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We sat like that in the morning quiet. The city building up its sounds outside. The light coming in warmer through the gap in the curtains. Two half-empty glasses of water and a blanket and the completely ordinary, extraordinary fact of being here together.

"I love you," I said.

There was no joke to catch the landing. Just the fact, in daylight, in my apartment, on my couch, with the coffee going cold in the kitchen and the pigeon continuing its philosophical inquiry out on the balcony. Just the truth.

She turned to look at me.

"I've loved you," she said, "even during that dinner at Isla's house. When you told me I was hiding, and you were right, and I was furious about it, because I wanted to argue with you and I couldn't." She paused. "I thought about you every day after that. Even when I didn't want to. Especially when I didn't want to."

"That," I said, "is the most Cam way of falling in love with someone I have ever heard."

"I know."

"Furiously. Against your will."

"Against every wall I had." She squeezed my hand. "You didn't knock on them. You just walked through."

"Like they were made of paper," I said.

"Yeah." Her eyes were very bright. "Like they were made of paper."

She looked down at our hands, and her thumb moved over my knuckles, and when she spoke again, her voice had gone very quiet.

"My mother wants to know if you'll come to Sunday dinner," she said. "She asked me on the phone, two weeks ago, at two in the morning. Before I'd done any of this. Before I even knew if you'd ever speak to me again." She swallowed. "She asked what you looked like, and what you did for work, and whether you could cook, and whether you'd come to Providence for Sunday dinner. And I didn't know what to tell her. I didn't know if I'd ever get to bring you home."

I couldn't breathe.

"I want to bring you home, Harper," she said. "To my mother's kitchen. To the loudest table you've ever sat at. My brother's going to interrogate you. My sister's going to love you more than she loves me within five minutes. My father's going to cry and pretend he isn't." Her voice cracked. "And my mother's going to hold your face in her hands and tell you she's been waiting for you my whole life. And she'll mean it."

My eyes overflowed. I didn't even try.

I hadn't sat at a family dinner table in two years. I hadn't been held by anyone's mother since mine stopped.

"You can't just say stuff like..." I stopped. "You can't just say that to me at seven in the morning, Cameron."

"I can," she said. "I'm going to keep saying it until you say yes."

"Yes," I said, laughing and crying at the same time. "Obviously yes. I'll bring wine. I'll bring the expensive cheese. I'll learn to make whatever your mother makes so she'll keep me."

"She'll keep you," Cam said. "She already does."

I kissed her. It wasn't heated from lovemaking. It was frantic and messy and tender all at once, just two people reaching at the same time with both hands, and no careful control left in either of us. Her hands framed my face, and my hands found her face, and neither of us was careful about what we gave away, because there wasn't anything left to give away carefully. It was all already out there.

When we broke apart, we were both breathing like we'd been running.

"I'm not letting go again," she said. It was absolute, the same voice she probably used to tell her team how the last two minutes of a tied game were going to go.

"Good," I said. "Because I have opinions about that, and they're extensive, and I'll be sharing them."

"I know."

"The footnotes alone..."

"I'll read the footnotes." She pressed her forehead to mine. "I'll read every word."

I closed my eyes and felt the warmth of her.

"We have a lot ahead of us," I said. I wasn't anxious about it. I was just naming it.