Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~6 min read
Chapter 23: Worth the wait
Two months.
Two months of dinners and museums and Sunday cooking and evenings tangled together on his couch with separate books, of learning each other sideways through proximity and conversation. Two months of sleeping in his bed, his arm across her waist, his nose against her hair, of mornings that felt like the best possible version of waking up. Two months of wanting and choosing to be patient about it, because he had said he wanted to do this right and she had said okay and they had both meant it.
Two months, and then a Saturday in June when she came to his apartment with a bottle of wine and her overnight bag and she was setting down her keys on his kitchen counter when she turned to find him watching her from the doorway.
“You’re doing it again,” she said.
“What?”
“Watching me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m something you’re not sure you get to have.”
He crossed the kitchen. He put his hands on either side of her on the counter — not caging her, not dramatic, just bracketing the space around her so that when she looked up she was looking at him and only him.
“I know I get to have this,” he said. “I’m watching because I want to. Because you’re in my kitchen and that’s — I spent a long time not letting myself have things I wanted.”
“I know.” She reached up and put her hand flat against his chest. Over his heartbeat — she could feel it, steady and real. “You can have this.”
“I know.” He bent his head. Pressed his forehead against hers. “I know I can.”
She stayed like that for a moment, in the warmth of his proximity, in the kitchen that smelled like garlic and whatever he’d been cooking before she arrived.
“Theo,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I’ve been patient for nine months.”
A pause. She felt his chest move — breath, or something adjacent to it.
“Are you done being patient?” he said.
“I’m done being patient,” she said.
He kissed her.
And then he kept kissing her, and the kitchen counter was behind her and his hands were at her face and her waist and then he was walking her backward through the apartment toward the bedroom, and she was laughing at the logistics of it, at the chair they had to navigate around and the book he’d left on the floor that she nearly stepped on, and he was laughing too, and then they weren’t laughing anymore, and the bedroom light was the warm amber of a summer evening and the window was open to the city sounds and the wine was forgotten entirely on the kitchen counter.
He was unhurried.
She had known from everything she’d observed about him — the eight handwritten pages of mentorship notes, the Italian dinner, the way he’d made risotto with the absorbed focus of someone who believes that whatever you do is worth doing with complete attention — that he would be unhurried. But knowing it in the abstract and experiencing it were different. He was thorough in the way he was thorough about everything, patient in the way she had been patient, reverent in a way she hadn’t entirely expected and that undid her at the knees, and the evening settled around them in the warm amber light with the city going about its summer business three floors below and she felt, somewhere past the wanting and the waiting and the having-finally — she felt known.
Not exposed. Not vulnerable. Known, in the deep way of being seen and finding the being-seen entirely safe.
“I love you,” she said.
She heard it before she planned it. But she felt it in the saying — not accidental but not premeditated, the truest thing said at the truest moment without calculation.
“I love you,” he said, and his voice was the low, deliberate voice with nothing managed about it. Not a response to her saying it. A statement, like his own, timed to when it was true and no longer possible to contain. “I’ve loved you since the Heathcliff lecture, I think. Possibly before.”
“You looked at me.”
“I know. I tried not to.”
“The whole room noticed.”
“I know that too.” He pressed his mouth against her temple. “I’m glad you knew before I could properly tell you. I’m glad you were patient enough to wait.”
“You’re worth it,” she said. Simply. The way she said true things.
They lay in the amber light afterward, the city sounds floating up from below, and she thought about the nine months that had led here — the first day in his office and the coffee cup and the almost-kiss in the elevator and the deleted draft and the investigation and the last day as his TA and the anteroom door. All of it in sequence, each moment its necessary component of the whole.
“The Heathcliff lecture,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I wrote something in my notebook during that lecture.”
He was quiet, listening.
“*Worth the wait,*” she said. “That’s what I wrote.”
She felt him smile against her hair — fully, unguarded, the real smile that she had spent eight months cataloging the ghost of and was now in the habit of seeing actual.
“Yes,” he said. “It was.”
Outside, the city went about its summer evening. Somewhere a few streets over, a laugh from a group on a terrace, someone with a bicycle bell, the low warm hum of a city that didn’t know or care about Victorian literature or ethics policies or one very stubborn man who had needed nine months to stop being afraid.
She was fine with that. She had always been fine with what the world knew and didn’t know.
She had the real thing. The rest could remain whatever it was.
“Dinner,” she said eventually, against his shoulder. “The wine is still on the counter.”
“In a minute.”
“You said that twenty minutes ago.”
“I have no intention of being efficient about this.” He tightened his arm around her. “We have all the time we need.”
She settled back.
She thought: *yes. We do.*
She thought: *finally.*
She thought nothing else for a while.
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