“Well, you don’t have to miss me anymore,” she says, her voice soft. A gust of wind comes to catch the words off her lips and twist them away. She squeezes my hand and I halve the space between us, my boots against hers. “We’re going to have to work on that.” At the confusion twisting my mouth, she clarifies. “When I told you I was coming back. You didn’t believe me.”
“I didn’t.”
I don’t remember hearing that promise, to be honest. I was too focused on the look on her face when I told her I wouldn’t settle for pieces. That what she was willing to give me wasn’t enough.
“If this is going to work—you need to trust what I feel for you, okay? I won’t ever lie to you.”
Her brown eyes search mine and I nod. “I’m working on that, too. I promise.”
“Good.” She tilts her head to the side, considering me. The sun shines on her skin and her hair clings to her neck. “I got a new job, you know. Down in Durham.”
The subject change leaves me grasping. I blink at her, confused. “Durham?”
I don’t care if it’s in Antarctica. I’ll buy a parka and learn how to speak penguin.
Her hand squeezes again, a deep press of her thumb in the center of my hand. The same way I do when everything around me is too loud and I need to calm down. “That’s where I went. The offices are headquartered in Durham but the job is remote. I need a change and this feels—this feels right. Finally.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” She tucks some hair behind her ear. “You know when I first got here, I had no idea why I picked this place. But I think somewhere in my head or my heart I knew this is where I needed to be. I need something slower, Beckett. Something deeper. A place where I can catch my breath and find my footing.” She holds my hand tight. “I need to be here. I want to be here.”
“Good.” I need her here, too. Want her here just as much.
“I’ve got something else to say to you.”
“Let’s hear it, honey.”
I can’t imagine anything better than the words she’s already given me.
“It’s a request, actually.” Her smile is coy, that blush deeper, her body moving further into mine. She curls her free hand around the nape of my neck, fingertips sifting into my hair.
“Anything you want.”
She presses up on her toes until her nose brushes mine. Until everything but her is a little bit blurry around the edges. Her mouth hovers there, hardly a centimeter away. I want to kiss her so bad my hands shake with it. She brushes her mouth against mine and I taste the bite of her smile.
“Ask me,” she whispers.
I don’t need her to say anything else. It feels like we’ve been slowly making our way to this exact spot since I stepped through the door of a bar, all those months ago.
“Honey,” I cup her face in my hands and smooth my thumbs across her cheeks. I drop a kiss to the tip of her nose, the little dip at the corner of her mouth. I close my eyes and exhale. “Did you find your happy today?”
I feel her grin when she kisses me.
“Yes,” she whispers into my mouth. “I did.”
EPILOGUE
EVELYN
A YEAR LATER
APRIL
“Evie.” He mouths my name between my bare shoulder blades—a smile tucked into my skin. “Wake up.”
I groan and burrow further into the pillow beneath my head, ignoring the handsome idiot braced above me. My flight from El Paso was delayed twice and I didn’t pull into our driveway until after midnight, Beckett asleep in the chair by the fireplace. He had a book open on his chest and a bouquet of fresh flowers at his elbow, his own tradition for when I get home from trips. He tells me he likes to see me walk through the door. That his favorite thing is to wrap his arms around my waist and tuck his nose under my ear, a quiet I missed you pressed into my skin.
Words and action, together.
I beat him to it this time, slipping onto his lap and brushing the words against his lips. He had woken up in increments, his sleepy eyes hazy but his hands sure on my hips.
Now, though. Now he’s not letting me sleep.
“It’s time to wake up,” he says again with a gentle bump of his nose behind my ear. I let out another groan, louder this time, and shimmy forward beneath my mountain of blankets to nip at his wrist with my teeth.
“No.”
A grunt trips out of him from somewhere deep in his chest, his body going lax and pliant against mine. I’m pressed down further in the mattress, his hips pinning me through the comforter and two blankets he insists on sleeping with.
“That had probably the opposite effect you were going for, honey,” he tells me, his voice a gruff promise. He scrapes his teeth against my neck with intention, another press and roll of his body overtop of mine.
I grin into the pillow. “Not if my goal is to stay in this bed with you.”
Poor Gus only had a tenant in that cute little house for two months before I broke my lease and moved all of my belongings into Beckett’s cabin. I was tired of pretending I wanted to be anywhere else except on his back porch—jam jar in hand and my feet tucked under his leg.
Our chairs are much closer together these days.
Beckett’s hand peels back the blanket over my shoulders as he drops lingering, indulgent kisses against my neck. His palm presses beneath me until he finds my bare breast, squeezing gently. I gasp into my pillow and turn beneath him.
Messy hair. Bare chest. A soft smile that’s prettier than the moonlight streaming in through the window.
“Hey,” he tells me, his hand still cupped around me. His fingers pluck at my nipple and my back arches.
I stretch my arms above my head and he watches their journey with interest. I twist my hands around the slats on the headboard and he makes a pained sound, low in his chest. I grin. “Hi.”
“You should put some clothes on,” he says, his other hand at my hip, squeezing and stroking and contradicting his statement.
“Yeah?”
He nods but doesn’t move his hands. He traces the soft skin between my breasts and his eyes trip down to watch the answering catch in my breath. “Yeah,” he answers.
“You sure about that?”
His head tips to the side and his tongue appears at the corner of his mouth, indulging himself in another stroke of my soft skin. I trace my fingers over the full swell of his bottom lip and we both shudder out a groan when he catches my thumb in his mouth, bites at the pad once. He pushes himself up on his knees, a strain of fabric at the front of his sweatpants.
He takes his hands off me and pats my hip. “You’re dangerous.”
I sit up to follow him and brush a kiss against the warm skin of his shoulder. “You started it.”
He catches my chin in his hand and guides my face to his. He kisses me slow and deep until I’m leaning into him, my naked skin tucked against his.
“I’ll finish it, too,” he says against my mouth. “After we watch the sky for a bit.”
That’s right. His meteor shower. It’s been taped to the front of the fridge for months, circled in bright red.
I drop my forehead to his collarbone and he cards his fingers through my hair. “We don’t have to,” he says quietly after a second of me rubbing my knuckles against my eyes. He brushes a kiss across my forehead. “If you’re tired.”