Chapter 22 For You, I’d Climb Every Mountain Emmett
SOMETHING’S DIFFERENT. A SMALL CHANGE, maybe, but the last thing it feels is small.
Little steps, hesitant and shaky, but every one of them in the right direction, braving the climb.
The look in her eyes, careful but determined, lit with a fire I’ve always recognized.
The rise and fall of her chest, deep and steady, like she’s breathing in new life, new strength, a new version of her with every inhale, breathing out the old with every exhale.
Cara is different, like she was yesterday, and the day before that. Like she’ll be tomorrow, and every day after that. Because she’s versatile, ever-changing, releasing what no longer serves her, and molding what does into something that fits her.
I will love every version of her, always. Her soul will always be hers, and it’ll always be tied to mine. I’m sure of it.
“You missed a spot,” she murmurs, lashes resting against her damp, rosy cheeks.
“Did not.”
“Did too.” She points, half-assed, to a spot on her head, covered with suds from the shampoo I just finished massaging into her hair. “See? Right there. Better wash it again.”
“Mhmm.” I’d never deny her, of course, but it’s that mouth, the way it lifts in the right-hand corner, a droplet of water clinging to her lush lower lip, glowing in the candlelight as that tiny smile breaks free and sends it cascading down her chin, carving a line down her throat before disappearing into the bubbles…
that’s what does it for me. I squeeze another dollop of shampoo into my palm and smooth it over her hair before working my fingers against her scalp.
She moans, and the sound—unfortunately—goes right to my traitorous cock.
“I can practically hear Princess Sophia weeping for me,” Cara murmurs.
“Pfft. Wrong. So wrong. You can practically hear The Pussy Pounder Five Thousand weeping for you.”
She laughs, real and hearty and fucking stunning. My entire world rights itself.
I massage her scalp extra long, until her moans fade and her breathing slows.
Her eyes stay closed while I rinse the shampoo, work her favorite conditioner through the long gold strands before finally winding her hair around my hand and pinning it to the back of her head.
I think she’s asleep, but when I pull my hand back, she catches it, lifting it to her mouth, covering my palm with kisses.
“Thank you,” she whispers, and I see every reason reflected back to me in those sky-blue eyes.
“Anything for you, firefly.”
With my arm on the edge of the tub, I lay my head in the crook of my elbow, gaze fixed on the tips of my fingers as they slowly move over every exposed inch of Cara’s skin, tracing the shape of her collarbone, fluttering over the faint freckles kissing her shoulders.
My fingers dance up her neck, and I smile at the bubbles dusting her jawline before I swipe them away with my thumb.
Cara lays her hand over mine, twining our fingers, and her hesitation hangs in the space between us.
“Yesterday you said…” She licks her lips and swallows, trying again. “You said you weren’t sure you even wanted a baby anymore. Did you… mean that?”
I carve a heart in the bubbles on Cara’s knee, searching for the right words. “I want a baby, Care. With you. Nothing will ever change that, and I’d do anything to give that to you. Whether that means more treatments, exploring adoption, surrogacy… anything you want.”
“But is that what you want?”
“Yes.” I hesitate, and the way her eyes flicker tells me she’s bracing herself for the but. “When the time is right.”
Her throat bobs. “And it’s not.” It’s meant to be a question, I think, but it sounds more like a quiet, painful acknowledgment, one I feel too deep in my bones.
“I think this has been an impossible fight, and I think we’re both tired and struggling to feel hopeful. The hormones have been hard on your body, but I think the mental fight has been the hardest part. Correct me if I’m wrong.”
Her gaze falls. “You’re not.”
“Hey.” My palm slides along her jaw, bringing her eyes back to mine.
“That’s nothing to be ashamed of. Everybody is allowed to struggle, and that includes the almighty Cara Nicole Brodie.
But in the spirit of transparency and healing, you are my priority.
I want you more than I want something I don’t already have, and your well-being is more important to me.
” I press a kiss to her lips, sighing at the way she melts into me, opening herself up before I shift back, forehead resting against hers.
“I want us to have a baby, Cara. But if you’re my one good thing—if this love is the only precious thing I get in this lifetime—that will always, always be enough for me.
