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He was giving her options. Not telling her what was happening. Not assuming. Not leveraging twenty-four hours of kindness into some unspoken debt. He was laying every possible future out like cards on a table and saying pick one, and whichever one she chose, he would help her get there.
Even the one that took her away from him.
So I know you’re okay.
Even that one.
Sage felt her eyes water. A shiver ran through her as the walls she’d been building came tumbling back down.
“Why are you doing this?” Her voice came out small, cracked in places she couldn’t smooth over. “Why are you — why do you keep—” She pressed her palm to her chest like she could keep her heart from coming apart. “I’m… a… I’m a tough bitch! I don’t do this. I don’t sit on people’s couches and eat their cookies and get all—” She waved her other hand vaguely at her face, which was doing things without her permission, “—this.”
Cal waited. Patiently. The fire popped softly.
“I don’t stay places,” she said, quieter, almost to herself. “I keep moving. That’s… that’s what I do. That’s who I am. The girl who keeps moving.”
She stopped. The hand on her chest pressed harder. “I…” She looked at him — this gentle giant who made her feel things she never thought she would feel.
“I don’t want to keep moving.”
The words surprised her. They rose from somewhere deep and uncontrolled, from the place beneath the armor where the real things lived — the things she’d been protecting since Felicity, since before Felicity, since the first time she learned that wanting something was the most dangerous thing a person could do.
She looked at him. At Cal Meridian — this scarred, silver-haired, flannel-wearing, prayer-saying, grizzly-bear-having, breakfast-making impossible man — sitting across from her with his hands open and his eyes steady and the patience of something that would endure.
“Cal?” she whispered.
“Yeah, sweetheart?”
“I’d really… I’d really like to stay here.” Soft. Vulnerable. A voice she barely recognized as her own — the voice under the voice, the one she kept locked away. “With you. If you’ll let me.”
The words hung in the air.
Cal smiled.
Not the corner-twitch. Not the almost-smile or the tightly controlled micro-expression. A real smile. It moved across his face slowly, the way dawn moves across a mountain valley — starting at the corners of his mouth, reaching his eyes, and changing the whole landscape of his face. The scars, the hard lines, decades of careful guardedness all gave way at once to something warm, undefended, and quietly radiant. A smile that made her feel so many things at once.
Oh, she thought. Oh no.
He didn’t say anything. He stood — the leather chair groaning softly with relief — and crossed to the hallway where the bags from Hallie’s store were stacked against the wall. He gathered them all in one effortless motion, every bag handle dwarfed in his big hands, and came back to where she was sitting.
He stopped in front of her. Extended his hand.
Sage looked at it — at the scarred palm, the thick fingers, the hand that had held hers in prayer, carried her things from a dead Jeep, and never once grabbed or taken or demanded.
“Are we gonna pray over it?” she asked, because she was still Sage and her mouth had a mind of its own.
But she gave him her hand anyway.
She gave it without hesitation. The old reflex — the flinch, the lightning-fast risk assessment that had preceded every touch since she was twelve — never came. Her hand slipped into his like it already belonged there. Like it knew something the rest of her was still catching up to.
His fingers closed around hers. Warm. Strong. Engulfing. He pulled her gently to her feet.
She stood. The height difference was absurd — her eyes level with about the third button of his flannel — and she had to tilt her head way back to look up at him. He was still smiling, that soft, real smile that kept rearranging his whole face and doing dangerous, wonderful things to her chest. Things she was definitely going to have a very stern conversation with herself about later.
He led her upstairs.
The guest suite was at the end of the hallway — her suite now. The same room she’d woken up in this morning, with its big four-poster bed, warm wood-beamed ceiling, crackling fireplace, and a bathroom bigger than the entire studio apartment she’d shared with Felicity.
She’d stumbled through it last night in a fever haze. Laughed alone in the shower this morning as water sprayed from six different directions. She’d locked and unlocked the door three times before finally admitting the truth to herself: the lock didn’t matter. Not because Cal couldn’t get in if he wanted to… but because some quiet, stubborn part of her didn’t actually want it locked against him anyway.
