Chapter 3: The Late-Night Confessional
The key turned in the lock just as the trumpet solo hit its crescendo.Alex didn’t bother getting up. Only one person barged in without knocking.
Jess shouldered the door open, a bottle of Malbec in one hand and a paper bag smelling of garlic and fried dough in the other. She took in the scene: Alex curled on the sofa in yesterday’s sweats, the dim glow of the record player, the oppressive quiet of a life being deliberately muted.
“Okay,” Jess announced, kicking the door shut and depositing her offerings on the cluttered coffee table. “Intervention time.”
“It’s not an intervention.It’s a Tuesday,” Alex muttered, pulling a cushion over her face.
“It’s a ‘my-best-friend-is-turning-into-a-quietly-desperate-hermit’ Tuesday.” Jess marched to the kitchen, her voice carrying over the opening and closing of drawers.“I got the vibes from your texts. ‘The shop was fine.’ ‘I’m just tired.’ ‘Maybe I’ll take up knitting.’” She returned with two wine glasses, the stems sticky from last week’s neglect. “Alarming stuff.”
She poured two hefty glasses, handed one to Alex, and sat on the floor, leaning back against the sofa. “Spill.The unedited version.”
Alex took a sip.The wine was tart, biting. “There’s nothing to spill.We’re neighbors.We say hi. It’s fine.”
“Fine,” Jess repeated, deadpan.“Like a corpse is fine. Technically neutral, but deeply unsettling.” She fished a garlic knot from the bag, tore it in half, and offered a piece to Alex. “I saw him.”
Alex froze, the bread halfway to her mouth.“When?”
“Yesterday.In the lobby. I was coming to see you, he was coming from the mailboxes.” She took a bite, chewing thoughtfully.
“And?”
“He must know I'm your friend because he gave me the embarrassed ovoidant look "good day"”.
Alex’s chest tightened. She saw it: him standing by the bank of metal boxes, keys in hand, his polite mask fraying at the edges. The image was sharp, painful.“Then he did this weird thing,” Jess continued, her voice dropping its performative edge. “He turned back at me and said, ‘Is Alex… doing okay?’ Not in a casual way. In a way that sounded like he’d been carrying the question around for a month.”
The air left Alex’s lungs. She stared at the deep red wine in her glass, a dark vortex. “What did you say?”
“I said, ‘ She's okay I guess.Why don’t you ask her?’” Jess shrugged. “He just nodded, like that was the answer he expected, and walked off. He's embarrassed, you're sad"
“I’m not sad,” Alex insisted, but the protest was weak, swallowed by the vinyl’s hiss.“You are!You’ve stopped singing. You haven’t started a single insane DIY project in weeks.Your text replies have the emotional depth of a Wikipedia article. You’re guarding your own life like it’s a crime scene.” Jess put her glass down with a firm click.“You’re terrified.”
The word hung there, undeniable. Alex felt it in her bones, a cold, constant hum. “Of course I’m terrified,” she whispered, finally giving the fear a voice.“But I'm not sad, I'm disappointed and I think too much of it. It wasn’t just a moment, Jess.It felt… huge...for me. And now it’s this… this awkward, embarrassing thing between us. We went from whatever we were friendly neighbours that were nice and even small talking to… nothing.Just this polite, awkward nothing. And if I try to fix it, I could make it so much worse. I could make him look at me with actual regret instead of just awkwardness.”
“Or,” Jess said, her voice softening, “you could end the torture.For both of you.”
“How? By ambushing him in the hall?‘Hey, remember when we almost kissed?Wild, right? So, wanna get dinner?’”
“Yes!God, yes! Anything but this… this suspended animation you’re living in.” Jess shifted to face her.“How do you know is not still thinking about it?He asked me if you were okay.”
Alex stood up, too restless to sit. She paced to the window, looking out at the brick wall of the adjacent building.“So what’s the move, then? Send a carrier pigeon?‘Let's stop being weird about something that almost happened a few weeks ago. Sincerely, the girl across the hall’?”
“it would be a beginning but just try talking.You use your words. You say the thing you’re most afraid to say.” Jess came to stand beside her, leaning against the wall. “It doesn’t have to be a grand speech.It just has to be real. ‘ I liked that night.’ ‘I’ve missed our elevator routine.’ ‘I hate this weirdness.’ Pick one. Just one true sentence.”
