Page 19 of Surrendering To The Forbidden Mountain Man

"I went home that night and sat at my kitchen table for two hours." His jaw works. His hands are steady on the box, but barely. "Wrote you a letter telling you everything I'd been holding down since you were twenty. How I felt. What I wanted. That I knew it was wrong and I wanted it anyway."

"You never sent it."

"I put it in the footlocker and told myself I'd burn it. That was eight years ago. It's still there because I couldn't destroy the one honest thing I ever wrote."

My hand on the door frame tightens. "Reid."

"I was wrong." The words come out stripped. No military phrasing, no tactical precision. "Yesterday. Everything I said in this kitchen. I was wrong, and I was scared, and I used the worst possible version of the truth to push you away because staying meant admitting that you chose me, and I don't know how to be chosen."

The anger wavers. Holds. Wavers again.

"You called it a fixation."

"I know."

"You reduced twelve years of my life to a clinical term because you found a card and a photo in my closet."

"I know."

"You stood in my kitchen and told me I missed a normal life because of you. As if my life isn't normal. As if choosing to wait for a man I loved instead of settling for someone I didn't is some kind of failure."

"You're right." His voice cracks on the second word. "You're right about all of it. And the reason I couldn't see it yesterday is because looking at that box and seeing the evidence that you loved me before I earned it made me feel like I stole something from you. And that's my fear, not your problem."

The hallway is quiet. Late afternoon light, thin, gold. His boots on the landing. My bare feet on the threshold. The box between us with two envelopes and a graduation photo and eight years of a letter he couldn't burn.

"You wrote me a letter when I was twenty-two."

"Yes."

"You kept it for eight years."

"In my footlocker. Under my service records. Moved it to my house when I came home. Still in the same compartment. I just transferred footlockers."

"And you want to tell me that what I felt was a fixation?"

A sound comes out of him. Not a laugh. Closer to the noise he made the night he kissed me, when his control broke and something underneath it surfaced. "I had a letter in my footlocker and you had a card in your closet, and we're both idiots."

The anger cracks. Underneath it, everything else rushes forward.

"Read the letter," he says. Quiet. "Then decide if you want me to leave."

My hands take the box. The second envelope is heavier than expected. Inside, a single sheet of paper. Military-issue notebook paper, torn along the perforated edge. His blocky handwriting, smaller than the card, pressed hard enough to leave grooves.

Mira. I'm deploying tomorrow. Six months, maybe longer. I should be writing my mission briefing but I'm sitting at this table instead because you walked into Hank's tonight in a red dress and I left because staying would've meant doing something I can't take back. You're twenty-two. Ben's sister. Too young, too close, too everything. And I've been telling myself that for two years, and it's getting less true every time I see you. I don't know what to do with this. I don't know if I'll ever know. But if anything happens over there, I wanted these words to exist somewhere outside my head. You are the most beautiful thing I've ever been afraid of. Reid.

The paper trembles in my hands. Not from the cold.

He's watching me read it. Standing on the landing with his hands empty, the box gone, the letter gone, everything he's held back for eight years sitting in my palms on a sheet of military notebook paper with his handwriting pressed so hard the pen nearly tore through.

"You called me the most beautiful thing you were afraid of."

"I was thirty-two. The poetry was limited."

A laugh tears out of me. Wet, sudden, almost a sob. His eyes close for a second. When they open, they're glassy.

"I'm in love with you," he says. No operational calm. No tactical phrasing. Raw, rough, standing on a landing in a hallway with bad lighting. "I've been in love with you since you were too young for me to do anything about it. And I'm still in love with you now that you're not. And I'm sorry I called it anything other than what it is."

"What is it?"