Do you understand? You are enough for me, and I will spend my days treasuring this immaculate gift I’ve been given. ”
Silent tears fall down her cheeks. “I didn’t realize how much I needed to hear that.
I…” She trails off, a teensy furrow between her brows as she thinks.
“I’ve never needed to be enough for someone else, because I’ve always been enough for me.
What somebody thinks of me, the value they place in who I am…
it’s never mattered. I never wanted it to.
” She sniffs, swiping at a tear. “Not being enough for myself anymore has been… impossible to overcome. Hearing that I’m enough for you, the person I love more than anyone else in this world…
Enough, just like this, with everything that I thought made me enough stripped away…
” Her eyes fall shut, tears clinging to her lashes.
The breath she pushes out, the way her shoulders fall and her chest opens, it’s nothing short of pure relief.
Sheer disbelief and unending gratitude. It’s like she’s had her head below water for far too long, starved of the only thing she needs to keep going. It’s living.
She cups my jaw, bringing my face to hers, where the tip of her nose nudges mine. “I feel alive, Emmett. I feel alive, and I wasn’t sure I’d feel that again.” She nuzzles closer, eyes closed as I cradle the back of her neck in my hand, her lips grazing mine. “I’m here.”
“You’re here, Care. I’m here. We’re together.”
“Promise me we’ll get through it, Emmett. Promise me. I can’t do life without you. I can’t.”
“You and me, firefly? We’ll get through anything.”
“Together?” she whispers, a plea that sweeps over my lips, shakes my shoulders.
“Together.”
I help her out of the bath, wrapping her in my fluffy housecoat, the one she likes best when she’s on her period, grumpy, or having a pre-midlife crisis, because she’s too young for a midlife crisis and insists she always will be.
I smile at the way she snuggles into the navy sherpa, inhaling the smell of fresh-out-of-the-dryer-and-still-toasty the way she always does.
I hoist her onto the counter, dabbing her skincare routine on her face in exactly the right order, because heaven fucking forbid the vitamin C serum is applied before the hyaluronic bullshit—a mistake I’ll only ever make once.
“Good boy,” she purrs when I bypass the retinol, which is apparently only for nighttime. “You’re learning.”
“ ’Cause you scared the shit out of me,” I mutter, finishing with her special face sunscreen, because according to her, even in the winter the sun doesn’t quit trying to age her flawless skin.
“You’re being dramatic.”
“You bit the tip of my finger and said, ‘Next time it’ll be your dick, cocksucker!’ ”
“Retinol is especially sensitive to sunlight! It’s like you were purposely trying to prematurely age me!”
I open my mouth to argue some more about her needlessly violent threats to something that brings her immense pleasure, but decide against it.
Instead, I swallow the smile that wants to break free at the little bits of her that are roaring to life beneath the surface, like they’re so damn tired of being buried.
Clearing my throat, I tap her knee with two fingers, stepping between her thighs when she opens for me.
My palms go to the counter on either side of her hips as I cage her in, and my eyes drop to her cleavage when the tie on my housecoat loosens, showing me the swell of her heaving chest, splotches of crimson that stain her skin, run rampant up her throat and pool in her cheeks.
“You trying to ensure a hate-fuck, Mrs. Brodie?”
She shakes her head, a look in her eyes that’s equal parts mischief and innocence.
“Good,” I murmur, lips at her ear as I grab a marker from the container on the counter, scrawling over the mirror. “Because I’d rather spend all my hours loving on you sweet and slow, showing you how much I appreciate this body, how perfect it is, instead of destroying it.”
A shiver runs down her spine, and I press my lips below her ear before I step back, capping the marker while I examine my creation.
Cara twists, looking over her shoulder. Her chest rises sharply, and her fingers find mine, clutching me tightly as our reflections stare back at us.
My eyes move over Cara, the way she sits there so effortlessly, like she isn’t the gravity that keeps me here on earth, and then back to us, the two stick figures holding hands on top of a mountain, the words written below it. The same ones I whisper out loud.
“No mountain is too high.”
“For you, Emmett? For you, I’d climb every mountain.” She brings my hand to her chest, pressing my palm over her heart, where it beats fast and hard. “For myself too. I want to fight for myself.”
