My mouth finds her neck. Her collarbone. A spot just below her ear that makes her gasp.
“Stevie, wait.” I stop. Pull back far enough to see her face.
She’s flushed. Breathing hard. Her lips are swollen and her eyes are dark and she’s looking at me like she wants to devour me whole.
I’m doing it again. Like at my house. Rushing. Taking. This isn’t me. She’s addictive.
“Did I break you? Should I reboot the mobster?” she asks.
“No. God, no.” I laugh, breathless. “I just. I need a second. My brain is doing something very inconvenient right now.”
“Inconvenient?”
“I want to do this right. We haven’t exactly had a normal trajectory.”
She grins and nips my jaw. “Breaking into your house. Leaving cookies. Sex in your foyer. Being relocated to another state. You know. The usual courtship.”
I laugh. The sound surprises me. I don’t laugh often. But she’s looking at me with that expression, the one that sees through every defense I’ve built, and I can’t help it.
“So if we’re not having sex in my, foyer slash living room, which is tragic, what would you like to do?” she asks.
“Talk. Without notes or unlocked doors or months between conversations.” I tug her toward the couch. “And then maybe kiss some more. Pull you into my lap. If you’re amenable.”
“I’m amenable.”
“Good.”
We sit. She curls into my side like she’s been waiting to fit herself against me and is only now getting the chance.
We talk for hours.
She tells me about the bakery. The regulars. Martha who ignores opening hours and Tom with his powdered sugar mustache. She tells me about learning to be Zoey, about the days she couldn’t get out of bed and the days she baked until her arms ached because it was the only thing that made sense.
She tells me about Saul. How he stayed that first week. How he calls every day. How he’s fighting to visit more, bending rules that shouldn’t bend.
She tells me about missing Enzo. The burned eggs. The terrible movies. The way he looked at her like she was worth protecting.
I listen. File it away. But differently this time. Not as data to be used, but as pieces of her. The parts I missed while I was hiding behind doors.
And I tell her things too.
About my grandmother’s amaretti. About the family I was born into and the one I chose. About the years I spent building walls so high I forgot what they were protecting. About seeing her at the trial. The way she saw me and what that meant.
“I filed you away,” I admit. “The woman with the panic attack and the honest eyes. The one who wasn’t afraid to chase what she wanted. I told myself you were a complication. A risk. Something to be managed from a distance.”
“And now?”
“Now you’re not a file.” I brush a strand of hair from her face. “You’re the whole archive. Every thought I have leads back to you.”
She kisses me again.
This one is softer. The kind of kiss that isn’t trying to go anywhere, just exists for its own sake.
When she pulls back, her eyes are bright. “Stay tonight.”
“Stevie.”
“Not like wall sex round two. I mean stay. Like, actually sleep here. I have a couch. It’s sentient and possibly evil, but it exists.”
