53. Foster
FIFTY-THREE
FOSTER
Leaving the bed when Sophie is half wrapped around me is hell, but sticking with my running routine is something that is important to me, so I’m up the minute my alarm goes off.
“Stay.” Sophie’s sleepy voice rasps, her hand brushing across my back.
I’m tempted to lie back and pull her into me. “I’ll be back soon,” I whisper, kissing her hand and watching as she offers a lazy smile and immediately falls back to sleep.
Running a trail through the forest is a bit different than the usual running I do down decently managed sidewalks, but I manage to make it back to the yurt without twisting anything.
Sophie is sitting on the deck in one of the Muskoka chairs, holding a coffee and staring out at the calm lake. She hasn’t noticed me yet, and I stop to take in the view and a few deep breaths. Eventually she turns her head in my direction, and her smile is a beacon, leading me back to her.
“Good run?” she asks, reaching for my hand.
“It was.” I bend and kiss her quickly. “I’m going to shower very, very quickly.”
She pulls me back as I begin to rise. “Good,” she murmurs, her lips connecting with mine.
“Some of these feel quite…vain.” Sophie glares down at the card she’s pulled from the box.
“But they work both ways, and therefore we both benefit.”
“I guess. Okay, Foster, what are three things that made me attractive to you?”
Only three things? This is going to be hard to narrow down. “First, your smile. Yeah, that one right there.” I point at her mouth as the corners tip up. “Your laugh, which is good because it goes well with your smile. And…” I study her for a beat. “Your hair.”
“My hair? As in my generic blonde hair?”
“The way it catches the light. It’s s—” I start to say.
“Sunshine,” she says slowly.
“Sunshine,” I confirm. “Now, do me.” I sit up expectantly, breaking the tension.
“Oh, I plan to,” she says, her eyebrows bouncing along with her shoulders, making me laugh.
“Let’s finish this round, then you can do me all you want,” I assure her.
She sighs and leans back on her hands. “Well, as my dad said, apparently I really liked your face when I was six. Turns out I still really like your face.” She giggles. “Like, I really, really like your face.”
“Great face, got it. What else?”
“Your kindness. You’ve always been kind. Even when you teased me as a kid, it wasn’t malicious. Now watching you work with the kids.” She fans her face, “Hot. And…” She studies me, her gaze eventually landing on my mouth. “Your smile, specifically when you look at me. I mean, it’s always great, but it gives me butterflies. Like it’s a goddamn butterfly conservatory”—she gestures around her entire body—“everywhere.”
“Everywhere?” I creep forward, expecting her to inch away, but she doesn’t. “Even here?” She cracks up when my finger presses into her shin.
She nods. “Especially there. You give me shin tingles like no one else.”
Sitting back, I draw another card. “What sense is the most sensual to you?”
“Out of the five?” she asks, and I nod. She thinks for a minute as if going through experiences with all of them. When she licks her lips I already know what she’s about to say. “Taste,” she says confidently. “Your turn.”
I could say taste, but when I think about the feel of her skin under my fingertips. The way mine reacts every time she touches me, the choice is clear. “Touch, hands down.”
“Touching or being touched?” she asks.
“They’re equally sensual if you’re involved.” She rolls her eyes and slips the card back into the box. “What? I’m serious. If I had it my way I’d spend all my days touching you.”
“May make it hard to do your job.”
“We’d adapt.” I shrug.
The next question is a big one, and I visibly tense as I decide whether or not I should ask it.
“Is it a dirty one?” Sophie scoots closer, and I pull the card into my chest. “Oooh, it is, isn’t it?” She reaches for me, and I cover the entire card with my hand, completely blocking it from her grasp. “Come on, you ordered me to sit on your face last night, Foster. Ask me the question.”
Oh yes, let’s do that again. Instead of asking this question, maybe we can reenact everything we did last night. The way she moved against my mouth as she leaned back, her nails digging into my thighs. How she’d begged me to fuck her harder against the railing of the deck, her cries echoing through the woods. But no, sex is nothing compared to this question.
“Where do you see yourself in five years, Sophie?” I ask, my heart thumping rapidly against my ribcage. I want the ground to open and swallow me. I want to be sucked into the sky. I want to evaporate. All those things would be better than waiting for this answer.
She doesn’t make me wait. “With you. Happy, eating cookies at two a.m., watching The Fellowship of the Ring for the seven hundredth time, at least one dog trying to take over our bed. Still arguing about blue cheese versus ranch whenever we get wings. Watching you cook for me in nothing but those gray sweatpants. Waking up every morning with a smile on my face because your face is the first I see and I happen to like it even more than I do now.”
Holy shit. She hasn’t said I love you yet, but that felt like a bigger declaration.
