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She pounds on the shop door with the ferocity of an FBI agent on TV until Charlie reappears, looking exactly how he always looks: tidy, overworked, well dressed, and like he wants to bite my thigh.

Holding his gaze feels like public indecency.

Some books you don’t read so much as live, and finishing one of those always makes me think of ascending from a scuba dive. Like if I surface too fast I might get the bends.

“Tonight,” I say, “can I just have you, Charlie? Even if it can’t last. Even if we already know how it ends.”He holds my jaw so gingerly. Like I’m something delicate. Or maybe like he is. Like with one wrong move we could crack each other open. My chest squeezes with that heart-crushing final-chapter feeling, only now I know the word for it. I know it even if I can’t bring myself to think it. “You do have me, Nora. I never stood a chance.”

we belong. In a way I don’t understand, he’s mine, and I’m his. It doesn’t matter what the last page says. That’s the truth. Here, now.

He kisses the base of my throat. “I remember exactly how you feel, Nora. Like fucking silk.”

“Nora,” he rasps. A small sound of acknowledgment hums out of me. “We shouldn’t have waited. We should have been doing this since we met.”

Slowly. Carefully. He draws back before I’ve gotten any relief, and a laugh rattles out of him at the sound I make. “I had no idea it was possible,” he says, “for you to want me as much as I want you.”“More,” I say, too deep into this now to second-guess admitting something like that.“Now, that,” Charlie says, pushing deeper this time, “I know is impossible.”

“I thought about you everywhere,” he says. “There’s nowhere in this town we haven’t done this.”Half laughing even as I’m wrapped around him, ravenous, I ask, “How was it?”“My imagination’s not as good as I thought.”

“I want more of you,” I gasp into his mouth, feeling each beat of his heart surging through me. Harder, faster, more, all.“You’re perfect,” he rasps. “That’s the word, Nora. You’re fucking perfect.”

After that, there is no more talking. I have never been so glad for someone to see straight through me, to read me like a book, as he brings me to the edge again, and again, and—yes, the romance gods would be proud—again.

“I don’t stay over at strange men’s places,” I say, blood fizzing.“Then it’s lucky this isn’t my place.”

“I’m sorry. I’m just . . .”“Don’t be sorry,” he says roughly. “Please don’t apologize for letting me know you.”

If I don’t say it aloud, I think, it doesn’t count. Maybe it won’t even be true.But it is true, and I’m not sure I’d want to stop it, even if I knew how: I am falling in love with Charlie Lastra.

I can’t think of a greater symbol of hope than a person who’s willing to drag themselves out of bed and sing at the top of their lungs to a group of strangers trapped on a train. That tenacity should be rewarded.

Neither of us leaves the shop that night. I don’t want to leave him, and I don’t want him to feel alone in the dark and quiet. Even if it can’t last, even if it’s just for tonight, I want him to know that I’ve got him, the way he’s had me. The way he has me.For once, I sleep like a rock.

“For what it’s worth,” he says, “I doubt I will ever like anyone else in the world as much as I like you.”

You can take the city person out of the city, but the city will always be in them.

I still feel like a city person, through and through, but maybe it’s possible to have more than one home. Maybe it’s possible to belong in a hundred different ways to a hundred different people and places.

I leave, and I don’t say goodbye. Because I’m not good at them. I’ve never really said one, and I don’t want to start with you.