He cuts me off again. Not with words, but with a soft, pleased, gasping kind of a noise that follows the crinkle of wrapping paper falling to the floor. “You knit me a sweater?”
“Obviously,” I mumble around the thumb nail that finds its way to my mouth as he surveys the swath of red fabric. “If you don’t like it—”
“Will you stop that?”
Chastising me with a tut, Finn wastes no time whipping off his store-bought sweater and replacing it for the chunky knit I lost a whole lot of sleep trying to finish, trying to makegood. As he tugs it over his head, I hold my breath and wait for it to be too small or too scratchy, or for some other inevitable fuck-up to make itself known, except it doesn’t. There are no snags in the fabric, no uneven stitches. It fits him perfectly, a little loose like I wanted, a little cropped like I knew he’d want.
Sidling closer, I toy with the hem sitting a couple of inches above his jeans waistband. “So you do? Like it?”
“I love it,” he replies, and he means it, I can tell by his voice and his eyes and his smile—his smile that fades into a frown when he brushes his knuckles over his cheek and something tickles his inner wrist. Rolling back the left cuff, he thumbs the little charm I hid in the stitching. “What’s this?”
I swallow. “Not quite mylittle broken heart,” I quote his own words back to him, thinking of the wooden heart that lives on my dresser, the larger replica of the gold one pinched between Finn’s fingers. “But I thought I’d return the favor.”
For a long moment, Finn just stares at the heart-shaped charm. And then he stares at me for just as long, just as intently, just as… fuck.Loving.
“Jesus Christ, baby,” he says again, less of a groan this time and more of a… I don’t know. Something tender and hopeful and rugged, something that perfectly matches the way I feel when he roughly cups my face and drops his forehead to mine, eyesfluttering shut as he brushes my nose with his. “I am so fucking glad you exist.”
My breath catches and sits like a rock in the back of my throat. Frustration has it doubling in size, has me frowning and pulling back, has Finn frowning too and muttering a concerned, “What?”
“You always say these nice things and I can never think of anything good to say back.”
“You don’t have to, honey.”
“But I want to. I want…” I sigh, fisting his sweater like a damn comfort blanket. “I want you to know that I feel all those things too. I don’t show it very well or say it very well either, but I do.”
“You show it just fine, Lottie.” As if to prove his point, he brings his wrist up between us, giving it a shake so the charm jingles. “I know.”
Relief settles my stomach. “Good.”
“I got you something too.”
“Really?”
Reprimanding my shock with another cluck of his tongue, Finn fishes a small parcel out of his back pocket and presses it into my palm. Not even trying to temper my excitement, I rip the thing open, something I’ll never admit to be a squeal leaving me at what I find.
Finn chuckles. “I knew you’d like it.”
As I hurriedly unravel the leather belt and slide it through the loops of my waistband, fastening it and hooking my thumbs around the great, big, obnoxious buckle stamped with the wordluckyin capital letters, I find thatlikedoesn’t quite cut it.
I shift my gaze to Finn, and the same revelation strikes me.
41
He teasingly asks if she wore the sweater first so it would smell like her.
A pretty, perfect blush says it all.
We spendthe end of the year doing a whole lot of blissful, absolute nothing.
On New Year’s Eve, we watch the fireworks from the deck of the A-frame. The first Sunday after, I watch endless episodes of The Powerpuff Girls with Silas and his great-granddaughter, and I try really, really hard not to be so amused by the little girl christening me Buttercup—I try really, really hard not to feel so…muchwhen the old man meets my boyfriend and drags him away to give some kind of a speech that I don’t hear, that no one relays back to me, yet it settles behind my ribcage and burns anyway.
The days are muddy after that, indistinguishable from one another because they’re much the same. I can only judge the passing of time by the number of strikes gouged into the wooden objects that get pressed into my hand at the end of each day.
Today, it’s a carnation.Carnations. Six of them, sitting on my bedside table. Five petals each—thirty in total to match the thirty scores shared across the stems. Thirty days of sobriety.
Thirty days of Finn, more or less.
Curled up on one side of my bed, I stare at the man sleeping on the other. I didn’t kick him out tonight. I couldn’t make myself. It was too hard, and that worries me. It’s the reason I’m awake, endlessly pondering what it means that I like sleeping beside someone now. That maybe I always did—maybe it just was never the right person. Which brings me to Finn is the right person, and fuck, that’s worrying enough,terrifyingenough, all on its own.
