Wanted All Along

Chapter 5

Home felt different in a way Amara couldn’t quite name.

The apartment was the same. The mug he’d left in the sink was gone now, along with everything else of Daniel’s she’d boxed up and left outside for him to collect the week before her trip. The walls were the same too, though she’d taken down two more photos she hadn’t been able to look at before leaving, leaving faint pale rectangles where they used to hang. She told herself she’d fill them eventually. For now, the empty spaces felt honest in a way the photos never had.

Her sister called the second night she was back, and Amara finally told her everything—the affair, the breakup, the vacation, though she left out most of what happened on the island beyond “I met someone.” She could hear the surprise in Jade’s voice, the careful way she asked follow-up questions like she was worried too much curiosity might scare the whole thing back into hiding.

“Met someone how?” Jade asked. “Met someone met someone, or met someone you’re never going to mention again?”

“I don’t know yet,” Amara admitted, which was true. “It wasn’t supposed to be anything. We agreed on that. Very clearly. Multiple times.”

“Mm-hmm. And how’s that agreement holding up?”

Amara looked at her phone, sitting face-up on the counter, the little notification bubble from an unsaved number she’d finally added as Kian two days ago, after the fourth message that made her laugh out loud in a grocery store checkout line. “Poorly,” she admitted. “It’s holding up poorly.”

Jade laughed, warm and unsurprised. “That’s usually how the good ones start.”

The texting became a habit faster than Amara wanted to admit.

Mornings, mostly—a comment about his coffee, a complaint about a meeting that ran long, a question about her day that felt more genuinely curious than she’d expected from a man who’d been so careful, on the island, not to ask too many questions. Evenings sometimes too, when the day’s noise had died down and there was nothing left but the quiet, honest hour before sleep, the kind of hour where people said things they might not say in daylight.

What are you doing right now, he texted one night, nearly two weeks after they’d said goodbye at the airport.

Lying in bed. Failing to sleep. You?

Same. Failing spectacularly, actually.

Big meeting tomorrow?

Something like that. Though that’s not what’s keeping me up.

Amara stared at that message a long moment before typing back. What is, then?

You know exactly what.

She did know. She’d known since the second night of messages had turned unmistakably suggestive, since she’d found herself typing things at midnight she never would have said to Daniel in two full years of dating him—not because Daniel wouldn’t have wanted to hear them, but because she’d never quite trusted him with that particular kind of honesty. There was something freeing about doing it now with a man who lived four hundred miles away, someone she might never see again if either of them decided to let this quietly end.

Tell me, she typed, feeling bold in the dark of her own bedroom.

He did. In detail, unhurried, the same patient attentiveness she remembered from the island coming through even in text, like he was still solving the same puzzle from a distance. Amara read each message twice, her pulse climbing, the apartment around her gone quiet except for the soft buzz of her phone against the sheets.

You’re very good at that, she typed eventually, breathless in a way that had nothing to do with anything physical actually happening in the room.

I have incentive to be thorough.

Is that what we’re calling it?

I call it whatever gets you to keep answering.

She fell asleep with her phone still in her hand that night, and woke to a single message sent at some hour she hadn’t been awake to see. Thinking about booking a flight to your city. Tell me that’s a terrible idea.

Amara stared at the screen for a long moment before she typed back.

It’s a terrible idea, she wrote. Book it anyway.

He landed on a Friday, three weeks after the island, with exactly one bag and no explanation for how he’d cleared his calendar that fast.

Amara met him at the arrivals gate feeling more nervous than she expected to, like the version of him standing in her actual city, in daylight, without the excuse of a resort and a week that didn’t count, might turn out to be someone slightly different than the man she’d been texting at midnight. He wasn’t. If anything, he looked more like himself here—less performed, somehow, than he’d been on the island, where she suspected some part of him had still been playing a version of relaxed that didn’t come naturally.

“You look surprised,” he said, pulling her in for a kiss that drew a few curious glances from the people around them, neither of them caring in the slightest.

“I half expected you to cancel,” she admitted. “Something to do with your calendar.”

“I told you.” He picked up his bag, slung it over one shoulder, and reached for her hand like it was the most natural thing in the world. “I have incentive to be thorough.”

She laughed, leading him out toward her car, aware the whole time of how easily he fit into this part of her life too—not just the island version of things, contained and temporary, but the real one, with traffic and grocery stores and an apartment with pale rectangles on the walls where old photos used to hang.

“So,” she said, once they were in the car, his hand resting on her knee like it had been there a hundred times before. “What exactly did you tell your assistant this trip was for?”

“Business,” Kian said, entirely straight-faced. “Very important business.”

“Is that what we’re calling it?”

He turned to look at her, something unguarded in his expression that hadn’t been there at the airport three weeks ago, something that looked a great deal like a man who already knew this had stopped being uncomplicated and had decided not to say so out loud yet.

“Drive,” he said instead. “We’ll figure out what to call it later.”

They didn’t figure it out that weekend, or the next time he flew in three weeks after that, or the time after that when Amara took a red-eye to his city instead, learning the particular geography of his life the way he’d learned hers—his office with its floor-to-ceiling windows and a view he never seemed to actually look at, the apartment that felt more like a hotel suite than a home, spare and orderly in a way that made her want to leave something of hers behind just to see if he’d notice.

He noticed. A single earring, forgotten on his nightstand after a weekend visit, was still there three weeks later when she came back, sitting in the same spot like he hadn’t wanted to move it, or hadn’t wanted to admit that moving it meant something.

They never called it anything, not directly. Not girlfriend, not relationship, not any of the words that might have made it feel like the thing it was clearly becoming. They called it seeing each other, when anyone asked, which felt technically true and completely inadequate at the same time. Amara caught herself, more than once, editing what she said to friends about him—not because she was ashamed, but because the real shape of it, the flights and the midnight texts and the earring he wouldn’t move, sounded like more than either of them had agreed to at the start.

She didn’t examine that too closely either. Not yet.