“And if he just gives me the faint smile? The ‘oh, that’s nice’ retreat?”
“Then you have your answer.And you can stop wondering. You can properly grieve it and move on. But what if he doesn’t?”
The question echoed in the quiet apartment. The record had ended, the needle caught in the silent run-out groove, emitting a soft, rhythmic pop-pop-pop.Alex thought of his hands on her face. Not just the touch, but the terrifying tenderness of it. The way the world had narrowed to a point of pure, unspoken potential. She’d spent a month trying to shrink that memory, to file it away as an anomaly.It hadn’t worked.
Jess’s phone buzzed, breaking the spell.She glanced at it.“Crap.My shift starts in forty. I gotta run.” She grabbed her jacket, shrugging it on.At the door, she turned back. “I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m saying this… whatever this is…” She gestured at the dim room, the uneaten garlic knot, the silent player.“…is harder. And it’s a choice you’re making every day you don’t say something.”
After Jess left, the silence felt different.Heavier, but charged. Alex cleaned up slowly, washing the glasses, the sticky sweetness of the wine giving way to the soap’s sterile lemon scent. She flipped the record, but didn’t start it again.
She stood in the center of her living room, looking at the door.Twenty steps.That’s all it was. Twenty steps and a few inches of solid wood between her life and his.
Twenty steps and a few inches of solid wood between her life and his. The absurdity of it finally struck her, a dull throb of frustration behind her eyes. She was a grown woman who talked to grieving families daily, yet she was paralyzed by a man who owned a sad fiddle-leaf fig.
She took one step toward the door, then another, her socks silent on the floorboards. Her hand was on the cool brass knob when a sound froze her: laughter in the hall. His laughter, loud and easy, followed by a brighter, unfamiliar one.Then a third voice, a man’s.
They were right outside.Her breath hitched. She stepped back from the door, pressing herself against the wall beside the crooked mirror. Through its reflection, she could see the slice of hallway visible through her own peephine heart rate turned into a frantic drum solo against her ribs.The door across the hall clicked open. “—complete disaster, but in the best way,” Taek was saying, his voice warm and relaxed, a tone she hadn’t heard in weeks. “Nick, you should’ve seen the client’s face.”
“I’m glad I didn’t,” the man—Nick—replied.“My blood pressure’s bad enough.”
Alex recognized Nick’s voice. She’d seen him a handful of times over the years, a tall guy with a loud, cheerful voice who’d sometimes help Taek move furniture. The other laugh belonged to the woman from the street, the one with the sleek black hair.Her presence in the hallway felt like a physical shove.
“Come in, come in,” Taek said. “I finally remembered to buy that whiskey you like.”
There was shuffling, then Taek’s voice again, closer now, directed into the corridor. “Just a sec, I think my mail…”
He stepped into her line of sight in the mirror’s reflection.He was wearing a soft-looking navy sweater, his hands in his pockets. His eyes, almost absently, flicked toward her door. They paused on the thin line of light underneath it.He knew she was home.“Everything okay?” the woman asked. She moved to stand beside him, following his gaze. She was even more striking up close, dressed in elegant, architectural black.“Yeah, fine,” Taek said, but he didn’t move. It was a suspended moment.
Then Nick clapped a hand on Taek’s shoulder, spilling into view.“What’s the holdup, man? The whiskey awaits.” His eyes, following his friends’, landed on Alex’s door. A flicker of confusion crossed his face, then recognition, then a slow-dawning, wide-eyed surprise.“Oh.Hey. That’s… your neighbor, right?” he asked Taek, his voice dropping into a knowing, theatrical whisper that carried perfectly.Taek nodded, a tight little motion. “Yeah.”
“The neighbor,” the woman repeated, her curiosity instantly palpable. She looked from Taek’s profile to the door and back again, a subtle, assessing smile on her lips. “The one you mentioned keeps the interesting hours?”
Alex felt her face flush with a fierce, mortifying heat.Interesting hours. He’d talked about her.What else had he said?Taek cleared his throat. “This is Alex’s apartment,” he said, a formal introduction to the blank wood. He finally turned fully toward her door, his expression unreadable.“Alex?”
Trapped, she had no choice. She closed her eyes for one second, swallowed the knot in her throat, and opened the door.
