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joels-darlin · 18 days ago

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The sun shines prettier with you - joel miller x female reader

summary: your relationship with Joel is private and new, and unluckily for you.. he’s working across the road from your office and the flowers he sends to you.. end up on another woman’s desk.

word count: 5.1k

content warning: first fic in a long time lol so no warnings, insecurity maybe ?

a/n: request for @kellyxo1 hope you love 🖤 got a little carried away lol. I don’t know how I feel about it 😭

The office awakens the way a city wakes, by degrees. First the automatic lights clicked alive with a faint buzz then the printers exhaled warm breaths of toner, the coffee machines began their staccato hisses and sighs like tired lungs. You breathed with it, a practiced rhythm. Tote bag down, lunch in the fridge, brown cardigan on the chair back. Mouse woken with two taps and your password on the keyboard.

Weller & Co. wasn’t a glamorous firm, not the kind with neon feature walls and kombucha taps—just a busy little marketing shop with framed case studies hung a tad crooked down the corridor, successes from clients that felt like neighbors, a chain of bakeries, a microbrewery, a dental clinic rebrand that still sent you free toothpaste every Christmas.

Your team lived in the south quadrant consisting of twelve desks in a pinwheel around two communal tables, a jungle of spider plants that had somehow survived four office moves and three Christmas parties.

Your desk was the third down from the windows. If you leaned back far enough, chin tipped upward, you could see across the street through a slice of glass between two hanging plants.

Luckily for you, across the street, past the orange fencing and a stack of timber that threw splinters of sun onto the pavement, Miller Brothers Contracting had taken up residence.

Mostly, you saw motion. Fluorescent vests flaring and vanishing. A saw coughing itself hoarse back and forth. Gloved hands passing sheets of ply like cards across a table. But sometimes when the angle was right and the sun slid just so, you caught the broad line of a back you knew by touch now.

The set of a jaw you’d memorized, the way he tipped his hard hat back with his thumb as if he were adjusting the whole day into place. And the warmth that rose in your chest had nothing to do with the office heating.

Boyfriend.

The word was still shiny on your tongue, too new to trust and too precious to put down. Joel had said it once with a careful smile, like checking a tool’s weight in his hand before committing to putting it to use, you’d said it back and felt the click of something settling where it belonged.

You kept most of that to yourself at work. Not a secret, just private. You guarded it the way you guarded the best part of a song, unwilling to let office chatter chew on it.

Which meant there was room for people like Tessa to fill the silences you didn’t.

“Morning, sweetheart.” Tessa’s voice arrived before she did, lacquered and sugary. She parked one hip on the corner of your desk, sipped her iced coffee, and glanced at your empty ring finger with a casualness too practiced to be casual. “Still single and thriving?”

A smile you’d perfected for this exact moment folded itself onto your face. “Thriving, yes. Single, no.”

“Mmm.” Her eyes went mock-wide. “Mysterious.” She swiveled toward the window, yellow hair catching the fluorescents. “Well, if you change your mind, I hear there are gentlemen across the street.”

You let the barb slide even where it stings. Tessa liked tally marks—on charts, on lips, on people. She played queen bee in a hive with no honey, skimming sweetness from other people’s good days. She was a weather system, annoying, persistent, hard to dress for. The interns adored her, the designers dreaded her feedback annotated in rose-gold gel pen. The CEO, Matt Weller, called her “a personality” like it was a killer metric on a cv.

“Big presentation at two,” she added, tapping your monitor with her nail with a click encites something that dissolves your patience. “Don’t be late. Weller wants fresh eyes on the deck.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” you said, and you didn’t dream of it. You dreamed of calloused hands and a voice that curled ‘sunshine’ around your name like a secret.

When you have a good thing, the world can’t help flicking it like a bruise to see how you flinch. Which is why it had to stay secret.

Safe.

At twelve, the building breathed out it’s working breath and inhaled food. Curry leaf from the fifth floor. From the street, diesel, hot bread and the bright metallic bite of cut steel drifting in through the revolving doors.

“Food truck?” Pam asked, tucking her black hair behind her ear.

“Leftovers,” you tell your friend, lifting your lunch bag. But your gaze had already tipped guiltily, instinctively toward the windows. Across the road, the food truck’s awning popped with the breeze.

There was a small queue. Workers line up and laughter curls through the open windows like a tune.

