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My heart melts. I love him with everything in me.
“I wanted it forever, and I was rocked with the possibility I couldn’t have that. It made me keep my guard up, even when we were friends.”
I snuggle closer, tracing a finger over the lines of his tattoos. The ship, the compass, the rose.
His lips brush my ear, sending shivers down my spine. “When I thought I might have lost you, I was gutted. I thought I was fucking smarter than that by now. Because if you haven’t figured it out… you’re it. You’re everything. Where I’m going. How I fight to get there. The reason I try.”
We lie like that for a breath. Two. Ten.
The darkness surrounding us feels warm, instead of earlier at the cove, when it was cold.
“They’re always there, even when you can’t see them,” he murmurs. “I used to tell myself that when we were apart. That you were looking up at those same damn stars as me. I didn’t know, so I had to believe.”
“Now you know it’s true because we’re together.”
I used to lie on the patio at home and wait for the sun to come up. It would warm the stones while I lay there, sending prickles and tingles through my body in a gradual awareness that eventually had me sighing in pleasure.
Now, Tyler’s cedar scent invades my senses, and I drink him in. My hands graze across his pecs, carved from hours of the physical work of being a musician.
I sense the moment he feels it too.
“Annie…”
“Shhh.” I press my finger to his lips. In the shadows, his handsome face is a dark outline.
I’ve wanted him my entire life, but the past week has been torture. A never-ending ache just below the surface of my skin. The need for completion, for absolution only he can provide.
We don’t need light. It’s inside us. Between us.
I lift my mouth to his. I kiss him with everything I am and everything I have—with acceptance, forgiveness, love.
Tyler stiffens a moment as my lips wander, my tongue brushing.
I’m asking him a question I already know the answer to, asking him to want me.
Except he surprises me once again.
Tyler rolls me on top, and my breath catches at the sudden shift. He presses up on his elbows, kissing me back.
Yes.
It feels so damn right.
Here with him, halfway across the world, he’s my family, my future. The commitment I’ve made, the one I will make again.
I trust him to the end of this world and the next.
“Six…” He brushes my cheeks with his thumbs. “What the fuck did I do to deserve you?”
His hands skim down my sides, reverently touching the same places he touched in the shower. This time, his fingers linger. He wants me, and I feel it. He’s still holding himself back, his pace steady even as his body hardens under mine.
I let him kiss me and touch me, treat me as if I’m precious.
But it’s not what I want.
“Every time you open your eyes, you deserve me,” I whisper. “Every time you take a breath. Now show me what you’d do if you believed it.”
He stills a moment, then his hand sinks into my hair and he draws me against him, groaning. My hips writhe over his, seeking out friction. He’s slick between my thighs because I’m slick, and my head swims at the idea of feeling him inside me.
