization is something I doubt he fully comprehends yet.
I step closer until almost no space remains between us.
“You’re allowed to struggle,” I whisper.
His jaw tightens.
Nolan glances toward the marina windows briefly before admitting, “I don’t know how to balance all of this.”
The vulnerability in the confession cracks something open inside me.
“Neither do I,” I admit.
His eyes return to mine with the look he gets every time I meet his honesty with my own instead of reassurance.
Like wanting to be a part of him still surprises him.
“I think,” I continue, “we’re both trying so hard not to lose each other that we accidentally started making each other lonelier.”
Silence settles heavily around us afterward. The kind of honesty that leaves everything stripped bare.
Nolan’s hands slide along my waist.
“You felt lonely?”
It almost breaks my heart to see how visibly pained he is by the realization.
I nod once.
“Sometimes.”
Emotion flashes openly across his face.
Guilt crashes through me too because I know he never intended that. That’s the problem. Neither of us meant for fear to start shaping the relationship this way.
“Christ.”
The roughness in his voice twists painfully through my chest.
I cup his face carefully.
“Hey.”
His eyes open again. They’re filled with fear, love, exhaustion, and overwhelming vulnerability. All tangled together.
“You know what scares me?” he asks.
I shake my head once.
“That I’m finally learning how to let somebody love me…” His voice lowers further. “And I still might not know how to do this right.”
The confession physically hurts to hear. Underneath all Nolan’s stress and overworking and emotional spiraling is the real wound. Not believing he knows how to keep good things once he has them.
I rise onto my toes and kiss him. Nolan exhales shakily against my mouth. And then the kiss deepens almost instinctively.
Not frantic, but full of need.
Like we’re both trying to reconnect emotionally through touch after days of tension and exhaustion and fear.
His hands tighten at my waist, pulling me closer against him while the morning sunlight spills across the kitchen around us.
He kisses me in the way that curls my toes, and I wonder if I’ll ever get enough of this…enough of feeling his lips against mine whenever I want.
When Nolan finally pulls back, his forehead rests lightly against mine while both of us breathe unevenly in the quiet kitchen.
The corner of his mouth lifts, and his eyes sparkle as both hands reach around my waist. Suddenly, I’m lifted in the air and settled on the hard butcher block countertops.
“Don’t you need to go to work?” I ask as he yanks my night shirt over my head, hands caressing my breasts.
“Yep. Don’t you?” he responds as he slips his hand beneath the waistband of my shorts.
“Um…yes?” I say, just as his fingers brush across my clit. “Oh God.” My entire body jerks at the contact.
“So wet already?” he murmurs against my mouth as he sinks one finger into my tight channel.
“Always. For. You,” I tell him in short bursts of air. “I’m so close already.” With Nolan, he makes me fall apart in record time, every time, whereas with other men I was lucky to feel satisfied at all.
“Can you come from this?” He leans forward, sealing his lips over one pert nipple. I do little to hold back my answering groan.
With a swift tug, he pulls my hips to the very edge of the counter as he slips his fingers from my sex.
At my grunt, Nolan answers with a chuckle as he switches breasts and presses his covered erection against my center.
“Oh!” I cry out at the contact.
Nolan continues to rub his cock against my pussy, the friction of our clothing making every sensation sharper.
My orgasm bursts forth, and I stiffen against Nolan’s hold. Stars flash before my eyes with each quiver of my walls.
“Fuck,” Nolan growls as he rubs himself against my center a few more times.
“Wow, that was a surprise,” I tell him as I wrap my arms around his shoulders, surprised to find that Nolan isn’t bashful at all about the fact that he just came in his sweatpants. It was honestly one of the hottest things I’ve ever experienced.
With a quick peck on my forehead, Nolan helps me get down from the counter before he goes to clean up really quickly.
Outside, the marina wakes fully below us. Boat engines hum to life. Workers shout across the loading dock. Tourists laugh somewhere near the bait shop. Life keeps moving.
When Nolan steps back in the space, the desire and intensity have been replaced with the pensive gaze from earlier.
“What are you thinking about?” I ask.
His eyes lift to mine, and his gaze tightens.
“How close I came to screwing this up.”
“Nolan—”
“No, I mean it.”
The roughness in his voice silences me. Underneath everything else lately—the exhaustion, the overworking, the investor pressure—there’s still this terrifying, vulnerable thread running through him constantly. The fear that he’ll accidentally ruin the things he loves most.
I brush my thumb lightly along his cheek.
Nolan glances toward the marina windows overlooking Back Bay. The restored docks stretch across glittering water beneath bright morning sun while charter crews prep boats for the weekend. Everything looks stable from up here.
That’s the dangerous thing about pressure. Sometimes it builds beneath the surface long before anything visibly cracks.
“What happens now?” I ask.
His attention returns.
“I honestly don’t know yet,” he admits. “But I know I want you in whatever comes next.”
Relief flickers through me so intensely it almost embarrasses me. It seems a part of me needed reassurance more than I realized.
“You’re not temporary to me, Hadley,” Nolan states firmly.
The words hit hard enough to physically ache. I know how much it costs him emotionally to say things like that aloud.
I step closer again until my forehead brushes his lightly.
“Neither are you.”
Emotion flashes openly across his face. Warm enough to wreck me.
Something sharp and burning fills the kitchen.
I blink once.
Twice.
Then glance toward the stove.
“The pancakes are on fire.”
Nolan whips around. “Jesus Christ.”
A startled laugh bursts out of me before I can stop it while Nolan lunges for the pan.
Smoke curls toward the ceiling. The pancakes are absolutely destroyed. The sheer ridiculousness of it snaps something lighter back into place between us.
“You’re very emotionally distracted,” I inform him helpfully.
“I’m going through something.”
Warmth flickers through my chest again.
We remake breakfast together after that. Nolan burns one more pancake. I steal strawberries directly off the cutting board.
“You know what Bailey told me yesterday?” I ask while reaching for syrup.
Immediate suspicion flashes across Nolan’s face. “That sentence has never improved my life.”
A laugh slips out.
“She said we’re in our stress-test relationship era.”
Nolan stares at me. “That sounds fake.”
“She reads too many romance novels.”
“Concerning behavior.”
I catch Nolan watching me from across the kitchen, his raw emotion stealing the breath from my lungs, just as his phone lets out a sharp buzz against the counter.
Everything shifts. I feel it happen physically. The tension returning to his shoulders. The flicker of stress behind his eyes. The marina office number lighting the screen. Pressure sliding back between us before either of us says a word.
Nolan hesitates.