The three of them stood there, a little tableau. Nick’s surprised eyebrows shot higher, now mixed with a gleeful curiosity. The woman’s look was open, friendly, and deeply inquisitive. Taek just looked at her, his dark eyes taking in her old sweats, her wild hair, the fact she’d clearly been hiding against the wall.
“Hi,” Alex said, the word creaking out.“Hey,” Taek said.
“We didn’t mean to disturb you,” the woman said, her voice smooth and polite. “I’m Mina, a colleague from Taek’s firm. This is Nick.”
“I’ve seen you around,” Nick said, a grin spreading.“The flower ninja. Taek said you were quiet.” He elbowed Taek gently. “He undersold it.”
“Nick,” Taek warned, a low rumble.
“It’s fine,” Alex said, forcing her polite florist’s smile onto her face.It felt brittle.“Just a quiet night in. Don’t let me keep you from your whiskey.”
Mina’s keen eyes darted between them, catching the current in the air. “It’s nice to finally put a face to the door,” she said. “Taek’s told us how you helped with that package fiasco last fall.”
He had?Alex couldn’t look at him.“It was nothing. Just neighbors.”
Silence descended, thick and awkward. The faint smell of Mina’s perfume, something expensive and floral, mixed with the familiar citrus of Taek’s cologne. Nick opened his mouth, likely to say something disastrously helpful, but Taek spoke first.
“We’ll let you get back to your evening,” he said, his voice carefully neutral. That faint, awful smile was back, a shield firmly in place.“Goodnight, Alex.”
It was a dismissal. A kind, final one.“Goodnight,” she echoed. Her gaze swept past Mina’s polite smile, Nick’s lingering intrigue, and finally met Taek’s. For a fraction of a second, the shield slipped. What she saw wasn’t regret or indifference, but a stark, mirrored panic—and something else, a frustrated helplessness.He was stuck in this performance, too.
He was stuck in this performance, too.The recognition flashed between them, a silent, shared frustration in the awkward tableau. It was that ache, sharp and familiar, that pushed the words out before her brain could censor them.
“Actually,” Alex said, her voice stronger than she felt.“Could you wait? Just for a minute?” Taek stopped mid-turn.Nick’s eyebrows performed a silent, exaggerated dance of intrigue. Mina simply watched, her professional curiosity deepening into personal interest.
Taek looked startled, his polite mask cracking with genuine surprise.“Uh. Sure.” He glanced at his friends, an unspoken communication passing between them.“You guys go ahead. I’ll join you in a second.”
Nick’s grin was a masterpiece of innuendo. “Take your time,” he singsonged, steering a pleasantly confused Mina toward Taek’s open door. “We’ll just… appreciate the fine craftsmanship of your cabinetry.”
The door clicked shut, leaving them alone in the fluorescent-lit hallway.The silence was different now, charged and fragile. Alex hugged her arms around herself, suddenly aware of her faded t-shirt.“I just…” she began, then forced herself to meet his eyes. “I wanted to apologize.For the hiding. And the… catastrophic awkwardness that came after.” She took a breath, the air feeling thin. “I’m hoping if I say something, maybe it’ll be less embarrassing to cross paths.”
Taek leaned back against his own doorframe, the stiff tension in his shoulders easing just a fraction. A real smile, small and tentative, touched his lips.“Which part are you apologizing for? The hiding, or the awkwardness?”
“Both.” She let out a shaky laugh.“Mostly my part in the awkwardness. I think I broke some kind of record for sudden exits.”
“It was a pretty clean get-away,” he admitted, his tone softening. “I spent the next hour trying to figure out if I’d imagined the whole blackout.”
“You didn’t.” The confirmation hung between them, stark and real. The vinyl sofa, the pooled candle wax, the weight of his hands—none of it was a dream.“Good.” The word was quiet, definitive. He ran a hand through his hair, the gesture familiar and endearing. “So, you’re hoping for less embarrassing hallway encounters.”
“A lofty goal, I know.”
“I think it’s achievable.” He pushed off the doorframe, closing the small distance between them. Not the intimate space of the bourbon-filled dark, but a deliberate, friendly proximity. “For the record, I’m sorry, too.For the ‘crossed a line’ text.That was…” He shook his head. “That was me panicking. I regretted it as soon as I sent it.”
“I regretted my ‘no worries’ as soon as I sent it,” she echoed, a mutual confession. “It felt like we were writing a treaty for a war neither of us wanted.”
