I’m in Eli’s arms before I’m aware that I’ve wildly launched myself at him. He accepts it with a sway and a laughing, “Oof.”

“What are you doing here?” I ask into his neck.

His arms come around me, one around my waist, one high across my back. Our hearts pound against one another.

“I came to give you the trademarked cupcake-with-a-dollar-store-candle combo,” he says, “since no one else can deliver the experience.”

I pull back, drinking him in. Holy hell, I love this man. “It’s not my birthday yet.”

Eli smiles, his eyes moving over whatever parts of me aren’t smashed up against him. “It is in one hour and fifty-seven minutes, give or take a few. I didn’t want to risk not being the first person to wish it to you.”

“Is that the only reason?”

“Yeah.” He curves a hand against my jaw, his thumb playing over the high plane of my cheek. “I’m actually gonna go now, good luck with everything.”

I laugh, still stunned that he’s here. “Eli.”

“Georgia, come on.” His voice turns quiet, his eyes warm and happy. “The cupcake is a front. I’m here because I love you.”

The past thirty minutes have been so surreal, but it’s this moment—Eli standing in front of me, teasing me and loving me when I wished for him to see me exactly like this—that makes it all solidify.

I burst into tears.

Eli’s face falls and he sets me down, herding me into the foyer before setting the cupcake box on top of his bag. The door shuts behind him.

“Georgia,” he murmurs, and he says my name with so much care that it makes me cry harder. He tries again, a quiet “Peach.” He says it the way anyone else would say love or home. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m in love with you,” I choke out.

His eyes turn into a starburst of the warmest colors—rich brown, honey, gold. “Is that a bad thing?”

I take a deep shuddering breath, pacing away from him. “No, but I spent all day—the past seven weeks, actually—wishing you were here and thinking about how much I hate being your friend, and then Adam called me to tell me someone was at the door—” I turn back to Eli. He’s in my space. He’s wearing jeans, a gray sweater with his necklace tucked lovingly under the collar, his old Converse. His hair is mussed, still too long, his stubble grown back. He’s here in my home. He looks so good in it. “And it was you. It’s not bad, it’s amazing. It just makes me feel like my heart is going to explode, and that’s very unsettling.”

He blinks. “You hate being my friend?”

“Yes.” Oh god, that sounded violently emphatic. “I mean, no, I love being your friend, but it’s not all I want with you.”

He takes a step, eyes locked with mine. I can see his hope there, right on the surface. “What do you want?”

“Everything,” I choke out. “All the good stuff and the messy stuff and even the bad stuff. I want all of it.”

I recognize the look in his eyes—the need to bookmark the moment so he can come back to it as a memory.

Releasing a breath, he reaches out, so I do, too, and our fingers twine.

He pulls gently, towing me until I’m pressed against him again. “I want all of it, too,” he says, his voice low.

“Is that why you’re here?”

One corner of his mouth lifts. “I told you it was the cupcake.” “You’re putting a lot of pressure on the cupcake.”

He laughs, but it fades quickly, replaced by something far more resolute. “I have things to tell you.”

The disaster I made in my living room calls to me. “Me, too.”

He nods, as if he knows, but he can’t. Not all of it. Not until I say it out loud.

“What if I kissed you first?” he murmurs, his gaze bouncing between my eyes and my mouth.

I let out a shaky breath. “I wouldn’t hate it.”

He smiles; it’s such a tender shape, such a tender feeling when his mouth grazes mine. It’s soft, but so quickly it’s not. He sighs, parting his lips against mine, and my throat tightens viciously as I open for him. He kisses me, slow and deep, his thumb sightlessly moving up to brush a tear from the corner of my eye. It’s a kiss that’s so hungry, that’s fully satiated, a kiss that ends when he moves his mouth to my cheek, but will never be over.

