As soon as that little piece of painted metal hit her palm, it felt so official. This was one of those milestone moments Leah would hold onto for the rest of her days. Because it wasn’t ‘here’, it absolute was ‘home’. It felt like home. As her fingers curled around that key, she took her lower lip between her teeth and clutched that key to her heart as if to keep it safe. Her heart had been beating in Glasgow for a long time, it was nice to be joined with it again.
Feeling the comfort of his arms around her, Leah leaned back into his chest the slightest bit and tilted her head into the touch of his fingers running through her hair. “Yeah, that’s mom. This was the last picture I took of her before she got sick. I wish you could have met her, she was one hell of a gal.” She had taken other pictures when her mother had gotten sick, but it was hard to look at her hero in such a way. It broke her heart. Any image of her mother would give her a pain in her chest, she couldn’t leave Boston without her. If only she’d been able to meet Tomlin, to see how happy he made her, how romantic this whole gesture was. She would have loved the man, even with his past. Thinking about it, she had to wonder what Tomlin’s family was like. “Are you and your family close?”
One thing he was going to learn about Leah was that she loved working. Running that bookstore had been all she had for so long, it was crazy to stop for that one trip when they’d met, let along pause to move all the way out to Scotland. Returning his hug, Leah breathed him in. Tightening her grasp around him, Leah almost feared that if she let him go, she’d wake up from this dream. “I don’t feel rushed at all. I’ve been working in that store since I was a kid, I don’t know how to not work. But our home won’t hold all of my books and they’ll be here pretty soon so, the faster we pick a spot for our bookstore the better. My personal collection should be fine but I mean. I have a bookstores worth of books shipping this way.” Leah leaned back only far enough that she could look down at Tomlin as she spoke, letting one of her pale hands slide her fingers through his short hair. God, it was good to be home. “I want to get to know the rest of your world. Our world.”
Tomlin smiled softly at Leah, brushing his thumb across her cheek. “Sometimes you can still meet people in stories. Wouldn’t you agree?” His thick Scottish accent seemed to echo off the books around them. “Whenever you miss her, whenever there’s something about her you think I just desperately should’ve known, tell me. I wish I could say my own family is worth getting to know, but their stories are best left with them. My past, in the past. You, however, I want to know everything about.”
He wondered if, behind the smile and despite their relationship being new, could she see the sadness about not having stories for her to listen to? Could she see the sadness in those bright blue eyes? “Mmm a little workaholic? Maybe we should agree to set a certain day every week for just us then because I’m a workaholic too. My schedule can be unpredictable, but with some planning I think I could manage to get one of my two days off a week to always line up with what you’re up to. I already know just coming home to you every night isn’t going to be enough.” He wrapped his arms tightly around her waist. It wasn’t lost on Tomlin just how much of a bachelor he’d been until this moment. “We’ll explore. Not just Scotland either. We can do trips all over Europe. If you had to make a top five places in Europe list where would we go first?”
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