Page 132 of The Grumpy Defenseman
Not fixed.
Safe.
I pressed my mouth to her hair.
“Good.”
Her fingers tightened around mine.
“I mean that,” she said. “The date. Being seen. Coming home. This. It felt like I got to choose all of it.”
My throat tightened.
“You did.”
“I know.” A pause. “That’s the part I’m still getting used to.”
I held her in the dark and thought about the river lights, her hand in mine, her voice saying no when I asked if she was leaving.
I thought about the version of my life I had been afraid to want because wanting it made it possible to lose.
Then I looked down at the woman breathing against my chest and understood something clearly.
Loss was not the opposite of choosing.
It was the risk that made choosing matter.
“Sam.”
“Mm?”
“I’m glad we went downtown.”
She lifted her head, hair falling across one cheek.
“That is the least romantic sentence anyone has ever said to a naked woman in bed.”
“I meant itromantically.”
“Devastating. Truly. I may never recover.”
I rolled her under me before she could say anything else.
She laughed into my mouth, and the sound moved through me like light turning on in a room I had stopped entering years ago.
This.
The word came back, but softer this time.
A home.
Samantha
Three nights later, Evan’s condo was quieter than I expected.
Not empty-quiet. Lived-in quiet. The kind of silence that gathered around a person who did not use noise to fill a room.
No television humming in the background. No music playing to cover the absence of conversation. Just the refrigerator, the low shift of the air conditioner, and San Antonio moving beyond the windows.
