Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 48039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 48039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
“I apologized,” I add, voice going raw. “Over and over. For the roof. For the night. For not holding you harder. For letting you walk to the bus station with a suitcase and pretending I couldn’t go after you because I didn’t have the right to be selfish.”
Her eyes shine. “Why didn’t you?”
“Because I was sixteen and stupid and I thought the brave thing was letting you run toward a future that didn’t have my ash all over it.”
She makes a sound that might break me in half if I let it.
“Say you’re angry,” I tell her, and I mean it. “You can be. You should be. I’ll take all of it.”
She shakes her head, water in her eyes, fight and tenderness wrestling in the lines of her mouth. “I’m angry we lost years,” she says. “I’m angry you were alone inside that for so long. But I’m not angry at you for the fire. Not once.”
Something inside me flinches like a body resisting light. “You should be.”
“I choose not to be,” she says, and the way she says choose lands like a hand on my back, firm and warm and not letting me step away from the truth. “You didn’t cause my father’s death. Faulty wires and a split-second decision and a man’s love did. If you need to hate someone, hate the code that let that panel stay in a house too long. Hate the winter that made the flames run fast. But don’t you dare hate yourself and call it justice.”
She steps closer. We’re chest to chest now, not touching, but the inches between us are over. Heat rolls off her. My hands lift and stop a breath from her waist because I won’t take anything she doesn’t hand me, not now.
“You wrote to me,” she says, the words almost a whisper, and everything in me goes white-hot at the wonder in her voice. “All that time.”
“Yeah.”
“Can I—” She swallows. “Can I read them?”
I nod once, the only motion I can manage with my heart punching my ribcage from the inside. “They’re yours.”
She looks like she might fold. She doesn’t. She straightens, jaw set, and then—God help me—her hand rises and lays over my chest. Right where the tempo of me turns reckless.
I stop pretending I can breathe.
Her palm is warm through my shirt. Firm. Claiming. It’s not sexy, not on purpose. It’s worse. It’s intimate in a way I don’t know how to survive.
“I don’t know what we’re doing,” she says, eyes on her own hand like she can will my heart to slow down. “And I’m not promising anything I can’t keep.”
“I don’t want a promise,” I say. “I want a chance.”
“Axel—”
“To be the man who doesn’t let go this time.” I lean in because I can’t not. “Let me.”
She drags her bottom lip through her teeth. My restraint takes that personally. The box feels too small; the air is all heat and noise and her. I whisper her name like I’m trying to convince myself not to destroy whatever fragile thing we’re building.
“Savannah.”
She looks up. Direct hit.
The ambulance door thumps once, someone walking by, and the real world crashes into the box with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. We don’t jump. We just… don’t move for a long breath.
“I accused you,” she says, voice steadier than mine. “Of giving up.”
“You were right about everything but my heart,” I say. “That never slowed once.”
She breathes out hard, like the fight drains and leaves something raw. “Say it again.”
“My heart didn’t slow.” I take her wrist, careful, and lift her palm off me an inch, just enough that the sudden lack makes the rest of me ache. “Not for a day.”
Her eyes close, lashes damp. When they open, there’s a new kind of fire there. Not the one that eats and eats. The one that warms.
“You’re too much,” she says, choking on a laugh that hurts. “You always were.”
“Yeah,” I say, and don’t apologize.
The radio on the dash squawks. Someone needs a unit to check a false alarm at the grocery store. The mundane claws open the moment, and I can either let it bleed out or stitch it to something that will hold.
“I’ll bring the letters tonight,” I say.
She nods. “The overlook?”
“Seventeen hundred.”
“Bossy,” she mutters, but the smile this time isn’t an accident. “Okay.”
We breathe in time a little longer, like our bodies need a minute to remember how to be separate. Her fingers slide down the front of my shirt, not intentionally; she’s pulling away and my chest follows without asking. Then she steps back. The space she leaves is immediate and unacceptable.
I catch the handle behind me with one hand and keep the other at my side because if I reach for her now I’ll forget caution, and she deserves our caution almost as much as she deserves our heat.