But you search until you find the familiar figure of him.

He turned a partial profile, and even at this distance you sensed the gravity of him. Your stomach did that ridiculous drop, as if your insides had taken an elevator he didn’t know you were in.

“Someone’s daydreaming,” Pam sang under her breath.

You flushed. “Leave me alone.”

Pam smiled, kind. “You text him. I’ll cover if Tessa goes on patrol.”

But you didn’t. You watched instead for a moment, then two, until a knot of clients arrived at the front desk and Pam had to peel away. You ate your leftovers at your desk and told yourself to be an adult. You could wait to see him, he’s fine. You’re fine.

Everything is fine.

The office swelled and settled, voices rising and falling. Thirty minutes later like clockwork, Tessa breezed in. The lobby door whooshed open dramatically if only for her effect, the AC cuffed her hair upward. She was sun-warmed and glowing, container of food in one hand, the other busy narrating her own mood.

“God.” She collapsed into her chair as if faint with thirst and admiration. “I have never seen forearms like that. Have you ever seen forearms like that?”

“Whose forearms?” One of the interns named Jax asked, eager already to hear the gossip.

“Across the street.” Tessa fanned herself with the corner of the food trucks menu. “Contractor. The voice on him is complete Southern charm. He said ‘ma’am’ and somehow it didn’t feel like a hate crime.”

Laughter surrounds the office, the kind with thorned edges.

“He smiled at me,” she added, the smile in question sliding toward smug. “I spilled hot sauce. It was… a moment.”

“A meet-mess,” Jax offered, delighted with himself.

You tucked a forkful of last night’s pasta into your mouth that you couldn’t taste. The thought that she’s talking about him, arrived not as a thought but as heat, a lick of jealousy bright as a struck match.

It felt childish and chemical. It felt like a hand closing tight around something you were just learning how to hold without fear.

“Maybe I’ll ask for his number,” Tessa mused. “If a man can carry a beam and a conversation, who am I to deny civic duty?”

Someone laughs in encouragement. A few of your co-workers do, Pam merely sends you a sympathetic look.

“It’s a free country,” you said, strained and practiced.

Home softened the doubt, the frustration. The walls of your house held the day and wrung the noise out of it. You put your keys in the dish Joel had once admired like it was an artifact and you put on the soft ugly T-shirt that made you feel like yourself.

You flick on the kettle before you begin texting him.

You: Do you know a woman named Tessa Morgan? Comes to the food truck at lunch?

It took a minute—the long minute where doubt gets teeth—before the dots pulsed.

Joel: The one you can smell from thirty feet? Perfume like a department store?

You barked a laugh alone in your kitchen. The kettle clicked off.

You: …Yes.

Joel: What about her?

You leaned your hip into the counter and told the truth and a little less than the truth.

You: She’s been talking about you.

The kind that can make people build cathedrals out of assumptions.

Joel: Darlin’… only thing I noticed was her spillin’ hot sauce and tellin’ Jesus to take the wheel.

You: That’s not the point.

Joel: Point is, I got my hands full with you. And I like it that way.

You: Do you now?

Joel: I like your coffee breath in the morning and how you swear at the printer under your breath. I like the way you steal my hoodies like a raccoon with opposable thumbs.

You: That’s slander. I return them after laundering.

Joel: That is slander. You “return” them by wearin’ them back to my house. On purpose. For evil, wicked reasons.

You: Evil?

Joel: I said what I said.

A beat. You stared at the ridiculous smile in your own reflection in the dark oven glass and softened further.

You: She said you smiled at her.

Joel: I smiled at the hot sauce on her blouse because she looked ridiculous.

Sunshine, I don’t see ’em. I see you. Don’t go gettin’ all twisted because some stranger likes the idea of me. She don’t know me.

You: And I do?

Joel: You know how I take my coffee and where my knee aches when it rains. You know I still can’t throw out a broken tape measure because Tommy gave it to me when we started the business. You know my front door sticks so you gotta lift it when you lock up. That’s knowin’ me.

The kettle water had cooled, forgotten by the time Joel had reassured you. You pressed your phone to your chest for a second in a reflection of relief.

You: Okay.

Joel: Okay.

You: I’m not gonna be weird about it.

Joel: You’re allowed to be human about it. But I’m yours.

You type, I know, and it felt like the first time in days you’d told yourself a thing you could live inside.

