Chapter 148: After the tide
The drive home was quiet and I was absolutely loving it because I wanted to take it all in.
Not the tense kind of quiet that used to stretch between us like a wire waiting to snap, but something softer. Caspian’s hand stayed on the gearshift, his thumb brushing against mine every few minutes like a reminder—I’m still here. You’re still mine.
I watched the horizon vanish in the windshield. The sun had fallen below the horizon hours earlier when we'd been leaving the beach, but its shadow still lingered in the sky, casting dusky purples and dark silvers on the road. The kind of twilight where you didn't need to talk.
I laid my head back against the seat and gazed at him. His face was carved in the last ring of light, all jaw line and cheekbone cut in shadow and memory. Something about how he'd come to be known touched me at the time. And how, somehow, that made him only more beautiful.
"You are staring," he murmured without looking around.
"Maybe I'm getting an eyeful."
He glanced at me, the eyes gliding sideways, and a small flicker of a smirk danced on his lips. "I'll allow it."
We pulled into the underground parking garage a half hour after that. I figured on the old ritual kicking in—the unspoken rite that we always fell into when we returned from somewhere. Drop keys. Off shoes. Off in opposite directions for a few minutes' quiet.
Not tonight.
Instead of to the kitchen or the bedroom, Caspian followed me to the living room and quietly dragged me down onto the couch next to him. He turned off no lights. He didn't even speak. He simply drew me into him, one arm around my shoulder, and buried his chin in my hair like he required the silence above all else.
I eased my form into his. My head dropped into the curve of his chest, and I could feel the slow, labored beat of his heart.
We did not need noise.
We still had the hum of the sea in our bones, the thrum of the waves embedded in our flesh. The silence between us was almost sacramental.
"Do you ever ask yourself," I exhaled into the fabric of his shirt, "that we always ended up here? That whatever would have happened would've brought us here?"
There was a silence for a bit. "I used to think life did not have a terminus in mind where you were. That it was random. Strategy. A game you played poorly or lost at all."
"Are you now?"
He shifted enough to look down at me. "Now I think… maybe things are supposed to be. Maybe not all of them. But we? I don't know how else to describe you."
My chest squeezed.
I'd adored previously—brief, idiotic, occasionally even beautiful in its own brokenness—but never this. This consistent, grounding thing. This guy who wasn't afraid to let me glimpse the entirety of what he was experiencing when he was staring at me.
"You are not afraid of me anymore, are you?" I said, uncertain as to why I needed to know.
"At you?" he said, raising an eyebrow. "Always."
I giggled, quietly into his chest, but he brought a hand up and nudged my chin against his.
"No," he said more seriously. "Not of us. Not of being noticed. Not of requiring you."
Something inside of me did something to me.
"Good," I said quietly. "Because I'm not scared anymore either."
The space between us shifted. Not the space itself, but the thickness. The air grew heavy, filled with warmth from something beneath it—need and love and the gentleness there where before there had been sharp edges.
He swept my hair back, behind my ear like he always did when he needed to look into my eyes. "Come here," he panted, even though I was pressed against him.
Oh well, I worked it out. I inched up a bit, getting myself sorted into his lap, my knees on either side of his hips, my arms loose around his neck.
"You're dangerous like this," he panted.
"Why?"
"Because I'd give you anything."
I did not joke about tying him up for it. I did not laugh and wave it off like I always did when things got too big. I just leaned in and kissed him.
It was not desperate. It did not burn. It hummed.
That same cadence we'd discovered on the beach, that same soothing undertow of something deep and abiding, was in the way his lips brushed against mine. He kissed me as though he'd finally discovered what made him human. As though falling in love with me was how he'd learned to breathe.
When we broke away, I remained close, my forehead pressed against his.
"Want to go to bed?" he asked. ".
"No," I breathed. "I just want to be like this."
"Then we'll be."
The rain started an hour later—a gentle one at first, a tap-tap-tap against the windows sound, like a lullaby. We were lying stretched out on the couch now, his body behind me, arms around me, our breathing in unison like waves.
I drew lazy circles on his forearm. "We should sleep sometime."
"Probably."
"But you're not going to let me up, are you?"
"No chance."
I smiled. My eyelids weighed heavy now, thankful for the rain and the cocoon of him around me.
"May I ask you something?" I whispered.
"Anything."
"If tomorrow isn't going to be like this… if it's noisier, less quiet, harder… will you remember this?"
His mouth grazed the curve of my shoulder. "I won't forget a moment of it."
Outside the window, the city continued on—cars, lights, the distant hum of life moving forward.
But in there, we were perfectly still, all of us together in the quiet of after.
Not because we had to be.
But because we wanted to be.
And that, for some reason, felt like love.