Page 69 of Sawyer
I kiss her like that’s a fact we both can live in.
Heat rises, slow, uncoiling. She slides my jacket off, folds it with an absent grace that makes me stupidly hungry. My fingers learn the back of her dress where the zipper hides; I move slow, giving her time to reconsider, to laugh, to stop me. She doesn’t. The fabric whispers down, and she’s standing in soft lace and bravery. I keep my eyes on hers as long as I can, then let my gaze travel with reverence that’s half prayer.
“Beautiful,” I say, because my vocabulary is battlefield blunt and this is the only word that lands anywhere close.
She steps into me, presses a kiss under my jaw, fingers slipping beneath my shirt. “Show me,” she says.
I do what she asks, unbuttoning slow enough to make my own hands shake. Her palms touch my chest like they’re learning terrain she intends to paint later. I feel more seen than stripped. When my shirt hits the floor, she tips her head, studies a scar like a curator and a lover at once, and presses her mouth to it. I forget how to breathe correctly for a second. She smiles against me, small and wicked.
We make it to the bed in a series of stumbles and laughter and quick, sharp inhalations when fingers find warm skin. I lie back, and she follows, braced above me, hair slipping around us like a curtain that keeps the world out. “I want to set the pace,” she says, breathless but sure. “But you can take the wheel whenever you want.”
My grin is helpless. “Shared command,” I murmur. “My favorite kind.”
Her mouth traces the geography of me—the line of throat and shoulder and the places no one sees except the few who’ve earned maps. I return the cartography, fingers sketching a path down her spine; my palms span her hip, learn its new shapes—strength and a bruise flowered into yellow and green. She shivers when I mouth the edge of lace. I slow, and check her eyes. She nods, a yes that’s both small and blazing. The lace joins the growing trail on the floor.
We take our time because we can. We’ve earned a clock that doesn’t tick like a bomb. She rides me down into the mattress with a gasp that’s all light after the tunnel. I meet her there, hands guiding, hearts synced. The world narrows to breath and skin and the long, rolling rhythm you make when you know you’re not stealing minutes, you’re spending them like a currency that keeps printing.
“Look at me,” she whispers as the crest builds, and I do—God, I do—until the room blurs at the edges, until her mouth opens into my name, until the only thing I know is that love feels like coming home in a body that knows the route by heart.
After, we don’t rush the return. She collapses on my chest, cheek over my heartbeat. I smooth her hair back and kiss the spot where protest and praise share a language. The ceiling is thesame as it always was, but the air under it is different—cleaner, like the house exhaled with us.
“I want to say something ridiculous,” she says after a while, voice muffled in my skin.
“Please do,” I say. “Ridiculous is my favorite genre lately.”
She lifts her head. Her eyes are still starry and a little wet at the corners. “Move in with me,” she says, like a dare and a prayer at once. “Not tomorrow. Not in a way that drags your duffel by the strap and calls it commitment. After the sentencing. After my father’s board finishes building the scaffolding around what’s left. When the kids finish the second half of the mural and the city looks a shade kinder. Move in then. Bring your stupid kettlebell and the pan you claim is iron but is definitely not. Bring the ugly mug you refuse to throw out. Bring the way you look at me like I’m what happens after a war ends.”
There are a lot of things I can do under fire. Talking is not always one of them. I manage to prop up on an elbow, frame her face with my other hand, and find my voice. “Copy,” I say, hoarse and happy and every other thing. “And while we’re swapping ridiculous…” I lean down, fish the small box I stashed in my discarded jacket, and hold it out. Her eyes widen, equal parts shock and oh-God-no-you-didn’t and yes-yes-you-did.
“Don’t panic,” I say fast. “This isn’t an ambush. It’s an idea I’ve been carrying around like a coin. You don’t have to cash it yet.” I flip the lid. Inside, a simple band—brushed platinum, thin as the white line she painted, inlaid across the center. “I asked a jeweler to make a line that would never rub off. When you’re ready. Not because I need to stake a claim. Because I want to build the rest of the map with you.”
Her hand flies to her mouth, and laughter bubbles up, the kind people make when the universe gets it right for a change. “You carried a ring in your pocket while you patrolled my hallway?”
“And in three safe houses and one command trailer,” I admit, sheepish and not. “I almost asked you when I was prying a flash-bang out from under a rolling door. Thought better of it.”
She sits, tucks her legs under her, and takes the band out carefully like it might be thin glass. She balances it on her finger without sliding it home. “After the sentencing,” she says, voice warm and steady. “After the mural. After we let the world stop screaming for at least three consecutive weeks. Then—yes. Put that on me.”
My grin is a stupid thing with teeth. “Then it’s a plan.”
We make love again because saying yes to a future makes you greedy for the present. It’s slower this time, softer, a study in the way heat can be a kind of prayer and not just a flare. We learn each other again with the silly, sweet joy of people who didn’t just survive the fire—they built a hearth out of what didn’t burn.
Sometime in the dark hours, the house creaks the way old houses do when the night settles deeper. She stiffens and then remembers where she is, who she’s with. I run my palm down her arm, count out my four by fours in her ear—breathe with me—and she melts again, sleep sneaking in like a kind thief.
Weeks turn like good pages.The sentencing lands with numbers that feel like justice measured instead of rage vented. The kids finish the mural in a crush of color that makes oldmen cry on a corner where nobody used to stop. Gregory shows up only when invited, listening more than talking, building a scholarship that doesn’t have his name on it. HarborShield becomes part of the house, like Edgar and the wisteria and the way the afternoon light finds the stairwell and turns it gold for seven minutes each day.
I move in like a soldier unlearning how to live out of bags: one drawer, then two; a mug that she calls hideous and then uses; a kettlebell that Edgar threatens to dust. With Dean’s blessing I take fewer long-haul details and more local contracts that let me wake up with her hair on my ribs and the sun thinking about climbing over the ridge. BRAVO becomes a hummingbird in the background instead of the engine under every step. It’s weird. It’s good.
One evening in early fall when the city smells like fog and baked brick, Cam and I take the long way home along the Boardwalk. She buys a paper cone of candied almonds and makes me hold it until my fingers stick. When we reach the studio, she climbs the steps two at a time and stops under the skylight, breathless for no reason that has to be solved.
“Ready?” she asks, mischief and courage braided.
“For what?”
“For a door that doesn’t creak.” She takes the ring out of the pocket where she’s kept it like a talisman between then and now. The studio light finds the inlay and turns it into a thread of moon. She holds it to me.
I take it like ammunition and prayer. “Camille Kingsley,” I say, because full names make good vows, “you are color and oxygen and the bravest person I’ve ever met. Be my home, and I’ll beyours. Not as a wall you hide behind but as the roof we choose to build together where rain sounds like music.”
She laughs, chokes, nods. “That was… very Sawyer.”