Before you could over-correct and make a joke that cut the softness, he sent one more.

Joel: Eat somethin’. And wear that ugly sleep shirt you like. The one that looks like it lost a fight with a laundromat.

You: It’s vintage.

Joel: It’s a cry for help.

You: Goodnight, Joel.

Joel: Night, Sunshine.

That last word had weight. It always did, the way it left his mouth as if the day itself were something he could hold up for you to see.

10:06 am on the dot.. the courier came in. You knew because the sliding doors sighed and the receptionist, Lilah, did her sing-song, “Hellooo!” that she reserved for special deliveries that weren’t stacks of paperwork.

The office’s attention pivoted like sunflowers turning. You ignored it for exactly eight seconds until the brightness of the bouquet caught the corner of your eye and you felt your stomach sway like you were on a boat.

Sun. A riot of Sunflowers and marigolds, lilies with freckled throats, sprays of baby’s breath like soft weather. The vase thunked onto Tessa’s desk.

She performed surprise with the skill of an amateur magician like they were meant for her and she knew it.

“For me? You shouldn’t have,” she said to no one and everyone.

“Who’s it from?” Jax all but asked intensely leaning over Tessa’s desk.

Tessa pulled the little envelope white, cream edges—opened it with a fingernail, and made a show of clearing her throat. The office leaned.

“Sunshine,” She paused, eyebrows at the precise angle of shock. “Miller Brothers Construction.”

The world did not tilt but narrowed, it became a hallway with the door too far too reach.

Sunshine wasn’t a word, it was a map of a kitchen at 11 p.m. Joel’s palm at the base of your skull, the murmur of his breath when he said it like he’d discovered the temperature of your skin against his.

Your hands went cold while your face turned hot. That private thing that was yours, now had Tessa’s stinking coconut hand cream all over it.

You set your pen down onto your desk because it would’ve snapped otherwise. Pam’s hand found your elbow under the desk. Squeeze. “You good?” She breathed.

“Yep,” you said, like walking on glass. “Great.”

Tessa propped the card between two stems and angled the vase toward the window, as if the street itself should see its own reflection in her triumph.

“Is he the contractor?” Jax asked, already composing the story he’d tell at drinks.

Tessa shrugged delicately. “Possibly, it’s their company,” she let it sit, “—hope it’s the older one.”

It was a perfect little violence against you, a note with the pet name only he used, signed with the company across the street.

You type with hands you barely feel.

You: So flowers now? To “Sunshine”?

The dots arrived instantly, a rush of relief and dread.

Joel: What?

You: Don’t do that.

Joel: What happened?

You: Never mind. Enjoy your day.

You put your phone face down like it was radioactive and stood up on legs that didn’t belong to you. “Bathroom,” you told Pam, and your voice sounded normal. The world didn’t stop because you’re devastated.

You locked the far stall and slid onto the closed lid and pressed your fingers to your eyelids until galaxies burst behind them.

You could be reasonable later. Right now, reason had all the appeal of a diet on your birthday.

The note, the word, his messy fucking handwriting you knew from notes he’d stuck on the fridge when you stayed over and he’d left early for work.

You cried because the day had been fine and then it wasn’t, and you’d thought love meant fewer ambushes like this but maybe it didn’t.

Quickly, you get out of the stall and wipe your face with the hand towels by the hand dryer, which smudges your mascara. “Gods sake-“ you utter in annoyance and wet the hand towel before wiping off the smeared make up.

Your phone buzzed on the paper dispenser.

Joel: Tell me where you are.

Joel: I didn’t send nothin’ like that to her. I swear it.

Joel: Just rang the courier, they fucked up.

Joel: Sunshine, please answer me.

You could almost hear the shift in that last message—the way his voice would drop when your name moved from teasing to tethering. You thumbed a reply that was both not enough and too much.

You: At work.

Joel: I gathered. What happened?

You swallowed. The truth was simple even if the feeling wasn’t.

You: Tessa got a bouquet. Card said “To Sunshine. Miller Brothers Contracting.”

Three dots. Gone. Three dots. Long. Your pulse was in your ears.

Joel: I’m comin’.

You typed fast, panic and pride wrestling.

You: Don’t. Please don’t make a scene.

Joel: I ain’t makin’ a scene. I’m fixin’ one.

You stared at that, wet lashes tacky, and felt something loosen in your chest that had nothing to do with capitulation and everything to do with being partnered by a man who didn’t leave you to mop up a mess on your own.

