Page 78 of Bounced!

You are not alone. Whatever comes, you will not carry it by yourself, not the bar, not the fear, not any of it, not while I’m here.

He held on to me like I was the last solid thing in a world that had started sliding.

I held him back the same way.

We moved together, slow and deep and quiet, breathing each other’s breath, my forehead against his, his hands spread wide across my back like he was trying to hold all of me at once.

“I’ve got you, babe,” I told him, against his mouth, and felt the words go into him and land. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

Near the end, he made a sound I hadn’t heard from him before. It wasn’t born of passion exactly, but something rawer. It was the sound of a man who’d been strong for everyone for so long that being held while he came undone broke something loose in him. I felt wetness where his face was pressed to my neck, and I didn’t say anything about it. I just held him tighter and brought us both home, slow and gentle into the dark, two men and one shared breath and a fear made smaller by being carried between us instead of alone.

Afterward, we lay tangled and quiet, sweat cooling, Dosty still snoring faintly on the porch, the paper bags stacked on the counter in the next room like a promise.

“That was—” Mark started, and didn’t finish.

“Yeah.”

“Nobody’s ever—” He stopped again. His arm tightened around me. “I’m usually the one who—”

“I know. I know you are. Not tonight.” I pressed my mouth to his chest, over the heartbeat that had finally slowed. “You don’t always have to be the one holding the roof up, Mark. Sometimes, you get to be the one under it. I built you a pergola, too. It’s just made out of me.”

He laughed, wet and wrecked and helpless, and pulled me up and kissed me.

We didn’t talk about the two million again that night. It sat in the room with us, enormous, unpaid, and unsolvable. But it sat there with us now, with both of us. That didn’t make it smaller. It just made it something he didn’t have to look at alone.

Mark fell asleep first, for once. The man who never slept, sacked out cold with his arms around me.

I stayed awake for a long time. I listened to him breathe. I watched the moon move across the ceiling of the house he’d built.

I didn’t know if we could save the bar. That was the truth of it, under the tenderness, under the vow. I didn’t know.

Mark didn’t know either.

Nobody knew.

Earlier, at dinner, Mark had gone somewhere behind his eyes and come back. He’d started to say a thing and stopped. I turned it over in the dark and couldn’t make anything of it. Maybe it was a builder’s habit and nothing more, a man who couldn’t look at a wall without pricing out what it would take to move it or repair it or whatever.

I didn’t let it become hope.

I’d spent my whole life not letting things become hope, because hope was just disappointment I hadn’t met yet. I wasn’t going to start being stupid about it now, four days into having everything to lose. So I held him close, closer than I’d ever held anyone in my life.

That part I let myself have.

Whatever came, whatever the morning or the four months after it brought, this had happened. This was real. Nothing could take this away from me . . . from us.

That wasn’t hope.

It was smaller than hope, it was heavier, and it was mine.

I pressed closer into the warmth of him, and I matched my breathing to his.

I still didn’t fall asleep for a long, long time.

Chapter 26

Mark

By Monday, the weekend was already a memory. Saturday had been packed. It was the old kind of packed, loud and good with bodies to the doors. I stood behind the taps and watched the bar be exactly the thing it was supposed to be. For six whole hours, I let myself not think about December.