He chuckled, a warm, low sound that vibrated in the sterile air.“A non-aggression pact. With strictly enforced faint-smile provisions.”
“Exactly.” The shared metaphor, silly as it was, dissolved another layer of the tension.She could feel her own smile, tired but genuine, finally reaching her eyes.
From inside his apartment, a muffled clink of glasses and Nick’s booming laugh echoed. Taek glanced back at his door, then at her.An invitation hovered, unspoken. The old panic flickered in her chest, the fear of ruination. But Jess’s voice in her head was louder now: What if he doesn’t?
“I should let you get back to your friends,” she said, but she didn’t move.
“They’re not going anywhere,” he said, watching her carefully. “And the whiskey is allegedly very good.” He paused, his head tilting slightly.“You could join us.If you wanted.No pressure. We could… downgrade the awkwardness from catastrophic to manageable.”
It was a risk. A huge, terrifying, delicious risk. She thought of the almost-kiss, not as a finished thing to be dissected, but as a beginning they’d both fumbled.This was a different beginning. One with witnesses and better lighting.“Mina seems nice,” Alex ventured, testing the idea.
“She’s terrifyingly smart and will absolutely psychoanalyze us both before the second pour,” Taek said, his eyes crinkling.“Nick will make increasingly unsubtle jokes. It might be a whole new kind of awkward.”
“But a shared one,” she pointed out.
“A shared one,” he agreed. He held out his hand, not to take hers, but in a gentle, open-palmed gesture toward his apartment.“So?Temporary ceasefire? See if we can remember how to just… talk?”
Alex looked at his hand, then at his face, now free of any faint smile.Just his open, warm, slightly hopeful expression. The ghost of bourbon and vanilla seemed to swirl in the hallway, mixing with the promise of good whiskey and loud laughter.
“Okay,” she said, her heart drumming a rhythm of pure, exhilarating fear.“Yeah. Okay.”
She took a step forward, not across the hall into the unknown of his life, but simply alongside him, toward the door.
She took a step forward, not across the hall into the unknown of his life, but simply alongside him, toward the door. The woodgrain of his door, she noticed, had a small, familiar chip at eye level she’d never seen before. He pushed it open wider, the warm light and the murmur of voices spilling out into the hallway.
“Don’t be nice,” he said quietly, just for her, as she crossed the threshold. “Nick smells politeness and goes in for the kill.”
Then they were inside. The scent of his apartment—clean linen, that faint smoky vanilla from the candles, and now the rich, oaky smell of whiskey—wrapped around her. It was different with people in it. The same minimalist furniture, the same books, but animated by the presence of two others lounging on his sofa. The coffee table held three glasses and an open bottle.
“She lives!” Nick announced, raising his glass. He was exactly as she remembered: broad, cheerful, with a smile that took up his whole face.
Mina uncurled herself with a panther’s grace, offering a hand. “A rescue mission. I like it.” Her grip was firm, her eyes sharp and amused.
“I was bribed with the promise of psychoanalysis,” Alex said, the words coming out easier than she’d feared.
Mina’s laugh was a quick, delighted sound. “He warned you. Good.” She gestured to the bottle. “We’re drinking Taek’s expensive stuff to celebrate his client not firing him. You’re just in time.”
Taek moved past her, his shoulder briefly brushing her arm. “Ignore them. They’re vultures.” He fetched a clean tumbler from a shelf. “This okay?” he asked, holding it up.
“Please.” She hovered, feeling the newness of the space with everyone watching. The last time she was here, the air had been thick with unsaid things. Now it was filled with Nick’s booming commentary on architectural clients.
“Sit, sit,” Nick said, patting the cushion beside him. “Don’t mind us. We’re just the audience.”
Alex took the offered spot, accepting the glass Taek handed her. Their fingers didn’t touch. He sat in an armchair opposite, the coffee table a safe moat between them. The whiskey was smooth and complex, burning a warm path down her throat.
“So, Alex,” Mina began, swirling her drink. “Taek says you’re a florist. What’s the most dramatic flower-related crisis you’ve ever had?”
It was a perfect, easy question. Alex felt her shoulders drop an inch. “A wedding where the bride’s mother insisted the peonies be a specific shade of blush that doesn’t exist in nature,” she said. “She brought a paint swatch.”
Nick groaned in sympathy. “Let me guess. You made it work.”