You: Please be… measured.

Joel: Darlin’, I ain’t the weather.

You picture him checking his watch, cussing under his breath, tossing his hard hat on the truck seat like a gauntlet.

A bloom of fear opened in your belly, fear of spectacle and of being looked at, of giving Tessa a story to varnish and keep.

You washed your face until you looked like yourself again, the mirror a kinder friend. On your way back through the open-plan.

“There she is,” Tessa sang, as if you’d been missing. “You okay, babe? You look.. flushed.”

There were days you said nothing. Today you said, “I’m fine.” Your voice was as flat and cool as a leveled beam.

“Must be all the excitement.” She propped her chin on her hand and glanced at the flowers like a co-star. “Some people just have that magnetism.”

“Mm.” You sat and worked, didn’t see half of your inboxes, a distraction.

There are changes in a room that happen like weather fronts, a pressure drop you feel on your skin before your mind names it. The office did that—went from bright chatter to a taut hush that ran from reception to the back wall.

Chairs stilled from rolling. The printer clicked into a shy silence. You looked up at the exact second you felt his presence.

Joel filled the doorway the way he fills spaces without meaning to. Not by volume but by presence. Gift bag in one hand, jaw tight, shoulders set not in anger but in decision.

His boots found the carpet and you swear the floor steadied under them. Sawdust clung to his jeans and the knuckles of one hand were nicked from a nail through the broken skin.

He didn’t look around for permission to enter the open-plan, he didn’t care about it. He didn’t look for you because he already knew where you were. His gaze took in the room in a single sweep, reception printing station, vase of yellow flowers like a flare, Tessa’s practiced posture, and then you.

The tightness in his face eased a notch while the rest of it sharpened.

“Hi,” Lilah, the receptionist said belatedly, breathy, as if someone had turned the oxygen down.

“Afternoon, ma’am,” Joel said, and it was polite, but it carried and there was steel under his manners.

He crossed the room with a confidence of movement that made Jax’s eyes go cartoon-wide. He didn’t loom over Tessa, but he arrived at her desk like a man arriving at an address with a parcel that had been misdelivered three times and now required a signature.

“These ain’t yours,” he said calmly, nodding at the bouquet.

The room held it’s breath. Tessa smiled the way a person smiles when they were told no for the first time ever. “Excuse me?”

Joel didn’t repeat himself but lifted the vase in one hand, and turned. Water sloshed but did not spill over, he walked the three paces to you. Not a scene but a correction.

He placed the flowers and gift bag on your desk with a careful thunk that rang through the lacquer, then leaned just enough that you felt the shape of his breath.

“They’re for my girlfriend,” he said, still in that even voice that moved like a plumb line.

He didn’t raise it, didn’t need to. The word girlfriend went through the room like electricity, found every ear, made the air smell briefly and inexplicably like summer rain on hot concrete.

He straightened and let his attention sweep the floor, not looking for assent just letting the fact sit where it belonged, heavy and ordinary. “Which would be her,” he added, tilting his chin to you in a way that was almost tender.

A cough of shock came from near the printer. A dropped pen across from you.

“Joel—” you started, your name for him an anchor and a warning and a relief.

He shifted his weight and made the smallest turn toward you, and softened. “Hi, Sunshine.” It was quiet, just for you.

The office noise returned in a wave of quiet and then receded as if unsure whether to crash or kneel.

He tipped his head toward the card propped in the flowers, expression flattening to something like irritation reluctantly tolerated. “That note’s wrong. Tommy was sendin’ a thank-you to a client. I wrote a message to you. Must’ve gotten the two messages combined. Didn’t even put my name down but the company.”

He huffed a humorless little sound. “Not that I’m hidin’. I just don’t usually autograph my flowers with the company title.”

Behind him, Tessa worked to install a new expression. “Oh. Goodness. How..how funny.” Her laugh put on a costume and forgot the lines. “What a silly mistake.”

Joel didn’t turn toward her, he didn’t need to.

He looked at you then and the room dropped away like a lift. There was an apology in his face and something else—irritation not at you but at the world’s habit of putting your heart where messy hands could touch it.

“Didn’t mean to let it get to this,” he said low, the words just for you two and the spider plant who would not tell.

