Updated Apr 9, 2026 • ~5 min read
Chapter 25: I Love You
Kennedy
She’d planned to say it on a weekend.
The weekend had more space — less logistics, less the accumulation of Tuesday things that made the significant thing harder to get to. She’d decided on a Saturday in late February and then Saturday came and went and she’d had a cold she was still recovering from and the timing was wrong, and she told herself she’d say it in March.
She said it on a Wednesday.
She’d come from school to his apartment, which had become one of the patterns of their life — two or three evenings a week, the casual navigation of each other’s spaces, the accumulated familiarity of knowing where his coffee was and where he put his keys and that he read on the couch before bed with the specific focused quiet of someone who wasn’t available in that window and she’d learned to let him have it.
She came in from the cold with her coat still on, and he was in the kitchen making something that smelled like garlic and rosemary, and he said *hey* without looking up, and she stood in his kitchen doorway and looked at him — the specific quality of a person in their own space, easy in their own skin — and the thing she’d been carrying for a month was suddenly less comfortable to carry than to put down.
“I love you,” she said.
He looked up.
She didn’t add anything to it. She’d been composing additions for weeks — the qualifiers, the context, the careful framing that would make it clear she wasn’t expecting a particular response and wasn’t making it his problem — and standing in his kitchen doorway with her coat still on she understood she didn’t need any of them. She’d said the thing.
He was looking at her with an expression she didn’t have a name for. Something that was not surprise — or was surprise but not the uncomfortable kind. More like: the particular look of someone who has been waiting for confirmation of something they’d been fairly certain about but hadn’t wanted to assume.
He put down the spoon.
He crossed the kitchen in three steps and stood in front of her and held her face in both hands and looked at her for a moment in the specific way he had of making her feel like the only thing in the room.
“I’ve been in love with you since October,” he said. “Probably before October.”
She breathed.
“I kept trying to find the right moment to say it,” he said, “and every time I thought I’d found it something else was happening and I — I was afraid of loading it onto a moment that was already carrying something else.”
“You could have said it in a corner store,” she said. “You could have said it at the station kitchen. You could have said it during a cold.”
His thumbs were on her cheekbones. “Yeah,” he said. “I could have.” Something shifted in his face. “Kennedy.”
“Yeah.”
“I love you,” he said. “That’s the whole of it.”
She kissed him. He kissed her back with the urgency of someone who had been holding something for a long time, and she felt it — the specific quality of being loved by someone who was telling you the truth — and she let herself have all of it without the management.
Eventually she was aware that the thing on the stove was still on.
“Your dinner,” she said against his mouth.
“Right.” He didn’t move for another moment. Then he went back to the stove, and she took off her coat, and she sat at his kitchen counter and watched him finish making dinner with the particular warmth of someone who had just put something down that had been waiting to be put down.
“October,” she said.
“The gymnasium,” he said, without looking up. “You told me about the girl with the reading difficulty. Elena Reyes.” He paused. “I went home and couldn’t stop thinking about it.” He glanced at her. “About you.”
She remembered that day. She remembered standing in the gymnasium doorway and thinking: *this is the problem. This is exactly the problem.* She’d been right — it had been a problem. It had been the best problem she’d ever had.
“I knew at the bench,” she said. “The night on Fletcher. I knew and I spent three weeks pretending I didn’t.”
“You’re very good at pretending,” he said.
“I’m learning to stop,” she said.
He looked at her over the stove. He smiled — the specific one, the one that arrived before he’d decided whether to let it, the one she’d been cataloguing since October and could now have without the catalogue because it was hers to have.
“Yeah,” he said. “You are.”
She stayed for dinner and after dinner and the rest of Wednesday, and she drove home Thursday morning in the thin early light thinking about all the things she’d been afraid of in October that had resolved themselves, and all the new things she was afraid of now that were different in quality and worth being afraid of, and the specific sensation of a life that was going somewhere.
She texted Tatum from a red light: *I told him I love him.*
Tatum: *AND???*
*He said he’s been in love with me since October.*
Tatum, for once, sent no further analysis. Just: *👏👏👏*
Kennedy put her phone away and drove the rest of the way home in the February morning with the windows slightly open, and the cold came in, and she didn’t close them.
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