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“We were.”

I look at the woman in the painting again, at the softness he saw in a moment I remember mostly for the urge to flee.

“I spent the next several weeks trying to convince myself that what I felt for you wasn’t real.”

He gives me a small nod. “Yes.” I take that in, then turn fully toward him.

“I’m done doing that.”

His hand comes up and cups the side of my face, his thumb resting against my cheek. “I love you too.”

I kiss him. At first, caution disappears completely. My arms go around his neck, his hands close around my waist, and weeks of missing him pour into the kiss. The fine willow at the nape of his neck is warm beneath my fingers, living strands shifting almost imperceptibly as I hold him closer. He tastes so familiar it hurts, but the man holding me isn’t the Kell who lived in my house because he had nowhere else to go.

He has a life of his own now. And he still wants me. That changes the kiss too.

I let the kiss slow before it can carry us any further. Kell stays close, his hands warm at my waist. “We said we weren’t starting with this.”

“We aren’t.”

“You’re kissing me.”

“Yes.”

“That’s usually how it starts.”

I laugh and let my forehead rest against his chest for a moment. “I’m not asking for sex.”

His hands stay at my waist. The silence that follows is brief, but not quite brief enough to hide what he’s thinking.

I tip my head back to look at him. “You’re disappointed.”

“A little.”

That makes me smile. “Good.”

He laughs, and some of the last tightness between us goes with it. I kiss him again, but this time there’s no desperation in it. I don’t need to use sex to prove we’re together, and I don’t need to run from the fact that I want him.

When I pull back, his hands stay at my waist. There are still things we haven’t talked about. The studio. The bed behind the partition. Whether he’ll sleep at my house or here or both. What happens when he paints until two in the morning and I have to be at the hospital by eight. A few weeks ago, every unanswered question would have felt like evidence that we were making a mistake.

Now they just feel like things we’ll have to figure out.

I don’t want to run anymore. I take his hand.

“I choose you,” I say.

His fingers tighten around mine, and a low resonance moves through the structure of him, quiet enough that I feel it more than hear it. Choosing him no longer feels like stepping away from the life I understand. It feels like choosing the one I want to build next.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Kell

Laura’s fingers are still wrapped around mine when she says, “I choose you.” I can’t answer. I’m trying to understand what the words do to me here, in the studio, surrounded by the life I built for myself. Nothing in the room has changed. I have.

I lift our joined hands and press my mouth to her knuckles. “I choose you too.”

Her face softens, and I think she’s going to kiss me again. Instead, she looks around the studio with the expression she gets when another thought has arrived and she’s deciding whether she wants to say it.

I wait while her gaze travels past me, taking in the canvases, the worktable, the partition with the bed behind it. When she looks back at me, some of the happiness in her face has turned serious.