Salvation in the Secular Age {MH/GD}

{Baby Love, I Need You Now, I've Waited Oh So Long}

HEY YALL. This chapter is long awaited, I know. I hope I have done these characters justice. Matty and Claire have  a lot, LOT more they will experience together, and I'm so excited to share those chapters with you in the weeks to come. I apologize if updates are slow, I am extremely busy and can't always find the time to write, though I love doing it. Please be patient, remember to vote and comment. I love you all!

{Claire}

The rain was a strange and beautiful kind of downpour, heavy droplets falling, saturating trees, the grass, the sidewalks, the cool gust of it all amongst the warmth of the sun that still shined through. Everything was almost glowing in a dampened, glistening, yellowish gold, and I was certain the moments that lied just ahead were ones I would remember for the rest of my life.

I had ordered coffee, the giant mug in front of me as I traced its brim with my fingertips. Matty's English breakfast tea was waiting for him across the small table, the liquid still and steady, but steaming. The both of us, the two lovers that had once been, were leaving in six weeks; myself for my book tour and he for his tour with the rest of the boys.

The two of us were a puzzle torn apart by our own selfishness, our own confusions, our own immaturity. There were bits and pieces everywhere, but they were coming together as if magnetized.

I was fine on my own, really. Functional. Pretty. Happy, even. I wanted to be one of those girls who did not need a man to complete her. But the truth was, no matter how many novels I read, no matter how happy I was in solitude, no matter how much money I made on my own, no matter how much I appreciated that I could stretch my legs in bed without disrupting anyone else, there was something missing.

I could not love the way everyone else loved.

It was about Matty, really, but more about myself.

I loved myself. I appreciated myself. I knew my own worth.

I was probably over-emotional because I'd just switched birth control and had been a week without it.

But the truth was, this scary, overwhelming, certainty, that I was not the woman I wanted to be without the man that he was.

In our year and a half apart, Matty and I had spent time learning about ourselves. We had crafted, perfected our art. We had shared moments, dignified and glorious, apologies and long lingering looks and grabbing onto the shoulders of others, only opening our eyes to see the faces we did not want to see.

Matty and I were both leaving soon, myself for my book tour and he and the boys for his own. We would not see each other for three months. When he had phoned me, the desperation and anxiety in his voice was thick, and I knew, I prayed, that he and I were going to have the conversation that needed to be had.

That city in California, with its sun, with its warmth, was not my home. This one, with its history and culture and grey overcoat, was not my home either. My home was in Matty's arms, the crook of my spine resting against his pelvis, his lips at my shoulder, his hands in mine.

I could see the entire world, every sunset and sunrise, every delicacy and terrain, hear every foreign tongue, and nothing would be as spectacular as the look on his face when I walked into the room, and I knew, I fucking knew, he felt the same.

The face he was making now, when he walked into this coffee shop, his coat slick with rain, his wild curls tucked underneath a black baseball cap, those eyes knowing where to find me immediately. Alone, waiting to be completed.

My smile grew, blossomed, really, when I saw him, and his rosey lips did the same. He stood there for a moment, just appreciating me, for all that I was to him. I did the same. It was a wordless encounter, but we were understanding each other.