“I said that I didn’t care what Auden Guest did, I was done running away from Thorncombe. No matter how shitty the villagers have been to my mom or me, she loved it here. So do I. Now, at least.”
Auden’s hands drop to my back and fist in my T-shirt. “You belong here.”
“Yes.”
“With me.”
I let out a shuddering breath. “Yes.”
“Even though we’ve hurt each other? Badly?”
Is he offering to forgive me too? Are those six steps outside the graveyard walls as branded into his memory as they are into mine? I’m too scared to ask.
Once again the coward.
“Even though we’ve hurt each other,” I repeat in a whisper, and coward I may be, but I’m also very, very smart, because that answer earns me a fierce, searing kiss. It’s a kiss like the one we once shared in his walled garden, the kind