“I love you,” he breathes against my skin, and the feel of it is so familiar that it takes me back to Blue Yonder, to those nights when he’d whisper things I couldn’t catch. It comes to me now that he was saying it then. He’s been saying it for so long, even in moments I couldn’t hear it or didn’t want to.

“I love you, Georgia,” he says again. He pulls back, his eyes finding mine, holding me in place. “That comes first before anything else we say.”

I nod, a tear dripping off my chin. “I love you, too.”

His smile is beautiful and quiet. So sure, that I know whatever we say tonight will only make us better. “Okay, then. Let’s do the rest.”

Eli’s crouched on my living room floor, still and silent except for when he lays an unraveled paper ring down carefully and picks up another one. In between reading, I tell him how I discovered his hidden messages. His mouth tips up when I include the part about my shouted declaration to him via phone, his gaze following the path of years’ worth of his own.

Finally, he puts down the last piece of paper, rubbing his eyes. He stands and rounds the coffee table to sit next to me on the couch. Running his hand along my thigh, he lets out a breath.

“I wrote all of these, so I know. But seeing them like this…” He trails off, shaking his head. “I really have loved you for a long time.”

My throat crowds with emotion as I nod.

“I saw you sneaking the rings I made when we were at Blue Yonder, so I knew you had some of them,” he says, biting back a smile at my shocked squeak, but then his expression turns infinitely tender. “You kept them all, though.”

“I did.”

His eyes search mine. “Why?”

“Because I’ve loved you for a long time, too.”

His lashes swoop down, pressing hard against his skin. When he opens his eyes again, they’re shining, pinned to me. He seems lost for words.

“Do you want to go first or do you want me to?” I tease, needing to ease his tension and mine.

He blows out a breath. “Maybe we should’ve written out an agenda.” “If I’d had notice—” I stop, triumphant, when he grins.

“Yeah, well, I’m going to live off the look on your face when you opened the door for the next fifty years or so,” he says, wiping at his eyes. “I don’t mind the agenda being collateral damage.”

“I have a late add if you’re amenable.” He quirks an eyebrow. “I am.”

“Will you tell me why you did this?” I ask, pointing to the rings. “And why you didn’t tell me about them?”

“I was going to tell you tonight, just so you know for unofficial agenda record-keeping purposes. I wasn’t just here for the cupcake.”

“I knew it.”

He laughs softly, then looks at the rings, sighing. “I don’t know, when I first started writing in them, it was to get my feelings out somewhere without it blowing anything up. You and Adam were the only real stability I had in my life at that point, and I didn’t want to risk telling you and have it get awkward.”

“I don’t know how I would’ve handled it anyway,” I admit. I kept him so firmly in the best-friend bracket back then; I needed him too much that way.

“Jesus, you would’ve crushed my fifteen-year-old heart,” he groans. “Good choice there. And when we got together, it felt like something I was

building for you, you know? I always felt like saying ‘I love you’ never really touched how much I was feeling. If I gave you a list that showed all of the times I loved you, cumulatively, maybe you’d see, since that’s your language. I had…” He huffs out a breath, rubbing a hand along his jaw. His stubble purrs against his skin, a sound I feel everywhere. “Plans like this for it, I guess, but me showing you, not a glass of wine doing the grand reveal.”

“So inconsiderate of it,” I say. “Thunder stealer,” he agrees.

“I’ll let you throw it out the window if you want.”

His grin is small. “Nah, that’s what I get for waiting. I should’ve known better.” His voice quiets as he grows serious. “I do know better. When things went bad between us, I used the rings as a way to say things I couldn’t say out loud because you were already so far away and I didn’t want to push you further. But not saying it did that, too. I think our problem was that we hid the pieces we didn’t trust about ourselves from one another.”

I nod. “Because if you didn’t trust it, or I didn’t, why would the other person?”

“Exactly,” he says. “I hated the way my anxiety made me feel and act, hated that working harder was the one thing that made it better while making it worse, hated feeling like if I released my foot from the pedal, I’d crash and everything I was working toward would go away. I was ashamed, so I didn’t give you access to it. But it was my whole life, Georgia. I woke up and fell asleep feeling that way. Of course you were going to feel shut out.”