“I’ll fight for you on the days you’re too tired to do it yourself.”
“I know you will, and I love you for it.” Her lips warm my palm. “It’s just not fair, you know?”
I open my mouth to tell her that she’s right: This whole thing is anything but fair.
But before I can, she gives me this smile.
It’s a little half-assed, absent of the laugh lines around her eyes I love so much.
But there’s a flicker of light in all that blue, a flame that roars back to life, fire that refuses to be snuffed out.
And then she says, “When I said I liked it rough, I was talking about sex, not life.”
Laughter bubbles in my chest, and I wind my arms around Cara, hugging her tight to me as her soft lines melt against my hard ones. She buries her smile against my neck, and I can’t stop myself from taking her face in my hands, pulling that smile closer to mine.
“I love you,” I whisper, my thumb sweeping over her lower lip as she slips her hands over my chest, around my neck.
“Strip it away, all of it, right down to your bones. The bold, the mouthy, the happy, the strong. I’ve spent this life loving those pieces of you, and I’m going to love every piece in between too.
The scared, the quiet, the sad, and the tired.
There isn’t a version of you I’m not going to love, because I love you, Cara. Right down to your bones.”
“And when I cry more than I smile?” She winds her legs around my waist as I hoist her into my arms. “Will you love me then?”
I lay her down on the bed, watching the way her gaze hooks on my movements, following my shirt as I tug it over my head, my pants as they slip over my ass.
My knees hit the bed, and I yank on the tie barely holding that robe together, shifting it open so I can breathe in the eighth wonder of the world, laid out right here before me.
“Baby, respectfully, you’ve always been a crier. ”
“How dare you,” she murmurs, but her eyes are locked on my cock as I crawl toward her.
Her throat works with a thick swallow as her gaze roams my body with the exact same appreciation I feel for hers: fiercely and wildly obsessed.
When I’m on top of her, my mouth dropping to hers, she stops me with a hand on my chest. “Wait.”
Sinking back on my heels, I watch as she grabs her phone, scrolling through to that dreaded app, the one that knows every single time we’ve had sex for the last year, at least. Her thumb hovers over the little pink icon, and I smooth my palm over her thigh.
She takes a deep breath. Licks her lips.
And deletes the app.
Tossing her phone to the floor and her arms around my neck, she climbs onto my lap, fingernails scraping against the scruff on my cheeks.
“Remind me how to love myself. Remind me how to do it right. Remind me that I’m enough.
That I’ll always be yours, and you’ll always be mine.
That today belongs to us, the same way yesterday did, and all of our tomorrows. Please, Emmett. Remind me.”
My hand glides down her spine, settling in the small of her back as I lay her down, cover her body with mine.
Her thighs fall open, welcoming me home, and my cock slides against her center, warm and so, so wet.
I grip her hip and bury my hand in her hair, holding her in place beneath me as her heart pounds in time with mine.
“There isn’t a world out there, a lifetime that exists from now until forever, where I’m not yours and you’re not mine.
I don’t need to dream about a brighter future, because wherever life takes me, I’ll be standing next to you.
You’re my life, Cara. My yesterday, my today, and my tomorrow.
And I’m going to love you right for every one of those days. ”
I sink inside her with a slow, deep thrust, unhurried, like I have the rest of my life to do this, to love her.
Because I do, and I don’t want to miss a second of it.
Not the highs or the lows, the laughter or the tears.
I want to take my time loving her, doing it right, so that at the end of this life, she’s felt it every single day.
Cara sweeps her thumb along my cheekbone, gathering a droplet of wetness on the soft pad.
My brow furrows for only a moment, but then another falls, and another, dropping like rainfall on Cara’s cheeks.
I watch in awe as one lands on her nose, carving a slow, precise path across the bridge, running over her cheek until it meets one of hers, like every part of me will always find some part of her to hang on to.
“I love you, Emmett,” she says, with so much certainty the words creep into my brain, chisel themselves there like carvings in stone, impossible to forget.
And the way she kisses me next?
Desperate. Insatiable. Reverent.
I’ll never forget that, either.