Chapter 880: "I’m Ready" Could track her movement through the house like sonar, mapping her approach by the whisper of skin on stone. She was coming from upstairs. Moving slowly. Deliberately. The way Sarah moved when she’d made a decision. My hands stilled over the cutting board. The knife rested against a half-diced tomato, forgotten. Every sense I possessed—natural and supernatural—oriented toward the hallway like satellite dishes tracking a signal. Her heartbeat reached me before she did. Elevated. Not panicked—purposeful. The steady, accelerated rhythm of someone walking toward something they’d chosen, something they wanted, something that scared them in the way that only the most important things in life could scare you. I was alone in my own head for the first time. Just me. Just the kitchen. Just the sound of Sarah’s footsteps getting closer. She appeared in the doorway, and every thought in my head evaporated like water on a hot engine block. She wasn’t wearing anything designed to seduce. That was the thing. That was what made it devastating. No sheer robe. No lingerie. No calculated outfit assembled to destroy me. Just a white cotton tank top—the thin, soft kind that came in packs of three from Target. It hung loose on her frame but clung in the places that mattered—the soft curve of her breasts, the subtle architecture of her collarbones, the way her waist dipped inward before flaring into hips that the tank top only hinted at. Grey sleep shorts. The short, showed her legs—long, toned, still carrying the faintest golden remnant of summer sun. They sat low on her hips, revealing a strip of bare skin between the hem of her top and the waistband. Just an inch. Maybe two. That inch of skin hit harder than every piece of lingerie in every Victoria’s Secret catalog ever printed. Her hair was down. Damp at the ends and the scent reached me like a slow-motion wave. And beneath all of it, the warm, clean base note that was just Sarah. No makeup. Just raw Sarah. Standing in my kitchen doorway with her arms crossed loosely over her stomach—not defensive, just... holding herself. Her eyes found mine. And I saw it. Not lust—though that was there, simmering beneath the surface like magma under thin crust. Not nervousness—though that was there too, a fine tremor in her fingers that she tried to hide by pressing them against her own skin. What I saw was certainty. The kind of certainty that came from a girl who’d finished to understand the steps before she leaped. "Hey," she said. Just that. Just hey. Her voice steady but soft, carrying the weight of everything she wasn’t saying yet. "Hey," I said back—raw around the edges, scraped clean by the sudden intensity of what I was feeling. A pause—two people standing on either side of a threshold, both knowing what crossing it meant, both waiting for the other to take the first step. Sarah uncrossed her arms. Let them fall to her sides. A small gesture that felt enormous—like watching someone set down a shield they’d been carrying for years. "I smell garlic," she said, and her lips curved into the slightest smile. "And something else. Lemon?" "Lemon herb chicken. Roasted vegetables. Garlic mashed potatoes." "You’re cooking." "I’m cooking." "For who?" I set the knife down. Wiped my hands on the towel draped over my shoulder. Turned to face her fully, giving her my complete attention—every enhanced sense, every ounce of awareness, all of it focused on her like a spotlight. "For you," I said simply. "I was cooking for you." Something shifted in her expression. A softening. A warmth that started in her eyes and spread outward, touching her lips, her cheeks, the way she held her shoulders. "How’d you know I’d be hungry?" she asked, stepping further into the kitchen. Each step deliberate. Measured. Sarah’s steps. "Because you always are after you’ve made a decision." She stopped. Three feet away. Close enough that the warmth radiating from her recently-showered skin reached me like gentle waves. "What decision?" she asked, but her voice had dropped. Softer now. Intimate. The voice she used when it was just us—when the world had shrunk to the space between our bodies and everything else was just noise. I held her gaze. Let the silence answer for a moment. Let her see in my eyes that I knew. That I’d felt it building. That I’d been waiting—patiently, carefully, without pressure—for exactly this moment. "Eat first," I said, turning back to the stove. "Whatever you’ve decided, it can wait until you’ve had a proper meal." "Peter—" "Sit down, Sarah." My