“I used tea dye and a lot of prayer.” She took another sip. “The peonies browned by the first dance. It was a whole thing.”
Taek was watching her, a soft, unfamiliar expression on his face as she spoke. It wasn’t the polite mask or the pained smile. It was simple attention. “You never told me that story,” he said.
“You never asked about peony fraud,” she replied, the ghost of a real smile on her lips.
The conversation flowed, carried by Nick’s relentless energy and Mina’s intelligent, probing questions. Alex learned that Nick was a structural engineer, that Mina specialized in sustainable materials, and that they’d all been friends since university. She learned that Taek’s “disaster” project involved a client who wanted a glass house overlooking a bird sanctuary.
“He tried to explain the concept of bird strikes,” Nick said, slapping his knee. “The guy asked if we could use ‘quieter glass.’”
Alex laughed, a real, unguarded sound that seemed to startle her as much as anyone. Taek’s eyes crinkled at the corners. He was relaxing too, the stiff architect from the hallway melting into the guy who teased his friends.
The whiskey warmed her from the inside, loosening the knot of anxiety in her chest. She contributed stories of her own: the time she had to create a funeral wreath for a beloved pet iguana, the chaos of Valentine’s Day deliveries. They listened, they laughed. It was normal. It was terrifyingly nice.
At one point, Taek got up to get more ice. As he passed behind the sofa, his hand, almost absently, brushed the back of her head where her curls were piled messily. It was a fleeting, casual contact, over in a second. But it sent a jolt through her, a live wire of memory connecting this moment to the dark, to his hands cradling her face.
She fell silent for a beat, the chatter of his friends fading to a buzz. He didn’t look back, just continued to the kitchen. But the air between them, even across the room, had changed again. It was no longer awkward, but charged with a new, quiet awareness.
Mina noticed. Of course she did. Her observant eyes flicked from Alex’s slightly flushed face to Taek’s back at the counter. A small, knowing smile played on her lips, but she said nothing, turning instead to debate Nick on load-bearing walls.
When Taek returned, he didn’t resume his seat. He leaned against the bookshelf near her, his presence a steady, warm gravity. The conversation shifted, ebbed. Nick launched into a story about a site inspection gone wrong, his arms waving.
Under the cover of his friend’s booming voice, Taek spoke, his words just for her. “This is okay?” he asked, his voice low.
Alex looked up at him. The faint smile was gone. In its place was a direct, searching honesty. She saw the question underneath: Is this too much? Are you still about to bolt?
She held his gaze, the sounds of his friends, the taste of whiskey, the scent of his home all weaving together. “It’s better than okay,” she said, and meant it.
He nodded, just once. A silent understanding passed between them, more profound than any treaty. The ceasefire wasn’t temporary. They were drafting a new set of terms, in real time, with witnesses.
Nick finished his story with a dramatic flourish, concluding with the collapse of a temporary scaffold into a mud pit. “And that’s why I always wear washable shoes,” he declared, raising his glass.
“A solid life policy,” Alex agreed, raising her own. Her eyes met Taek’s over the rim. He lifted his glass slightly in a private toast.
The evening deepened. The whiskey bottle grew lighter. Nick, fueled by single malts and a captive audience, decided the moment needed music. He commandeered Taek’s stereo, scrolling through his playlists with theatrical disdain.
“No, no, not this melancholy architect jazz,” he boomed. “We need a mood. A vibe.” He landed on a track—an upbeat, soulful funk song from a band Alex loved but never admitted to loving out loud.
A grin spread across Nick’s face. “This! This is it.” He turned the volume up, not to an obnoxious level, but to a volume that filled the space, that demanded a reaction.
Mina rolled her eyes but her foot was already tapping. Nick held a hand out to her. “Mina. A demonstration of rhythm for our guests.”
With a sigh that was entirely performative, Mina took his hand and let him pull her up. In the open space by the sofa, they began to move, a silly, exaggerated two-step that was more about making each other laugh than dancing. Nick spun her, she dipped him precariously, and they both stumbled, laughing.
The sound was infectious, a pure, unselfconscious joy. Alex watched, a smile breaking across her face. This was his world, loud and warm and slightly ridiculous. Taek was watching too, leaning against the bookshelf, a look of fond exasperation on his face.
Then Nick pointed at them. “Your turn! Neighborhood relations mandate a dance. It’s in the bylaws.”
