Page 202 of Carrick
After the meeting broke up,I lingered—moving slowly through the house, collecting pieces of stillness wherever I could find them. A hand on the railing. The texture of a hallway runner under my bare feet. The way the sunlight caught on Carrick’s coffee mug left on the side table, a faint ring of warmth still pressed into the wood.
The world outside had sharpened its teeth. But something in me had gone quiet.
Not empty. Just… centered. Like a storm had passed through my body and left behind a kind of reverence for what was still standing.
When I reached Carrick’s room, the door was half-open, the light inside low and golden. He sat at the edge of the bed, forearms braced on his knees, head tilted slightly like he’d been listening for me before I’d even touched the handle.
He didn’t look up when I stepped in. But I knew he knew it was me.
I closed the door behind me, softly, and crossed the room without speaking. The moment didn’t need words.
I crawled into the bed beside him, careful not to startle, careful not to ask anything of him—not even attention. I just curled onto my side, facing him, one arm tucked beneath the pillow, the other draped loosely across my stomach. My body still wore his hoodie. My skin still remembered his touch. My heart still beat like it was measuring time by the sound of his breathing.
He didn’t move at first. Then slowly, deliberately, he turned. Shifted. Laid back. And let me curl into his side. His arm came up and around my shoulders. Not tight, not possessive. Just there. Anchoring. Present. The same way it had been in the bath, and on the floor, and in every breath I’d taken since I gave him my grief and he didn’t flinch.
When he finally spoke, it was soft. Careful. “Still with me?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
His breath released slowly against my temple. “Good.”
I didn’t tell him how much that meant. How that single question—still with me—cut through the noise in my head and made room for something quieter, something steadier, to rise. Instead, I let my hand drift up, resting just over his heart.
And we stayed there, tangled in cotton and breath and unspoken truths, while the rest of the world spun too fastaround us. The longer we stayed like that, the more I felt the edge inside me dull. Not disappear. Just soften. Like maybe the sharpest parts of my grief didn’t have to carve me open every time I let someone close.
I could feel the weight of his hand at the base of my neck, warm and steady, thumb drifting gently along my hairline. The motion wasn’t rhythmic. It wasn’t calculated. It was just there—a man who couldn’t stop touching me, even in silence, like some part of him needed the contact to believe I was still real.
And I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to let the rest of the world in. But the words had been waiting for me all day, coiled behind my ribs, heavier every time I tried to breathe around them.
And now, with him beside me, still and open and his, they finally rose to the surface.
“I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you, too.” I didn’t lift my head when I said it. I didn’t look at him. I just let it fall between us like truth had its own gravity. His body went still. His fingers stopped moving. The fan turned another lazy rotation overhead, and I could hear the sound of his inhale—slow, deliberate, like he was steadying himself before he spoke.
But he didn’t speak right away, and the silence made my chest tighten, my breath catch—but I hadn’t said it for a response. I hadn’t said it because I needed reassurance. I said it because he needed to know—because this wasn’t about lust or comfort or some trauma-laced need to cling to something steady. This was about him. About the way he looked at me like I wasn’t broken. The way he held me like every fracture was sacred, not something to be hidden. The way his voice quieted the chaos in me when nothing else ever could.
He shifted finally—his hand sliding down from the nape of my neck to rest at my waist. His thumb pressed gently intothe fabric of his hoodie. His voice, when it came, was quiet and careful. “You mean that?” he asked.
I nodded. “Yeah. I do.”
His throat worked around a swallow. “You’re not just scared?”
“I am,” I said. “But not just scared.”
He blinked, like he wasn’t sure if he was allowed to believe that. Like the truth of it made something in him ache.
“I need you to understand,” I continued, “this isn’t about needing someone to fix me. This isn’t about having nowhere else to go. I’ve been alone before. I can survive it.”
“But you don’t want to,” he said quietly.
I let out a shaky breath. “No. Not anymore.”
The silence between us shifted then. Stopped being weight and started being warmth. His hand curled tighter at my waist. My fingers drifted higher across his chest, tracing the faint rhythm of his heartbeat beneath the cotton.
And for the first time, I saw him hesitate. Not because he didn’t want to say it. But because it meant something now. Because there was risk in speaking it out loud.
His voice was almost a whisper. “Are you saying you…?”
I didn’t make him finish. I closed the space between us, pressed my lips softly to his. Not as a question, not as a promise—just as truth.
