Page 51 of Riggs
Riggs’s thumb skims the inside of my wrist under the table, exactly once. Heat arcs up my arm, familiar and brand-new all at once. Later, when everyone drifts to the front for impromptu street basketball and to argue about the merits of Hayes’s “exactly-right” s’mores method, he tugs me into the kitchen with the excuse of more napkins.
We’re alone for a breath. The house hums. The ocean pushes a soft hush through the open window. He braces a hip against thecounter, wraps an arm around my waist, and brings me in close enough that the quiet tightens.
“You good?” he asks, because he always does, because even on our easiest days he takes my pulse without looking like he’s counting. It’s not paranoia anymore. It’s attention.
I nod. “Happy,” I say. “Like, obnoxiously so.”
He leans down and kisses me—slow, sure, no cameras, no cover. When he lifts his head, his mouth curves. “Me too.”
“Still wedge the door?” I tease, because habits don’t vanish and I don’t want them to.
“Always,” he says. “And I turn the deadbolt with my left hand because you like to make fun of me for being predictable.”
“I love you for being predictable,” I correct, and he gives me that look that made me say yes to buying a plant we both knew I’d forget to water.
The screen door bangs. Rae’s voice floats in. “If you two are making out over napkins, at least bring the napkins.”
“On it,” I call, laughing, and grab the stack.
Back outside, the party leans into twilight. Sawyer teaches Hayes a trick shot while pretending not to; Camille has her feet in my lap, laughing while sipping her cherry wine. Tomorrow she’ll probably paint this exact scene because she can. Rae and Jaxson stand shoulder-to-shoulder over a tablet, already building a net. Riggs drops down beside me and laces our fingers like a habit he’ll never break.
Later, after the last glass is rinsed and Sawyer has wrangled Jaxson into promising to text when he hits Valor Springs andRae’s threatened to bug our toaster just because she can, the house goes soft and sleepy. We do the rounds—deadbolt, wedge, back light, stove check—like a ritual we both like performing. In the bedroom, he pulls me in under the window where the ocean is more sound than sight and we count breaths for no reason except that it’s ours.
“Home,” he says into my hair.
“Home,” I echo.
The world is still loud out there—hungry, humming, always ready to write your life for you if you let it. But here, in Saint Pierce, with string lights and a door that creaks the same way every night, we write our own.
Tomorrow I’ll post a picture of Rae dominating the grill and call it girl math. I’ll tag Hayes as “thermometer daddy” and make him scowl. I’ll pretend I don’t know Jaxson left at dawn and then text him anyway. Camille will paint the way the sky turned copper just before the lights flicked on. I’ll clean and laugh, and read as I wait for Riggs to get home from whatever quiet corner of the world he went to keep safe. And he’ll kiss me in the kitchen and wedge the door and count my breaths until his match.
We’re happy. We’re home. And for the first time in too long, I’m finally at peace.