Alex froze, her smile stuck. “Oh, no. I’m… I’m a spectator.”
“Nonsense!” Nick declared. “Taek, do your duty.”
Taek pushed off the shelf. He didn’t look at Nick. He looked at Alex, his head tilted in a question. The earlier charge was back, amplified by the music, by the laughter, by the simple, terrifying fact that she was still here. He extended a hand, palm up, an echo of his gesture in the hall.
No faint smile. No polite mask. Just an open, waiting question in his dark eyes.
The safe thing was to decline. To laugh it off, to take another sip of whiskey and let the moment pass. But she’d been safe for a month. She’d been safe for four years.
She placed her hand in his.
His fingers closed around hers, warm and sure, and he pulled her gently to her feet. The music wrapped around them, a brassy, joyful sound. He didn’t pull her into the center of the room. He simply held her hand, their joined hands resting between them, and began to move in a simple, shifting step that matched the beat.
It wasn’t a dramatic dip or spin. It was just swaying, a gentle rock from side to side, their clasped hands the anchor point. She was hyper-aware of every point of contact: the pressure of his palm against hers, the brush of his sweater against her arm, the scent of him cutting through the whiskey and perfume.
Nick whooped. Mina clapped in time. But their noise faded into the background. The world narrowed to the space between their bodies, to the rhythm they found together, hesitant at first, then smoother. She looked up at him. He was already looking down at her, his expression unreadable, intense.
“See?” he said, his voice barely audible over the music. “Manageable awkwardness.”
“Barely awkward at all,” she breathed back.
He smiled then, a real, full smile that reached his eyes, transforming his face. It was the smile she’d seen from afar for years, but never this close, never directed at her with such unguarded warmth. Her heart did a slow, heavy roll in her chest.
The song shifted to something slower, the funk melting into a smooth, bluesy groove. Nick and Mina’s silly dancing dissolved into a comfortable lean against each other, talking quietly. But Alex and Taek didn’t stop. Their swaying adapted to the new tempo, a fraction slower, a fraction closer.
His other hand came up, resting lightly on her waist. A bolt of pure sensation shot through her. Her free hand found the soft wool of his sweater at his shoulder. They weren’t really dancing anymore. They were holding each other, moving in a small, private circle in his living room, surrounded by the evidence of his life and the soft glow of lamps.
No one was watching now. The pretense of performance was gone. His thumb stroked a slow arc over her knuckles. She could feel the steady beat of his heart through the layers of fabric.
“I didn’t imagine it,” he murmured, his lips close to her temple.
She didn’t have to ask what he meant. The dark. The almost. The seismic shift. “No,” she whispered into the space near his collarbone. “You didn’t.”
He drew back just enough to look at her, his gaze searching her face. The music, the friends, the room—it all blurred into insignificance. There was only his hand in hers, his other on her waist, and the terrifying, wonderful truth hanging in the air between them.
“Alex,” he started, his voice rough.
But he didn’t finish. The song ended. The silence that followed was abrupt, ringing. They stood frozen in the center of the room, still holding each other, while the next track began—a quiet, familiar jazz piano piece. It was the same song that had been playing the night the lights went out.
The recognition hit them both at once. A shared, sharp inhale. His grip on her hand tightened almost imperceptibly. The past and the present collided in the soft notes of the piano.
Nick, oblivious, let out a contented sigh from the sofa. “Now that’s more like it. The architect jazz returns.”
Mina shushed him, her keen eyes missing nothing. She gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod to Taek, then deliberately turned her back, engaging Nick in a pointed conversation about concrete.
The spell wasn’t broken. It was deepened, made more potent by the callback. Taek didn’t let go. He leaned his forehead against hers, a mirror of their pose in the candlelit dark. His eyes were closed. “I regret the lights coming on,” he said, the words a soft confession against her skin.
Her breath caught. All the careful walls, the polite distance, the month of agony, crumbled to dust. “So do I.”
When he kissed her, it wasn’t the hesitant, almost-kiss of the blackout. It was sure, and deep, and tasted of whiskey and resolution. It was an answer to a question they’d both been too afraid to ask for weeks. Her hands came up to cradle his face, her fingers sliding into his dark hair. He pulled her closer, his arm wrapping firmly around her waist, anchoring her to him.
From the sofa, Nick made a soft, choked sound of surprise, then a muffled, “Finally.”