Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 48039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 48039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
I pull back enough to see him properly. His hair is a mess from my hand. His lower lip is red from my teeth. “I meant what I said,” I remind him.
His face softens at the edges, something tender under the heat like snow collapsed over a river—quiet, deep, moving. “I heard you.”
“Say it back,” I ask, because I want to hear him speak the sentence that will change his shape on the inside.
He holds my gaze like it’s a decision. Then he nods once. “It wasn’t my fault,” he says, voice rough but steady. “It was his love.”
The sentence lands between us and inside him like weight and like a lift. His shoulders drop a fraction. His breath evens just enough to carry us to the next thing. I feel something unclench in my own chest I didn’t know I had been holding, a spring releasing that had been coiled since the night everything split. I lay my forehead to his and close my eyes.
We don’t rush the silence that follows. We let it stretch its legs around us; we let the fire do the talking. When I shiver, he doesn’t ask permission with his eyes—he just opens his jacket and shifts closer, and I slide into the space like the answer I’ve been saving up for too long.
His arm comes around me, heavy and sure. Our joined hands settle on my thigh, heat bled from his palm to my skin until I can’t tell which is which. The box of letters sits on my other side like a witness or a pastor or a pile of tinder we’re not going to burn because we’re done using flame to prove our love exists.
“I’m going to make this right,” he murmurs, not an oath so much as an intention. “Not with some grand gesture. Not with penance. With… breakfast. With rides. With standing where you need me. With showing my face when it’s hard.”
“I don’t want a martyr,” I say into his jacket. “I want a man.”
“Good,” he says, voice rough and oddly light. “I’m more useful as that.”
I laugh, helpless and glad. The sound floats up into the dark. He shifts just enough to see my face. He doesn’t kiss me. He doesn’t have to. His eyes do it—slow, reverent, unashamed. My lips part on instinct and he groans under his breath.
“Soon,” he says.
“Soon,” I echo.
We sit like that for a long time—hands linked, shoulders pressed, fire warming our shins. I read a few more letters. The café lights sway overhead. A fox slips along the ridge line, pauses, watches us with the weary curiosity of a neighbor, and ghosts away.
I slide the last letter of the night back into its envelope and tuck it under the stack with care.
“Thank you,” I tell him.
He shakes his head. “Don’t thank me for making you cry.”
“I’m thanking you for letting me see you.” I squeeze our joined hands. “And for not running when you saw me again.”
His mouth curves. “I’ve never been fast enough to outrun you.”
“You never tried.”
“Fair.”
We stand when the fire dials down to orange bones.
“Want me to walk you home?” he asks, like we’re thirteen and our mothers are waiting.
“Yes.”
The night leans in around us as we go. The snow creaks. Our boots find the same rhythm we used to have.
“I’ll bring pancakes the next morning we both have off.” He grins.
“Bossy,” I laugh, just to feel his eyes darken.
“You love it,” he says, and for the first time in a decade, I don’t flinch at a future tense.
His hands slide up my ribs and then stop. “If I take you inside,” he says, words careful, breath not, “I’m not promising to stop at the door.”
My body goes liquid with the image—his mouth, my back to the wall, the sound I’d make inside my throat where he could hear it and nobody else could. I sway. I catch myself on his shoulders, grip, admit nothing out loud and everything with my fingers.
“Axel,” I say, a warning and a plea.
He steps back one inch. One. His control is obscene. It turns me on and makes me want to throw it into the snow and stomp it.
“Soon,” he repeats. “No more running?” he asks.
“I’ve done enough of that,” I answer. “Besides.” I tilt my head up and lick my lower lip just to watch his pupils track the movement. “You’re very efficient at catching.”
“Don’t test me,” he murmurs.
“I plan to.”
He huffs out a laugh and squeezes my hand like a promise. Axel releases my hand with a last stroke of his thumb across my knuckles that I will feel for hours. He nods once, soldier-precise, then tips his head toward the dark sky a moment before turning to leave.
My mouth still tastes like him. My chest feels lighter and tighter at once. And somewhere in my stomach, a coal I’d let go cold wakes and glows and refuses to go out.