Wanted All Along

Chapter Twelve

The offer came exactly nine days after the second interview, an email that landed while Amara was in the middle of an unrelated meeting, her phone buzzing insistently in her bag until curiosity got the better of her and she checked it under the table.

We’re pleased to offer you the position of Regional Marketing Director…

She didn’t hear another word of the meeting after that. She sat through the remaining twenty minutes in a fog of quiet disbelief, nodding at appropriate intervals, mentally rereading the email over and over until she was certain she hadn’t imagined it. The moment the meeting ended, she was in the stairwell, phone pressed to her ear, calling Kian before she’d even fully processed what she was about to say.

“I got it,” she said, the second he picked up. “Kian. I got the job.”

There was a beat of silence, and then his voice came through warm and full, none of the careful composure he usually carried into conversations, even good ones. “Amara. That’s incredible. That’s—God, I’m so proud of you. When do you start?”

“Six weeks. They gave me time to transition out of my current role and find a place to live.” She laughed, giddy in a way she hadn’t felt in longer than she could remember. “I’m moving. I’m actually moving.”

“You’re moving,” he repeated, like he needed to say it himself to fully believe it too. “I want to take you to dinner tonight. Properly. I’ll fly out—I don’t care what’s on my calendar.”

“You have a company to run.”

“I have a company that will survive one night without me.” His voice had gone soft, certain. “This matters more.”

He flew out that evening, showing up at her door with a bottle of champagne and an expression that made her chest ache with how much had changed in the four months since a bar on a small island, two strangers who’d agreed, very clearly, that this wasn’t supposed to be anything complicated.

“To new beginnings,” he said, pouring two glasses once they were settled on her couch, the city lights outside her window a poor substitute for the ocean but somehow just as significant.

“To new beginnings,” Amara echoed, clinking her glass against his.

They talked late into the night about logistics—apartments in his city, neighborhoods he thought she’d like, the practical shape of a life she was choosing to build somewhere new. It should have felt overwhelming, all of it happening so fast, but instead it felt like relief, like she’d finally stopped holding her breath waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“I keep thinking about something Jade said,” Amara admitted, curled against his side, his fingers tracing slow patterns along her arm. “That I shouldn’t be asking whether this is the right decision. I should be asking whether I’m being honest about what I actually want.”

“And are you? Being honest?”

“Yes.” She said it without hesitation, surprising herself with how easily the word came. “I want this job. I want this city. I want—” She stopped, suddenly aware of how close she was to saying something she hadn’t fully let herself think yet, let alone say out loud.

“You want?” Kian prompted gently, no pressure in it, just quiet curiosity.

“I want you,” she said finally, meeting his eyes. “Not just the version of us that exists in weekends and flights. All of it. Whatever comes with that.”

Something shifted in his expression, unguarded in a way she’d only seen glimpses of before—at the market with the oranges, in the quiet dark after their first night together. “I want that too,” he said, his voice rough with something that sounded a great deal like relief. “I’ve wanted that for longer than I’ve let myself admit. I think I was afraid that saying it out loud would make it real, and if it was real, I could actually lose it.”

“You’re not going to lose it.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Neither do you,” Amara said softly. “But I’d rather risk it than spend the rest of my life wondering what I would have had if I’d been brave enough to want it.”

Kian pulled her into a kiss that felt different from every kiss before it—slower, more deliberate, carrying the particular weight of two people finally saying, out loud, the thing they’d both been circling for months. When he pulled back, his forehead resting against hers, he said, quietly, “I love you. I don’t know exactly when it happened. I just know it did, somewhere between the island and now, and I’m done pretending I don’t.”

Amara felt the words land somewhere deep in her chest, warm and terrifying and entirely welcome. “I love you too,” she said, and meant it completely, no editing, no smallness, no careful hedging against the risk of wanting something fully. “I have for a while now.”

They didn’t say much else for a long time after that, the champagne going warm and forgotten on the coffee table, the city lights outside blurring into something that felt, for the first time, like it might actually be home.

Later, tangled together in the dark, Amara found herself thinking about how different this felt from the beginning—the careful boundaries they’d both insisted on that first night at the resort bar, the word uncomplicated they’d clung to like it might protect them from exactly this. It hadn’t protected them from anything. It had just delayed the inevitable, she thought, tracing idle patterns along Kian’s chest while he dozed beside her, both of them too wrung out and too happy to fully sleep yet.

“I keep thinking about the bar,” she said quietly, not sure if he was even fully awake to hear her.

“Mm.” He shifted, pulling her closer, a low hum of contentment in his chest. “What about it?”

“You told me you hadn’t done anything reckless in a decade. And then you booked a flight to see me three weeks later.” She smiled into the dark. “I think I knew, even then, that uncomplicated was never actually going to be true.”

“I knew it the moment you told me it was a mistake, working on vacation.” His voice was rough with sleep, but there was warmth threaded through it, unmistakable. “I just wasn’t ready to admit how much trouble I was already in.”

“Are you still in trouble?”

“Constantly,” he murmured, pressing a slow kiss to her shoulder. “I’ve never been happier about it.”

Amara fell asleep with a smile she couldn’t quite explain to anyone who hadn’t lived the last four months alongside her, the whole strange, unplanned shape of it—the vacation, the texts, the flights, the slow unraveling of every careful boundary they’d tried to build around something that had never had any real interest in staying simple.

Tomorrow there would be logistics again—apartments to tour, a job to give notice for, a life to pack into boxes and carry somewhere new. Tonight, there was only this: two people who’d finally said the thing out loud, and meant it.