She stares up at me. The room is so quiet I hear the log collapse in the fire.
“Are you asking me to move in, Edward Rogers?” She arches an eyebrow. “With your crooked bookshelf and your war against spices?”
“Yeah.” I don’t blink. “Move in. I’ll straighten the damn shelf. I’ll throw out the cinnamon. I’ll—hell, I’ll build you a studio on the north side. Good sunlight. Big sink. Storage for all those brushes you leave lying around like land mines.”
Her mouth falls open, then closes around a laugh. “You’d build me a studio?”
“I’ll pour the fucking slab when the ground thaws. I'll have it framed in a week. I can mill trim from the deadfall. I’ll make you a workbench that won’t wobble when you get mad and slam your elbow into it for emphasis.”
She’s laughing and crying at the same time now, which is apparently a thing she does when she’s happy enough to drive me insane.
“And my gallery?”
“I’ll help.” The words are easier than I expect. Truer. “I’ll sand and stain frames until my hands look like I bathed in walnut. I’ll hang the shows straight. I’ll haul boxes and say ‘yes, ma’am’ to the fire code guy. I’ll drive you to town in a goddamn tie if that’s what it takes.” I scrub a hand over my jaw. “I’ll carve you a sign. ‘Penny Kaye’s—’ what did you call it?”
“Gallery of Wild and Wonderful Things,” she whispers, swiping a tear from her eye and grinning like the glorious sunrise peeking through the window.
“Right. I’ll carve that into a slab of oak that’ll outlive both of us.”
I take her wrists and kiss the pulse in one, then the other, because I can. Because I want to.
I want to live with her. I want tolive.
She laughs wetly and wipes at her eyes with the edge of my sleeve. “You’d really do all that, Edward?”
“I'd doanything,” I say, and it scares me how much I mean it. “Anything you need. Anything that keeps you here.”
Her hands slide up my chest, over the worn cotton, to the back of my neck.
“Okay,” she breathes. “But I have conditions.”
“Of course you do.”
“One,” she says, ticking a finger up between us, “we replace those prison curtains with something that isn’t the exact color of despair.”
“Done.”
“Two, you put that soldier sketch in the gallery someday. Not opening night. But someday. People need to see it.” She pins me with a look when I start to shake my head. “That’s not negotiable.”
I let the resistance rise, feel how old and tired it is, and let it go.
“Someday,” I say. It’s the most honest compromise I’ve ever made. “Maybe. And not because it’ll sell. But because you say it should be seen. And you're always right.”
Her smile is small and fierce. “Exactly.”
“And three?” I ask.
She leans in, lips an inch from mine. “Three… when we go down the mountain, you stand next to me when I tell my parents. We tell them together. Because this—” her fingers tighten at my nape, “—isours.”
“Damn right it is.”
Her breath fans my mouth; I’m seconds from kissing her when she pulls back, mischief sparking. “Also, I’m replacing your chipped mugs with something that doesn’t taste like tin.”
I snort. “Now you’ve gone too far.”
We both laugh, the sound new and good in the quiet. Then I do what I’ve wanted to do since she saidyou’re the point… I kiss her. Her hands are warm where they slide under my collar to pull me down, and mine are careful on her jaw, then not careful at all.
“I love you,” I say against her mouth, because saying it in the calm after the storm feels different. It feels like choosing it.
