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“You don’t know.”
“I do,” I reply, again placing my hand on his cheek and forcing his eyes back on me. “I do know because if I say I’m going to do something, I do it.”
We’re so close.
“Say it,” I whisper, pleading. “Say it, Gus.”
The world slows. We hold each other’s gazes, taking each other in. The air tingles and there’s a palpable tension between us. It drips with want and desire, but also a sense of necessity. Somewhere along the way, amid the legalese and the NDAs and the flights and the jabs and the selfies and the thousands of texts we sent each other, Gus winter and I became part and parcel.
I need him. He needs me.
And in this moment, finally, we’re both exactly where we want to be.
“I love you,” he finally utters. “Julia, I love you.”
When I hear those words, a sense of rightness settles over me. I’ve been to a thousand cities and have lived in dozens of places, but I’m home for the first time. I throw my arms around his neck and kiss him. I kiss him again and again, so hard and frantic that I don’t even realize I haven’t said it back until we’re both lying in a tangle on the bed, wearing nothing but sweat and trying to catch our breath while we come down from the fastest orgasms we’ve ever given each other.
“I love you too,” I finally say. And Gus smiles into the curve of my neck, holding me close.
Part III: the Takeover
Chapter 26: Gus
Julia leans her head against my shoulder and sighs. She always finds the perfect spot to rest her head so neither of us ends up uncomfortable. We could be here for hours—and I’m not complaining. I can’t think of a better way to spend a flight from Vienna to Boston.
“Tired?” I ask before I plant a kiss on her hair. And another. I’ve been doing that as much as possible since yesterday. Kissing her, touching her, staring at her unabashedly. It comes naturally and makes me so damn happy.
“Not tired. Wistful,” she admits. “I love Vienna. We should go back soon.”
“We can go anytime you want,” I assure her. Another kiss. Okay, two more, actually. Fuck it—three. Then I hold her hand, because I can’t sit here and not hold her hand. “Now that the takeover is underway, all I have is time.”
Surprised, Julia pulls her head back to look at my face. One of her eyebrows tilts upwards in that cute, amused way. “Pardon me?” she inquires, now eyeing me like I’m not the man she just spent the last forty-eight hours banging so hard that the guests in the room below us called the front desk because they thought there was a murder underway.
“Did I say something wrong?”
Julia cants her head to the side. “You, with free time? Unheard of. This is the part when you tell me you’re kidding.”
“I’m not. I’m nearly unemployed.”
“So? Employed or not, I plan to keep you busy in Montana. We’re supposed to hunker down in the cabin until we’ve run out of surfaces to fuck on. Oh, and in the rare moments when we’re not fucking, you’ll be working nonstop on your book.”
“We can christen every surface of the cabin, work on my book, and go to Vienna, love.”
“I don’t know,” she says before biting on her lower lip flirtatiously. “It’s a big cabin.”
“We have the stamina, don’t we?” I reply, shrugging.
She bobs her head in agreement. In fact, she nods so vigorously, I nearly miss her mouth when I pull her into a deep, probing kiss.
Being in love for the first time in twenty years makes me realize I was an idiot for putting it off so long. Regret is now my middle name, and even though I know we ended up in the right place, I’m annoyed it took me so damn long. In hindsight, I should have gone up to Julia on the night of her father’s birthday party, assured her I would screw her filthily and love her madly for the next fifty years, and we could have been in a love drunk haze for five or six months by now.
And “love drunk haze” is the best way to put it. When we woke up the night after the chaos with Jay, we didn’t leave the bed. We quite literally stayed there for another six hours, alternating between fucking, eating room service, and talking about what happens between us now that everything has changed.
I love her. She loves me. We’re together.
We agreed: From this point on, we don’t leave each other’s sides. I’m going to follow her around the world and she’s going to follow me back to Montana whenever I need a break from the jet setting. I’ll work on my book and Julia wants to find a job—which I support completely.
It’s simple. There’s no reason for it to be anything but simple.
