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Ok. Truth be told, she kind of wishes he had been the one who bought her the hot chocolate.
There’s something—safe, that’s the word that first comes to mind, but Emma isn’t stupid (anymore), and so she never uses that word unless she has to. There’s something non-threatening, at least, about a man buying you hot chocolate, though. It’s such a homey drink.
Of course, he didn’t. Didn’t buy it for her, that is. Henry did. Henry’s her son—her only son. That is cold hard fact. Whether Henry is her boy is an open and unfair question. She skims a finger into cinnamon-dusted whipped cream and decides she doesn’t have to answer it yet.
The hot chocolate goes down warm and comforting. Emma thinks about Graham’s eyes. Eager and bright. And with something a little twisted, a little wrong—but in a way that hurts him, not her.
See, this is a world with emerald-shadowed forests, ice-cream clouds, and a coastline blustered by wind and salt. This is the kind of place where, if you hold out your hand, someone will take it.
This is the kind of place that Emma has dreamed of.
It terrifies her.
Regina and her Louboutins and her spies are everywhere. Emma has actually become familiar with the musty, lead-paint scent of the town holding cell, and that—just sucks.
She doesn’t know why Graham isn’t similarly sullied by association. Doesn’t know why, when she lies on the springy rack of a bed Granny charges twenty-five dollars a night for—which, great deal, but don’t these people know that it’s the twenty-first century?—she’s thinking about him.
He smells like leather and cigarettes and spearmint. Emma’s skin begs for his touch.
Guess you could be pretty happy around here, huh? Henry asks, dimpling.
Don’t press your luck, Emma snarks back, and ruffles his hair—a little shy, at first, but it feels natural.
Graham chooses Emma. Regina’s face is a little twisted, a little wrong—and then set like carven stone.
In the police station, Graham’s hands are on Emma’s face. His eyes are bright, and maybe it’s still the fever getting to him, but maybe it isn’t.
Safe. Emma rounds her tongue around the word but doesn’t let it slip. She wants to. She wants—well, she wants a lot of things. His fingers carding a curl behind her ear. A field of dry sweet-grass, quilt-soft, with stars like snips of diamond overhead.
Her boy. A life. Graham.
Graham kisses Emma, and it blooms in her chest like a phoenix rising, like color and light, like one of the flat fairytale people in Henry’s book, come to life.
Everlasting life.
Only—it doesn’t.
Last, that is.
Graham—Graham Hunter, that was his full name—owned a plot in the Storybrooke cemetery. This seems all wrong to Emma; what kind of man, barely over thirty, has bothered to buy himself burial ground?
No one in town can answer her. When she asks these hard questions, their eyes shift away like they don’t understand.
Henry grips her hand. Henry whispers, cursed.
Emma is starting to believe him.
Here’s what she didn’t say in the police station:
I think I could love you.
She was going to say it in another minute. 9:35. She was going to say it at 9:35.
(He died at 9:34.)