EPILOGUE
MANY YEARS LATER, AND STILL NOT ENOUGH
ROMAN
Amber light bathes the living room as the sun slowly sets outside.
The house is quiet as I sit on the couch, sketchbook balancing on my bent knee, my pencil tracing the figure I’ve drawn hundreds of times.
I don’t need to look at him to put him on paper.
I’ve been watching him for years, every lovely inch of him imprinted in my mind. I would know how to draw him blind.
I’m so focused on the arch of his neck that I almost miss the doorbell ringing.
Leaving the sketchbook and pencil on the coffee table, I head to the door, already smiling. It’s impossible not to.
Light blue eyes I’d know anywhere peer up at me when I open the door and aching love that never changes tears through me, making my heart soar.
Jesse.
My blue jay.
My whole heart.
He lights up when he sees me, just like he always has, like it’s instinct for him. Like he can’t do otherwise. Like it’s an impulse that’s stronger than him.
“Hey,” he says, a smile stretching his lips, before the same smile turns sheepish and I have to bite the inside of my cheek to stop myself from laughing.
“Hey,” I tell him, feeling my mouth twitching.
“I forgot my keys,” he mumbles adorably, and it takes everything in me not to grab him where he’s standing, to remain rooted to the spot and tease him a little bit.
“No. Really? That’s never happened before.” It happens all the fucking time since he’s always leaving in a hurry in the morning.
He shoots me the cutest glare, and the speed with which I fold is not even funny.
I take a step forward, just as he takes one towards me, and I reach for him, pulling him into my arms and inside our home. The door closes behind us as I lift the bag off his shoulder and set it down.
I let his sweet scent surround me as his hands cling to my shirt, Jesse grumbling against my throat.
“It’s all your fault, you know.”
I smile against his hair.
“What is, again?”
“Me forgetting my keys in the morning.”
“Is it?”
“Yes, Roman. It is.” He pulls his head back to meet my eyes, a faint blush blooming on his cheeks. “You’re the one who’s always making me late. And distracting me.”
My hand slides up to his nape, kneading it, and the heat that never stops burning when he’s around me flares when his eyes flutter.
“I thought you liked me making you late. And distracting you.”
“That’s neither here, nor there.”
“Maybe I should stop.”
“Don’t you fucking dare.”
I chuckle and the smile he aims at me makes the beautiful, fine lines of his face shimmer.
I love those lines. They always remind me that it’s a face that has been smiling and laughing for years. They’re the same lines I have.
“Was Laura alright?” I ask him, knowing he was going to drop by his mom’s place after work.
“She’s great. Happy as a peach. To say that retirement suits her would be an understatement.
She tried to get me to join her in about ten different things, including jewelry-making and gardening classes.
She doesn’t even have a garden, she lives in an apartment, for crying out loud.
She practically bullied me into it.” He shakes his head, rolling his eyes, but I know how much he loves having his mom nearby after years of living so far away.
I still remember when I asked him if he wanted to talk to her about moving in closer to us. We’d already been living for a few years in the apartment I’d been renting before Jesse had come back that summer, after deciding to sell my father’s house.
It hadn’t been an easy decision, mostly because it was the place I’d met and loved Jesse, but it was also a place that held a lot of hurt within its walls, a lot of pain that we both wanted to leave behind.
My apartment was small but Jesse immediately loved it—said we didn’t need more space anyway since we were always on top of each other.
I fucked him right there, on the floor of my small living room that night.
And when a small, two-floor house became available that wasn’t too far from either of our jobs, that was perfect size-wise for us who never wanted or needed any space between us, we took it, and his mom followed later in an apartment ten minutes away.
She became the closest thing I’d ever had to a mom.
“Mmm,” I hum pensively, giving Jesse’s nape a brief squeeze. “So, that’s who you take it from.”
He gasps, his mouth dropping open, before he narrows his beautiful eyes at me and his left hand comes up, his index finger poking my chest.
“Is that any way to talk to your husband?” he says, peeking up at me, the mischief he can’t contain gleaming in his narrowed gaze.
Because he knows what calling himself that does to me.
He barely has time to gasp when I bend down and pick him up by his thighs, seating him on the counter.
That’s one of the things Jesse said was non-negotiable about our place—a counter to sit and eat cereal in the mornings.
The other one was a bedroom window with a gauzy, little curtain that would never stop swishing.
I made sure he had both.
The counter proved very useful for other things as well through the years.
Like him sitting on it and wrapping his legs around me, pulling me flush between his thighs, as he loops his arms around my neck.
“You can’t use that every time you want to win an argument.” My voice is hoarse, thick with the emotion that always tightens my throat when he reminds me what he is to me.
My husband.
His smile is both soft and playful.
“Why not? It works every time. And you love hearing it as much as I love saying it.”
I do. No matter how many years have passed I can never get enough of hearing it.
Without breaking our eye contact, I unloop his left hand from around my neck, and watch as Jesse’s breathing stutters when he realizes what I’m doing, his eyes melting before I’ve even started.
I bring it close to my mouth, brushing kisses on his wrist, on the tattoo he asked me to put on him back then, the same pattern of thorny vines and roses I have.
Thorns that no longer pierced me. Vines that no longer choked me. A burden that no longer weighed on my shoulders because it was now shared.
I mouth its twists and turns as it curls around him, sucking just a little more insistently on his pulse, loving the way his eyes grow hazier and hazier.
But it’s when I bend his fingers and kiss his wedding band that he sighs and uses his legs to pull me in even closer. Tighter.
“Give me my kiss, husband,” he whispers with a rasp against my lips, humming when I swallow his rugged moan.
I kiss him like it’s been ages since I last saw him, when it has only been a few hours.
I kiss him like I’ve missed him so much I couldn’t breathe until he came home.
I kiss him like he’s always been and always will be, my everything.
He’s breathing hard when we part, and so am I, our lips still clinging, meeting again, my tongue slipping in for one more taste, one more touch, just one more.
“Hey, Roman?” he whispers as he leans his forehead against mine.
“Yeah.”
“We have more time, right?”
More time to be together.
More time to love each other.
More time to cook together, and eat together, to sleep in each other’s arms, to kiss, to touch.
More time to be happy.
I cradle his face in my palms, knowing I’m holding my world between them.
“We have all the time we want.”
I feel his smile in my hands. It feels like the sun.
“You and me, Ro?”
“You and me, Blue.”