Page 318 of Wild Card 13

“I know.”

She squeezed my fingers once. Then let go. “We’ll figure it all out.” She lifted the folder. “Go before I get us both fired. My place. Seven.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She pointed the folder at me. “Dangerous.”

I winked. “Only after hours.”

Then the question rose up in me, easy and impossible and ridiculous enough that I knew if I waited, I would overthink it until it became something else. I asked, “Will you be my girlfriend again?”

She smiled. Kissed my cheek quickly. She walked away from me then, spine straight, heels clicking on the arena floor.

Except she looked back once. Over her shoulder. And blushed.

CHAPTER 41

LUCY

NOW

By August, love had stopped arriving like a confession.

It came in coffee cups left on my desk before eight and a toothbrush tucked beside his sink. It came in the blanket he kept folded over the back of his couch because Dottie liked that one best, and in the way my favorite mug had somehow ended up in his kitchen cabinet without either of us discussing what that meant.

The first time Ty and I had loved each other, everything had felt bright and urgent and too big for the bodies we were living in. At eighteen, love had been summer heat and lake water and promises made under a sky wide enough to make anything seem possible.

This time, adoration did not ask to be believed all at once. It simply kept showing up until the shape of it became impossible to deny.

Dottie noticed before I let myself say it out loud. Every morning, whether we left from my apartment or his lake house or met in the middle because we were still trying to be responsible adults about the whole thing, she trotted ahead of me with her leash between her teeth and a deeply unrealistic faith in routine. She expected Ty’s truck. She expected his hand on her head. She expected him to crouch in front of her and say, “Morning, Dot,” like she had personally saved his life by existing in his general direction.

Before I noticed how easily my hand found his in the dark now. Before I noticed that Naomi had stopped pretending she was notpleased every time a Paper Lantern cup appeared on my desk. Before I noticed that the basket of Dottie’s toys in the corner of Ty’s living room looked less like something temporary and more like evidence.

That morning, Dottie pulled me down the shaded path at Alder Lake Park with her ears flopping, her paws damp from the grass, and her entire body committed to the idea that every squirrel was a direct threat to national security.

Ty walked beside me with his coffee in one hand and Dottie’s collapsible water bowl clipped to his belt loop. He had not asked if he could bring it. He had just started bringing it.

That was how so much of the last several weeks unfolded. Quietly. Without ceremony. Without either of us standing in the middle of our lives and announcing that something permanent was being built.

The first morning after he had asked me if I was his girlfriend again, he showed up at my office with coffee and did not kiss me in the hallway.

The next night, he came over and helped me rearrange the books on the shelves he had watched me pick out weeks before, then fell asleep on my couch with Dottie’s head on his thigh and one hand still wrapped around my ankle.

Two days later, I stayed at his house and found a drawer emptied for me in a nightstand.

I had stared at it for so long Ty had leaned in the doorway, arms crossed over his bare chest, hair still damp from the shower, and said, “Too much?”

I slipped my travel makeup pouch and my sketch pad into their new home. “It’s perfectly thoughtful.”

Then he had smiled at me, slow and sleepy and beautiful.

He did not ask me to rush. He did not take one night in his bed and turn it into an assumption that my life had moved. He did not make jokes in front of the team. He did not crowd me at work. He did not push when I needed a door half-open instead of flung wide.

But he made room. A toothbrush. A drawer. A blanket Dottie liked. A quiet place for my coffee on his dock in the morning. His hand finding mine under the kitchen table when the past tried to put its teeth in me.

We were not what we had been at eighteen.

We were slower. More careful. More honest.