“I—” The office waited for your mouth like a jury. You breathed and found your voice where he’d left it, steady as a tool. “Thank you for… fixing it.”

“I’m sorry it got mixed up.” His eyes flicked, just once, to the vase and back. “And you thought that name was for someone else.” He softened around that word so it meant something again.

You nodded once, grateful that your eyes didn’t betray you with tears in this moment. They could fall later where the sound didn’t echo with a dozen voices.

He touched the corner of your desk, not you but needing to be near you. Unsure if you wanted any part of him touching you.

“I’ll meet you outside later,” he said. “Don’t worry about dinner. I got you somethin’.”

He left with a final look your way and nowhere else. The air remembered how to be breathed. Noise returned in a ragged, embarrassed way, like a conversation after a dropped plate.

Pam swiveled slowly toward you in the aftermath, eyes bright with the kind of delight that was less gossip and more defense of a friend. “Well,” she whispered. “That was… the hottest declaration of administrative correction I’ve ever seen.”

You laughed helplessly. The tension in your shoulders melted like frost in sunlight. Across the office, Tessa pretended to answer an email with great passion. The bouquet glowed on your desk like an apology from the sun itself.

Before you could help yourself you’re digging into the paper gift baggie, filled with chocolate, a Starbucks card.

And a note; “for my sunshine. sorry for fucking up. Joel.” And a messily drawn love heart. Almost an oval, truthfully.

“I had no idea,” Tessa said later, appearing at your elbow with a clipboard she did not need. She kept her voice hushed, the register people use in church and breakups. “Obviously. If I’d known he was yours—”

“He’s his own person,” you said mildly, not looking up. Then you took pity because you were tired of being tense. “But… yeah. He’s with me.”

Tessa blinked. “Well. He’s… very devoted.”

You let a beat pass. “He is.”

“And the note—such a funny mistake,” she tried again as if she didn’t know how to apologise.

“Wild, isn’t it,” you said, tone so even she could lay her measure against it and find no slant to complain about.

Tessa shifted, weight from hip to hip, a woman who had to find a new story about herself to tell the room.

Finally, and to her credit, she gave a small, sincere nod. “He looked at you like you’re the only woman in here,” she said, an echo of something honest breaking through. “Lucky.”

“Both of us,” you said, and found you meant it. The heat inside of you that burned like jealousy had simmered in summer rain.

He was there waiting outside like he’d promised when you walked out of the revolving doors, leaning against his truck with the posture of a man who knows he’s being looked at and doesn’t care.

The afternoon sun painted him in long lines, his throat, thick forearms, the crease at the corner of his mouth you kissed when he smiled. In his right hand, not a florist’s vase, not paper and ribbon, but a little bouquet held tight at the stems, the ends damp where he’d rinsed them at the outdoor spigot on site.

You smile even though your hands are full with the yellow flowers from earlier, gift baggie discarded, chocolate eaten, Starbucks gift card and his written note tucked into your purse.

“Hey,” he said before you could say it, and his eyes searched your face the way he checks a frame.

“Hey,” you echoed, and your own rush of words surprised you with how gentle they came. “You okay?”

He snorted. “You askin’ me that after the day you had.”

“You showed up in my office like a western. I thought you might’ve broken a code of conduct.”

“Far as I can tell, the only code I broke was not kiss in’ you in front of everyone.”

A moment passes—

“I got you these.. didn’t know if you’d toss the sunflowers away after Tessa had ‘em.” He lifted the flowers that consist of daisies, purple thistle, clover, tiny white stars you couldn’t name—awkward and beautiful. “Picked ’em from the lot next door. They’re ragged I know—“

“They’re perfect.” You interrupt and reach out to take them. Something in his chest eased like a knot undone.

“Joel… I’m sorry. I should’ve called you. I-”

“Don’t apologize for feelin’ somethin’ when someone steals something meant for you,” he said, a quiet fierceness that wasn’t anger at you but at the idea of the world making you second-guess your own pulse. “That ain’t on you.”

“It wasn’t just the word,” you admitted, your thumb stroking a petal that had seen better soil. “It was the picture it painted. In my head. You… and her. Laughing, smiling. I know it’s dumb.”

“Ain’t dumb.” He leaned his hip against the truck and rubbed a hand across the nape of his neck, a tell you were beginning to cherish. “I been a man long enough to know how stories like that write themselves when folks don’t give ’em an edit.”

