Page 110 of Before the Bond
"Do you?"
I knew it. The machinery didn’t stop.
Seven years of building the case for why I didn't deserve it was not something that was dismantled in a single night.
But she was sitting beside me with her shoulder against mine, and she had driven back through that gate in the dark with no promise it wasn't already too late, and she had saidI love youon the back porch in the cold fog with the steadiness of someone who had made a decision and arrived at it completely.
Tonight you just get to be here.
I let the machinery run itself out. I stopped feeding it.
"Yes," I said. "I do."
Something in her expression shifted. She just leaned in, closed the last inch between her shoulder and mine, and stayed there.
I'd understood the gesture.
This is yours,it told me.Go on, then.
"I keep expecting it to feel different," I said.
Olivia turned to look at me. "What to feel different?"
"This." I gestured at the room, at her, at the air between us that had stopped pretending to be neutral months ago. "I've thought about it for a long time. I thought when it finally—" I paused. "I thought I'd know what to do with it."
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "Do you?"
The honest answer was no. The honest answer was that I had spent seven years building the architecture of staying away from her, and now that architecture was gone and I didn't quite know how to stand without it. But she was looking at me with the same expression she'd had on the porch — open, certain, already pastthe question — and the honest answer was the only one she'd accept.
"No," I said. "Not really."
The corner of her mouth moved. Not a full smile. Something smaller and more private. "Good," she said. "Me neither."
Olivia reached out this time. Not for my hand, but for the hem of my sleeve.
The steady heartbeat in my chest quickened.
I looked down at her fingers on my arm. Something caught behind my ribs.
Seven years.
I turned toward her.
I’d kissed her twice before. Once in the aftermath of terror, once in the slow, deliberate quiet of the porch after Jake's shift.
But this was different.
Not the first. Not the second. This was what came after the question had been asked and answered. This was simply her.
She kissed me back before I'd fully closed the distance.
Her hand moved from my sleeve to my chest, palm flat, right over where my heart had been pounding since she drove back through the gate. The touch sent a tremble throughout me, like every impulse in me was trying to slow down — and failing.
I pulled back just enough to look at her.
Her hair came loose as my hands came in to pull her closer. The firelight moved across her.
I thought about the first time I'd seen her — eighteen, standing on a hiking trail in Northern California — and the way every animal instinct I had went completely, catastrophically still.
