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“Ow,” he deadpanned, smile growing.

“Kiss me,” she said again with an impatient stamp of her foot.

“So bossy.” He brought his hands to her face, lowered his mouth almost to hers, and said, “I love you, too, Tansy. So fucking much.”

Finally, he pressed his lips to hers. She went languid against him, melting into his broad frame and slipping her hands around his back to hold him tight.

When they parted, Jack whispered, “We have an audience.”

Now that she had him in her arms, she didn’t want to let him go, not even to leave the room. But the committee deciding Jack’s fate—andhers—were awkwardly trying not to stare as they waited to discuss the presentations.

She removed her hands, gestured at Kai to meet them out in the corridor, and pulled him after her.

36

Jack

Jack followed Tansy into her bedroom later that night, taking in the neatly made air mattress and the plastic sets of drawers holding her clothes. It wasn’t lost on him how big this step was—her letting him into this most private space.

Following the presentations, the librarians had headed back home, and Jack had driven Tansy and Briar—his girls—for ice cream and a walk around Hermann Park, where they’d watched the sunset and mimicked the calls of the birds in the trees. Briar had been nodding off by the time they’d reached Tansy’s house, but she’d insisted on bedtime reading. Jack had told Tansy he’d wait in the living room, figuring they’d finally talk after. But Briar surprised him by asking sleepily, “Can Jack do it?”

“Yeah.” He’d had to clear his throat to say, “Yeah, I can read to you.”

He’d sat on the floor beside her bed and rested his elbow on the mattress so she could see the book. It was a nonfiction guide to caring for bearded dragons, which apparently she was lobbying Tansy pretty hard to get. Briar had snuggled down, shifting to rest her head on his arm, and he’d widened his eyes to clear the sudden moisture blurring them. She’d fallen asleep before he quit reading, and he’d carefully extricated himself without disturbing her, startling when he realized Tansy had been watching from the doorway.

Now she was turning on the lamp in her room, pulling her earrings from her ears, and setting them in a dish on the stacked plastic drawers she was using as a nightstand. She turned and laughed at him still on the threshold. “You can come in.”

“Can I?”

She softened, understanding the question he was really asking—if he could come into her life, all the way, finally. “Yeah, Jack. I want you here.”

He closed the door with a soft click and then came behind her to circle his arms around her and tuck his chin over her shoulder. “I’m still good to do this slow. However you need it to go.”

She tilted her face back to look up at him. “Will you stay the night? Even though all I have is this terrible air mattress, and we’ll probably be rolling into each other all night?”

He huffed a laugh into her hair. “You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Then, yeah. I’d sleep on a floor with you. And don’t act like you don’t already end up on top of me all night anyway.”

She turned in his arms and began to unbutton his nice shirt, the same one he’d worn on their first date. “No one’s ever persuaded multiple county officials to promise me resources before. When you go, you go big, don’t you, Jack?”

He shrugged. “For you, yeah.” Then, “What if we don’t get the grant?”

She pulled open his shirt and tugged it down his arms. She had to stop to deal with the snaps at his wrists, leaving him half bound by his own shirt while she did. “What aboutus?” she clarified. She shook her head. “If you don’t get the grant, and the library closes in the end, then at least we’ll know we tried everything we could. I can accept that. But Jack, those things I thought I needed—autonomy and you putting my needs first—I said all that because I was scared. I thought I needed proof that I could be safe with you. Maybe it was even an impossible bar I thought you wouldn’t clear. Because…I knew from the day we met that you were trouble for me.”

“I’m trouble?” he asked, unsure if she was joking or serious.

She got his shirt off and stepped back to look at him. She lifted her hands at her sides in an open shrug, a vulnerable offering. “You’re the one who showed up when I needed help. I know I talk a big game against the whole damsel-in-distress thing, but there’s this little part of me, deeply buried under my feminism and all the lessons I’ve learned the hard way and what I want for my daughter, that still secretly just wants to be taken care of. So when you rescued us that day, I think that part of me fell a little bit in love with you. And that scared me about as much as the hurricane. That’s why I pushed so hard to prove I didn’t need you. But I do. And Iwantyou. And I don’t care anymore what that might say about me.”

Jack stepped forward and hooked a finger into the strings loosely tied at the side of her wrap dress. He tugged it undone and opened the fabric, revealing underneath her plain cotton bra and her soft stomach. “If you think you didn’t save me, too, you couldn’t be more wrong.”

She released a breath as he slipped the dress off hershoulders and it pooled on the floor. She worked at his buckle, then his fly, and soon he was out of his pants, too.

They laughed as they crawled onto her air mattress, jostling as it shifted. He tucked her back to his front, slipping his hand over her hip, circling there, dipping lower with each pass.

“I’m conflicted,” he said into her hair.