voice was gentle but firm. "Let me feed you. Then we’ll talk. Then we’ll... whatever comes after talking." I heard her exhale. A long, slow release—tension leaving her body like steam from a kettle. She pulled out a stool at the island. Sat down. Folded her hands in front of her on the marble countertop. And watched me cook. We ate in a silence that wasn’t silence. It was the most communicative quiet—every glance a sentence, every brush of fingers reaching for the salt a paragraph, every moment of eye contact a Chapter in a story we’d been writing since the night on the kitchen counter. Sarah ate slowly. Deliberately. Tasting everything, savoring it in a way that told me this wasn’t about the food. It was about the ritual. About sitting across from me in this warm, golden kitchen, sharing a meal I’d made with my own hands, existing together in a space that felt sacred in its simplicity. ’Sacred.’ There was that word again. Her word. The one she’d used to describe what we’d done. What she was about to ask me to do. She finished her plate. Set her fork down with careful precision. Took a breath. "Peter." "Sarah." "I need to tell you something." "I know." She blinked. "You know what I’m going to say?" "I know you’re going to say something important. I can feel it." I set my own fork down, mirroring her, giving her the respect of my full presence. "I’ve been feeling it for days. Week, maybe." Her lips parted slightly. A flush crept up her neck—not embarrassment. Something deeper. Something closer to being seen. "That thing you do," she murmured. "That thing where you just... know. Before I say it. Before I even fully know it myself. It used to scare me." "Now it makes me feel safe." She looked down at her hands, then back up at me. "Because it means you’re paying attention. Really paying attention. The way you do everyone. But... different. Because with me, you wait." The word landed like a stone in still water. "You wait, Peter. You’ve always waited for me. Even when Emma jumped. Even when—" She stopped. Swallowed. Started again. "Even when I know your body wanted what my body wanted, you waited. Because I asked you to. Because I needed you to." "Of course I waited." "Not everyone would have." "I’m not everyone." "No." Her smile was small and immense at the same time. "You’re not." She stood. Came around the island. Stood beside me—close, but not touching. Respecting the electricity between us the same way you’d respect the surface tension of water before breaking it. "I’m ready." Two words. Spoken quietly, without drama, without performance. Just truth, delivered in the voice of a girl who’d spent weeks making sure she could say them and mean every syllable. "I know what it means. I know what changes. I’ve thought about it every day since the kitchen—since you carried me to the couch and I said not yet and you just... held me. Like that was enough. Like I was enough, even without giving you everything." "You were. You are." "I know." Tears gathered in her eyes—not sad tears. "And that’s why I’m ready. Because you made the waiting feel like something beautiful instead of something missing. You made me feel like my pace mattered. Like my boundaries were—" "Sacred," I finished. A tear spilled over. She laughed—wet, bright, startled. "You remember." "I remember everything you’ve ever said to me, Sarah. Every word. Every silence between the words." She reached out. Took my hand. Her fingers were warm and trembling—not with fear, but with the enormity of what she was offering. "Not here," she said. "Not the kitchen. Not the couch. Not anywhere that belongs to the house or the estate or the empire." "Then where?" "Your room. Your bed." She lifted my hand, pressed her lips to my knuckles—an echo of something Linda had done, though Sarah couldn’t know that. The tenderness of it cracked something open inside me. "I want to be in your space. Surrounded by you. I want it to smell like you and feel like you and I want to wake up tomorrow in your sheets knowing that’s where it happened." My heart was doing things that hearts weren’t supposed to do. Expanding. Aching. Burning with a heat that had nothing to do with lust and everything to do with the specific, devastating experience of being loved by Sarah Carter. "I want you to carry me," she whispered. "The way you carried me from the counter that night. I want to feel your arms around me the whole way. I want the last thing I feel before we start to be you holding me like I’m the most important thing in the world." "You are." "Then show me."