Page 144 of The Clinch
HARD COUNT (LIZ)
Iwake before the alarm because my body has already decided this day matters.
I lie still in Leo’s bed, staring up at the dim gray-blue ceiling. Our bed, if I’m being honest. Over the last few weeks, I’ve moved out of the guest room in quiet increments until my things stopped looking temporary.
The air conditioner hums hard against the August humidity pressing at the windows. New York in late summer is mean, swollen with heat and ready to snap.
My first day.
Orientation, logistics, introductions, the long administrative march into the life I’ve spent years trying to claw my way back to. Excitement sits high in my chest. Under it, something sharper. Pressure. The old fear that if I stop moving for even a second, everything I built will reveal itself as caffeine, nerve, and brute force.
The bedroom door is open. Light spills in from the kitchen.
Coffee. Blender. Leo.
I walk out barefoot in his T-shirt and find him already dressed for camp, black shorts, dark fitted T-shirt, hair ruffledfrom sleep. He turns at the sound of me, and the whole room changes. The way he looks at me makes the kitchen feel smaller.
“Morning, Flash.”
Sleep roughens his voice and makes one word feel more intimate than it should.
“Morning.”
He turns the smoothie toward me, then my coffee. “You need fuel.”
“You say that as if I’m heading into battle.”
His mouth shifts. “You’re going to med school orientation in Manhattan in late August. Close enough.”
That almost makes me laugh. My nerves are sitting too high for it. I reach for the coffee instead and take a sip, then another, letting the taste steady me.
He watches me for a second. “You nervous?”
“I’m fine.”
He comes around the island and stops in front of me. “Look at me.”
I do. His hand settles at the side of my neck, warm and steady, his thumb under my jaw.
“You deserve this,” he says.
The objection sticks on the way up. “What if I walk in there and realize I’m way over my head?”
“Then you sit down, listen, and do it anyway.” His hand slides to my waist and draws me closer. “Because this is yours.”
I’m too full of feeling to trust my mouth. “You keep looking at me as if you plan to keep me.”
“I do plan to keep you.” He says it without smiling, and something in his face tells me he knows exactly how loaded that sounds.
The kiss he gives me is slow and sure, enough to leave me flushed and my breathing uneven by the time he lifts his head.
He glances toward the windows. “It’s brutal out already. Finish that. The car will be downstairs in thirty.”
I blink. “The what?”
“Your car.” He says it with maddening calm. “The train’s a mess in this weather, and you don’t need to start your first day sweaty and disheveled.”
I hate how fast relief arrives.
