Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 75547 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75547 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
It’s not a fairytale. It’s not a ring. It’s not even a label. But it is something. Dark, honest, and somehow what I needed to hear.
I breathe. It shakes on the way out. “Okay.”
“Okay,” he echoes, and something unclenches in his jaw. “Now, do me a favor and stop letting other people’s stories about me pick fights in your head. You want to know something, you ask me. Not Lana. Not a rumor. Me.”
I nod, a little dizzy with relief, a little embarrassed at my own spiral. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry.” He squeezes my shoulder, then releases. “Be clear. All I ever ask.”
The room exhales with us. The fridge hum clicks into a new cycle like it was waiting to see where we’d land. Outside, a car door slams somewhere, the echo a punctuation mark.
“You hungry?” he asks, like we just tightened bolts on something and now it’s time to put the tools away.
I laugh, still pushing back my tears. “We just had that conversation and you ask if I’m hungry?”
“Emotions burn calories,” he states with infuriating logic. “I’m putting burgers in a pan. You want a fried cheese skirt or are you still pretending that’s not the best part?”
“Cheese,” I reply, and wipe my face on the hem of my sleeve. “Please.”
He moves to the stove and the whole universe shifts a half-inch back into place. I set out plates and slice tomatoes like a person who has things to do. It feels good. It feels like proof.
When he slides a plate in front of me, he pauses, thumb brushing my wrist. “And Kristen?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re wanted.” He states it simple, like he’s telling me the weather. “By me. Don’t get it twisted because someone else wanted a version of you that was easier to carry. I want all of you. I want to taste your good days and swallow out your bad as I kiss you until all you can think of is my name on your lips.”
The words land and sink, heavy and warm. I hold his eyes until I know I’ll remember it tomorrow. “Okay,” I whisper unable to come up with a remark.
We eat. The world doesn’t end. The moths keep up their bad habits banging into the light. The map on the wall keeps being a directional paper with a future awaiting another plan. And inside me, something fragile sets back in place like pieces coming back together.
The night settles into a softer quiet after dinner. Dishes clack and steam, then stack in a rack like soldiers at ease. He wipes the counter the way he always does—efficient, thorough, like mess can’t outrun him if he sees it. I dry and hang the towel and turn to find him watching me, not with heat, not with the kind of pressure that used to live in rooms with men who wanted the night to go a certain way. Just watching. Like he’s memorizing a picture he doesn’t want to forget later.
“What,” I ask, self-conscious and yet, warmed by it.
“Nothing.” He shrugs, a small tilt of his shoulders. “You look like you live here.”
“I guess I do.”
He nods, accepting this as a fact we don’t need to wrap in ceremony. “Walk?”
It’s cooler now. The day let go, finally. We cut down the block, past porches where people lean back in plastic chairs and let screens do their talking for them. Fireflies stitch green commas over the ditch water. Somewhere, a grill pops and hisses. The night smells like cut grass and memory.
I slide my hand into his and he doesn’t flinch like some men do at public touch. He squeezes once, matter-of-fact, as if to say this is how it should be. We walk in a rhythm that our bodies learned in the last month without asking for permission.
“Tell me something true,” I request, because I want to know more.
He thinks. “When I was fifteen,” he shares after a beat, “I rebuilt an engine for a 1970 Chevelle with my dad in our driveway and thought I’d invented calm. I didn’t. But it felt like it because every project he did with any of my brothers resulted in lots of yelling and cussing. When it was my turn, I was determined to stay calm. We did it and fuck, it was fun. I’ve been chasing that version of quiet since.”
“I like that.” I kick a rock; it skitters, sparks briefly against asphalt. “My mom used to read to me out loud even when I was too old for it. Thick books. She’d give everyone different voices, even the boring rich men who only talked about property law. That was my calm.”
“You got her voice in your head still?”
“When I need it.” I smile into the dark. “Sometimes it sounds like Trina now when she tells me to breathe. Which would make my mom laugh.”