“I shut you out, too,” I say, pressing my knees against his. “I was ashamed of how much I needed you. I was only happy those first couple months, and it felt like so much pressure to rely on you like that, to not be able to find happiness on my own once you really fell into your job. The further away you were, the bigger that feeling got and the more it scared me. I hid how much I needed you when we were together and after we broke up, even that week we were at Blue Yonder. I had these Eli Mora lists

—”

His eyebrow arches up. “Wait, I had my own Georgia Woodward–made lists? Plural?”

“Don’t be flattered,” I warn, seeing the spark in his eyes. “They weren’t beautiful physical manifestations of the reasons I love you. They were a way to keep my messy emotions in check.”

If anything, that spark grows. “Your messy emotions are on my list of reasons I love you, so I’m going to be flattered anyway.”

My throat goes tight hearing that. I finally trust it’s true. “That’s very weird of you.”

“Is that on your list of reasons you love me?” he asks, one corner of his mouth pulling up. I nod with a helpless laugh and he hums happily.

“Anyway, it didn’t work. I still needed you, I just put it in a box. But underneath all my rules, I was still doing all the things I told myself I couldn’t—I was still in love with you. I still missed you.”

Eli takes my hand, lacing his fingers with mine.

“It clicked for me looking at the rings,” I say. “You wrote the things you loved about me in good times and bad, when we were at our highest and lowest. I was wrong when I said before that we’re only good at loving each other when it’s easy. I think we’re good at loving each other out loud when it is, but we’ve silently loved each other through all of the hard stuff.”

“We have,” he says quietly. “God, it’s so good to hear you say it, though.

I wasn’t sure.”

“I’m trying to be better about saying hard things. It’s scary, though.” “But you’re doing it,” he says, looking proud and windblown.

I nod, then take a deep breath. I’m about to do it again. “That night we argued—”

“I wouldn’t call it arguing.”

“That night we vehemently disagreed,” I amend, raising a questioning eyebrow. When Eli nods his approval, I continue, “You said that doing something means more when you’re scared, because you know the risk but trusting yourself ranks above that. Saying I wanted us to be friends was letting my fear drive. In reality, the only honest option is having everything with you, even when it’s not perfect. Especially then. I love you, and I

know that our current logistics are complicated, but I don’t care. I can be here and you can be in LA and we can figure—”

“I’m not going to be in LA.” He says it so calmly, so matter-of-factly, that it takes me five full business seconds to understand it.

“What?”

“That’s my other agenda item,” he says. “If you’re done with yours.” “I— yes,” I manage.

Eli scoots closer, curling a hand around my thigh. “I told you that Adam’s bachelor party was the catalyst for my decision to quit my job, but it was also you, Georgia.”

“Me?” The improbability that I played into his decision to quit his job five years after we broke up is laced through my voice.

Something flashes in his eyes—an old pain, maybe, seeing my confusion. “Yes, you. A few weeks after Adam’s bachelor party, Luce promoted me to VP.” His mouth tips up at my gasp, but he continues, “He congratulated me for working my ass off, said I was on the fast track to director as long as I worked even harder to prove I deserved it.”

“Oh, fuck that guy.”

“Right?” Eli says with a short laugh. “I just stared at him while all this shit flew through my head—that I was on my way to being him, someone who had nothing but his work, who went home to an empty house, who would die with a shit ton of money in the bank but no one there to hold his hand.”

I take his, just so he remembers that’s not his path.