You smiled, a crooked thing he wanted to kiss off your mouth. “You did a pretty good edit.”

“I was goin’ for grovelling boyfriend-meets public service announcement.”

“You stuck the landing.”

He ducked his head, that little embarrassment he had when you complimented him in public like humility packaged as bashfulness. Then he straightened, a thought occurring. “Tell me about her. Tessa.”

You almost laughed. “You want gossip?”

“I want to know the kinds of people who can make you small at work so I can call you big at home.”

The words landed in you with a small shock of joy. “She’s not cruel,” you said honestly. “She’s… hungry for attention. Like she tried to sell a certain story about herself. Sometimes I think she can’t see herself unless she’s reflected in other people’s eyes.”

“She can use a mirror,” he said dryly.

“That’s not the same.”

He considered that, then nodded. “You want me to leave it how it is?”

“Yes,” you said. “You already did the important part.”

“Which was?”

“You came.”

He breathed out, the kind of breath a man takes when he realizes the tool he chose fits the hand and the job. “Always will.”

Silence lays thick between you for a moment, the good kind. He reached for you and after a glance—tucked a daisy from the messy bouquet behind your ear, rough fingers softening at your temple like he could press safety into the skin. “You look like summer.”

“You look like a liability in high-vis.”

He grinned, finally, the real one you hoarded. “C’mon. I brought you somethin’ else.”

He opened the passenger door and on the seat sat a paper bag from the food truck, grease soaking dark stains into the bag. He pulled it out with a flourish. “Grilled chicken wrap, extra sauce, no cilantro because you said it tastes like floor cleaner. And one of those lemonade juice things you pretend ain’t just sugar.” He pauses almost bashfully. “Thought I’d try one too.”

“Did you—” you laughed, delighted, a sound that made two of his vertebrae decide to retire to a beach somewhere— “did you sneak over there after storming my office?”

“I didn’t storm,” he said, his dignity wounded. “I perambulated with purpose.”

“You stormed with manners.”

“That’s fair.” He takes the bouquet from you and sets them into the backseat. Now shining with yellow.

Brightness ambulated between you.

Without a warning he’s helping you into the truck, hand hovering over your lower back and he leans over your torso to clip in your seatbelt.

“Here.” He hands you the lemonade from the drink holder, and the bag with food. “Dig in.”

You took the long way back home, windows down and music blasting. Food stuffed into your face, sauce dripping onto your blouse. His hand settled on your thigh long ago.

“Tommy’s gonna give me hell,” he said idly, amused now that the day had been wrestled into shape. “He’s gonna say I made a spectacle.”

“You didn’t.”

“I know that. You know that. Tommy likes to see everything through the lens of ‘how can we not get sued.’”

“Bless him,” you said solemnly.

“He asked me once if lovin’ you was OSHA-compliant.”

You almost choked laughing. “And what did you say?”

“I told him if OSHA had a chapter on you, they’d outlaw me from bein’ within twenty feet of the site.” He squeezed your hand, then brought it to his mouth and kissed the heel of it, a move so intimate it felt like a prayer. “I ain’t ever gonna embarrass you.”

“You didn’t,” you said simply. “You made me feel secure.”

He drove with that quiet focus he had, the same face he wore when measuring a span or squaring a corner, and you had the absurd thought that he was measuring a life you could fit inside.

At his place, he lifts the front door that sticks, the evening moved like a song you both knew. Shoes off, you perched on the counter.

He stands between your knees, braced hands at your hips, searching your face to see if he could register any emotion that gave away your remnant upset.

“You know what Sunshine means when I say it?” He asked suddenly.

“That I’m bright and blinding and you can’t see straight around me,” you said with a grin that tried to deflect and failed.

“It means I can find my way home with you.” He held your gaze. “It means I ain’t gotta squint to see what matters.”

Your throat did that small, ridiculous ache again. “Joel.”

“I don’t give pretty names to pretty things ’cause they’re pretty. I give ’em because they’re true. I ain’t sayin’ that word to anybody else. Not on a card. Not to a stranger. Not even by accident.”

“I know.”

“I want you to know it.”

“I do.”

He nodded, the kind of nod that says a job is finished properly. Then he kissed you softly, the kind of kiss that eased rather than sparked, a match held not to make fire but to show a path.

When he drew back he rested his forehead against yours to ground himself, and you. Reassuring you things would be okay.

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