Page 72 of Down, Boy

"Deal."

"And you're buying the pie."

"Also deal."

"And if Maverick eats my couch, you're replacing it."

I look down at the puppy, who's now trying to gnaw on Callie's stethoscope. "That's fair."

She kisses me again, quick and sweet. "We're really doing this."

"We're really doing this," I agree.

Maverick barks his agreement, and somewhere in the back of the clinic, Biscuit barks in protest. Callie's phone buzzes with what's probably a client message. My watch beeps with a reminder I forgot I'd set.

It's chaos. It's messy. It's completely unplanned.

And somewhere between the puppy trying to eat everything in sight and Callie's sarcastic commentary about my place on her priority list, I realize I've stopped thinking about flight plans and mission objectives and carefully plotted trajectories.

I'm just here. With her. With dogs who don't respect personal space and a future that doesn't come with a manual.

Best decision I've ever made.

Her house at nine that night is a cardboard archipelago, and we navigate it by lamplight with Maggie’s pie boxed on the counter and three dogs exiled to the living room by executive order.

"Rules," Callie says, taping a box shut and pointing the tape gun at me like a sidearm. "You’re here to pack. Books in boxes. Mugs in paper. Hands to yourself until the kitchen’s done."

"That’s a lot of rules for a man who brought pie."

"The pie bought you entry. It did not buy you privileges."

"Noted." I wrap a mug that says WORLD’S OKAYEST VETERINARIAN and set it in the box with the reverence it deserves. "For the record, I’ve missed the rules. Two weeks of nobody threatening me with office supplies. I didn’t know how to live."

She laughs, and then she doesn’t—the laugh cuts out halfway, and when I look up she’s watching me across the boxes with her whole heart out where I can see it, two weeks of empty road and bad phone calls and one rehearsed speech sitting between us on the floor like a fourth dog.

"You came back," she says. Quiet. Not a joke anywhere in it.

"I was always coming back." I put down the tape. "Took me too long to figure out the flight plan. But you were never not the destination, Callie. There was never a version of the map⁠—"

I don’t get to finish the navigation metaphor, which is probably for the best, because she comes over the boxes.

Not around. Over. A knee on the book box, a hand fisted in my shirt, and her mouth on mine with two weeks of missing me behind it, and I stop being a man with a speech and become a man with his hands full of the only future he’s ever actually wanted. We knock the tape gun off the counter. Neither of us files a complaint.

"Kitchen’s done enough," she breathes against my jaw.

"Thought the rules⁠—"

"I make the rules. I can suspend the rules. It’s called executive authority, Mercer, keep UP."

I keep up. I keep up down the hallway, shedding flannel and dignity in roughly equal measure, past a door that Biscuit judges us through with the solemnity of a supreme court, into the bedroom where two weeks of apology and homecoming turn slow and serious the second the door clicks.

Because this time is different, and both of us know it. The first night was disbelief. The morning after was joy. This—this is a promise being signed, and I take my time over every clause. I lay her down on the bed she’s about to give up for me, for Texas, for a life neither of us can fully see yet, and I learn her again like I’ll need to carve it from memory: the line of her collarbone, the scar on her knee from a horse that didn’t mean it, the exact sound she makes when I kiss my way down her stomach and tell her, against her skin, every specific thing I missed. Her breath goes short. Her hands find my hair. When she comes apart the first time it’s with my name and a laugh tangled together in the same breath, which is the most Callie sound there is, and I’d fly every empty mile of the last two weeks again just to hear it.

"Come here," she orders, wrecked, imperial, pulling me up. "Now."

"Yes, ma’am."

And when I slide home—that’s the only word for it, home, this woman, this bed, this ridiculous perfect life with its boxes and its dogs and its pie going cold on the counter—she wraps herself around me and holds on like she’s done deciding too. We move together slow, then not slow, her nails mapping my back, my name coming apart in her mouth, and the control I’ve been so proud of all my careful life just... goes. Gladly. Finally. She takes me over the edge with her, and the last coherent thought I have is that every landing I’ve ever stuck was practice for this one.