I know I need to respond, say something equally lovely, but all my words are jumbled in my mouth. All my thoughts fully scrambled. Sixteen- or fourteen- or however-old-I-was-when-I-actually-fell-for-her-year-old me is screaming at me to do something, say something. But I just sit, mouth agape, staring at the woman of my dreams who says things that seemed impossible a couple months ago.
“Was that too much?” she asks, pulling her knees to her chest and looking worried.
All I can do is shake my head while I grasp at coherent thoughts falling like feathers through my mind.
“Are you going to say anything? Technically it’s your turn. You don’t have to say anything about me. I didn’t say that so you’d say anything back. I won’t be upset if you talk about winning a marathon or getting your entire back tattooed. Maybe in five years you’ll be back in Korea, running a school. Or you’ll have a whole running club for kids who have been told they can’t do it. I can actually see you doing that, for the record. You’d be very good at that. Oh god, I made it awkward by being too honest, I’m sorry. I, fuck, I should have just said something like attending an alumni gala without needing a fake date or having a house without doom piles everyw?—”
I cut her off with a kiss. I’m buying time, sure, but hopefully it stops her from worrying. She relaxes into me, and the kiss turns from desperate to slow and sensual. This . This is what I want to be doing. I give her one last long kiss before resting my forehead against hers, catching my breath, trying to slow my heart rate down.
“Kissing you whenever I want to. Holding your hand whenever you’re near me. Waking up to sunshine even on cloudy days. Cooking for you. Laughing with you. Sharing all my good and bad days with you. Taking on the world by your side. Proving to you that you’re worthy of every good thing life has in store. Showing you every single day what it is to be truly loved because you are the most loveable person I’ve ever known. Calling you mine and being yours. Being with you, Sophie, that’s where I see myself in five years, because the alternative is unthinkable. Not loving you is unthinkable.” I take a breath, and when I pull away and finally look at her, there are tears streaming down her face. “Don’t cry, sunshine.” I smile, wiping them away.
“They’re happy tears.”
“I guess those are allowed.”
“Wow, they should put a warning on the box.” She laughs, wiping her face, collecting all the tears I missed.
“Caution, may cause fits of truthfulness and sappiness.”
She holds up another card. “This will be a nice palate cleanser. Foster, what is your favorite kind of foreplay?”
“Easy. Pretending to date you, or pretending I didn’t desperately want to date you. It was like being edged for weeks on end. Why do you think I came without even touching myself?”
“Oh? Is edging something you’re into?”
“If you’re the one edging me, it sure is.”
Her eyes trail down my body, her lip slipping between her teeth before they make their way back to my face. “Noted.”
“What about you?”
“When you kiss or lick me right”—she runs her fingers along her collarbone—“here.”
“Really?”
“Mm-hmm. No one had ever touched me like that before. It seems so small, but it’s all the small things with you.” A smile appears for a second but is quickly replaced by what appears to be worry.
“What’s up?”
I watch as her fingers twine around each other, squeezing and releasing again and again. “It’s all so good. With you, I mean. I keep having to push this annoying little voice down.” She taps her temple.
“What’s it saying?”
“Not to trust it,” she admits quietly.
“Have…” I swallow, trying to collect myself, going over our time together. “Have I done anything that gives that little voice power?”
She shakes her head. “He didn’t either, in the beginning. I didn’t even see it happening. Not until I was out and really started to look at things. Then I just felt incredibly dumb. I know I’m not.” She stops me before I have a chance to contradict her. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel like I am. And I know, logically I know, I shouldn’t listen to the voice. You’re not him. You’ve never done a single thing in all the years I’ve known you that would make me think you’re even capable. For one, you’re not a narcissist.” She laughs before releasing a deep sigh. “Also, Cass would never have pushed for this if she didn’t believe you were right for me.”
“It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks though, Soph. All that matters is what you think and feel.”
“My god, this was supposed to be a fun game, and I keep taking it to this heavy place. What’s your favorite foreplay? When you touch me here. What about you, Sophie? Proceeds to trauma-dump while making the man I’m very into worry I’m about to call the whole thing off. When really what I’m trying to do in the most awkward roundabout way ever is tell him I love him t?—.”
“What?” I shout, making her jump but at least it stops her spiraling.
Her blue eyes meet mine as her head tilts to the left, her lips moving back and forth as if she’s trying to contain words she hasn’t said yet.
“Back up a sec. You what?”
“I love him. Him being you. I love you.”
“Yeah?”
She nods slowly back, her eyes never leaving mine. “I have my whole life, it would seem. I was just afraid to admit it.”
“Good. And for the record I’m not worried you’re going to call the whole thing off.”
“No?”
I shake my head slowly. “I’m not him, and I’m never going to be him.”