Eli’s been looking out the window, back in that moment, but now he looks over at me. “I thought about Adam telling me it was okay that I missed his bachelor party, and you not responding to the text I sent you from the airport when I told you I couldn’t make it. I thought about the night you told me you were done, what a turning point it was for you when it could’ve been a turning point for me, too. You pulled yourself out of our misery even though it fucking hurt. If I took that promotion, I knew I would only be extending my misery. And for what? For some stability that was meaningless if I was alone?” His eyes are full of so much emotion,

matching the feeling in my heart. “I swear, Georgia, your voice was in my head when I told him I was quitting instead.”

Old wounds are meant to stay stitched up, but something inside me breaks open instead with his confession. It feels like relief, like real healing, not just for myself, but for Eli, too.

“I’m so proud of you,” I whisper, my voice cracking. “God, you really have been doing work with Amari.”

“He’s relentless,” he laughs, reaching over to brush his thumb over my cheek. It comes back wet. “I’m not saying I wasn’t scared after I did it, or that I’m not still. But I know that fear is my anxiety talking and, let’s be honest, a heavy fucking dose of being a cog in a capitalistic roller coaster you feel like you can never get off of.”

“I know it’s an inappropriate time to mention this,” I breathe out, “but that’s the hottest thing you’ve ever said.”

He throws me the tiniest wink, then leans forward, hooking a hand around the back of my calf, squeezing gently. “The reality is, I do have to be a cog and that may feed some of my anxiety. But I want a life that makes me happy. I want something that’s going to feel right, not just give me financial stability. I went on interviews in LA and San Francisco. I got two job offers, including the first place I interviewed with and a strategy role at a telecom company in San Francisco.”

“Eli,” I breathe out. “I— congrat—”

“I didn’t accept either of those jobs,” he interrupts gently. “You told me you wanted me to choose something for myself, and now I need you to trust that I am. I’m choosing neither of those jobs because it doesn’t feel right. I’m choosing you and me because it does.”

I don’t even realize I’m crying until his arms are around me and I’m tucked into the home-shaped place of his arms.

“I can be anywhere, Georgia,” he murmurs, running a hand up and down my back. “I’d like to be with you. Here, if you’ll have me.”

“I just spent a whole huge agenda item telling you I would,” I sob.

He laughs, then pulls back to frame my face, taking me in. The look in his eyes is hard to describe, but I know I have time to find the words for it.

For now, all I can think is home, and it’s what I hear when he says, “I love you.”

“I love you,” I say, and then, because I’ve promised both Eli and myself we’d say the messy stuff out loud, because it’s such a relief to do it, I admit, “I’m still scared.”

“Me, too.” I thought his paper-ring smile was his happiest, but the one he gives me now replaces it. “Let’s do it together.”

I nod, crying, smiling ridiculously, and he kisses me just like that— through my tears and my joy. Because of it. He pulls me onto his lap, his mouth turning quickly from grateful to hungry. The talking portion of the agenda is officially over.

I sink fully into my need for him, let it feed the way he needs me. In return, he gives me everything: soft, wrecked groans, his fingers between my legs and then his mouth, his whispered, it’s so good, Peach, it’ll always be so good. A quiet, I’m so in love with you. All of it plays on a loop that feels timeless.

Somehow I know this is the end of missing him the way I did before. It dissolves in my blood, an effervescence that follows the path of his fingers as he frames my hips, pulling me down onto him so he can finally slip inside.

Later, when I’m sprawled on the couch, wearing the Denver Nuggets T- shirt Eli packed for me, he turns off the lights as he walks out of the kitchen. He’s shirtless and flushed, holding my cupcake. His hand is curved around the candle, protecting the flame.

I think about my birthday years ago with Eli when I wished for him. I trace the fine lines creasing the corners of his eyes as he sits next to me and sings “Happy Birthday.” Those lines remind me that eight years have stretched from that moment to this one, that we’ve circled back to it. That we love each other. Not again, but still.

Time is a miracle. It shows you what you had, and sometimes it brings it back to you. Different. Better.

Eli’s done singing. Our eyes catch over the candle and I see the flame in his. It won’t extinguish. It never did.

“Make a wish,” he says quietly. So I do.