Page 111 of Snake

Aloud, he responded to the last thing she said. “You’re moving to St. Louis. I know.”

She nodded. “And you and I? I mean, we haven’t really had a relationship at all yet. I don’t want to make any big moves on the basis of this single conversation, after everything else.”

With a flash of insight, Cox understood what his job was here: to listen, to take her worries seriously, and to be supportive. While he was determined to storm through brick walls to make this happen, Autumn was a thinker and needed to examine every obstacle before she took it on.

So he said, “There’s a lot of threads to untangle, yeah.”

“It’s too soon to ... I don’t know. It’s too soon.”

A new thread of worry began to wrap around Cox’s hope, but he also heard that he was right: she was telling herself the same things she said to him. She wasn’t looking for reasons they wouldn’t work, she was looking for ways around the reasons.

“It’s too soon to commit,” he offered. When she nodded her agreement, he asked, “Can we commit to trying?”

Her smile at that was big and bright and bursting with relief, and oh god, she was beautiful. He’d never known anyone anywhere who made him feel like this; he wished he could embed her in his chest and never be apart from her.

“I can do that. I mean, Ida’s always saying I need to decide what I want first and then figure out how to get it. I want you, and you want me, so let’s figure it out.”

A shower of sparks went through Cox, that buzzy, breathtaking feeling he was beginning to understand was happiness. Love. Hope. They’d broken through the rocky face of his heart like the first shoots of intrepid trees, determined to grow where before there was only cold stone.

He grabbed her close and kissed her, saying in that way all the words that had so often eluded him, all the words that had never before occurred to him, all the feelings, needs, even dreams, that were fluttering to life as she held him.

“I love you,” she whispered against his beard, and something exploded inside him. He clenched her so tightly she gasped and went rigid.

“Sorry,” he muttered, easing back. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” She stroked his cheek. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, just ... nobody ever said that to me before. I ... sorry.”

It wasn’t easy to maintain eye contact after that admission, but he focused on the love in her eyes and let her look.

“We have a lot to talk about, you and I,” she said.

Cox nodded. He didn’t want to talk about any of it—but that wasn’t actually true. He didn’t know how to talk about it, it made him uncomfortable to think about talking about it, but he wanted her to know him. All of him. And he wanted to know every corner of her.

He wanted to love her and be loved by her. Both their maps, filled in all the way to the edges until they joined into one.

“But I don’t want to talk right now,” Autumn said, pitching her voice low, like a purr.

Cox’s brain did a screeching drift. He’d been preparing for a long, angsty conversation, with her tears and his regret, and, at best, her hesitant agreement to try again, moving slowly.

Maybe she meant she wanted him to leave, but the tone of her voice suggested a different intent.

Unsure, he asked. “What?”

She hooked a finger into the placket of his shirt. “I don’t want to talk right now,” she repeated in the same come-hither tone. She wasn’t asking him to leave.

Cox grinned so wide his cheeks ached. “You got a bed in this dump?”

Her eyes went wide as she laughed. “Oh my god, did my grumpy guy just make a joke?”

My grumpy guy. He liked that.

“I’ll save my funny side for you.”

“You’d better. That’s a precious resource. I’m not sharing.” Hooking her arms around his neck again, she jumped without warning off the island, trusting him to catch her. He did.

“Bed’s upstairs,” she cooed. “Giddy-up.”

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