Chapter 59
TRISTAN
Oh, Katie.
Realization trickles through me, slow and cool, then fast, like I’m standing under a waterfall being battered from all sides. No one has ever wanted me like this, and I don’t know what to do. I have never been enough, but for Katie, I am.
Her lip trembles.
“Say something,” she whispers. “I just told you my deepest, darkest secret.”
I press my forehead to hers. “I am honored,” I breathe, “to be your deepest, darkest secret.” I stroke my fingers over the downy softness of her cheek.
My mind spins, rewriting history.
That time she refused to wear a dress I bought her and I caught her trying it on at home.
The time I caught her looking at me when I was swimming.
The time I looked too long at her.
And further back, the way things started to feel wrong with my girlfriend of three weeks as soon as I met Katie. The way I kept trying to get interested in other women, but one text from her and I’d be too busy on my phone to make conversation.
And I thought I could marry someone else?
I am a fool.
“Did I hurt you very badly when I proposed like that?”
She pulls back, blinking, her lashes spiked and damp. “No,” she says fiercely. “No, Tristan. Never.”
“Don’t lie.” Her jaw sets. I cup her cheek. “You can be honest.”
“Fine. A little.” I can see her drawing herself up, taking shaky little sips of air.
“This is hard for me,” she admits, her voice wavering.
Her hands twist in her lap, and it makes me love her more.
“I have loved you for so very long, Tristan. Not desperately like you said, but quietly. So quietly that I didn’t realize what it was until it was too late. ”
“Not too late,” I say gently. My throat is thick and my head is buzzing.
“Sometimes it feels like you own pieces of me.” Her breath shudders out of her. “Like pieces of me didn’t even exist until you came along, and if you left, you’d take them with you. I think they might be the best ones, actually.”
“Katie,” I breathe. I can’t help but pull her against my chest. She tucks her face in my neck and I feel more than hear the sobs shaking her.
I feel like crying too, an odd mix of happiness, hope, and regret that chases up my nose and throbs behind my eyes.
“I know, sweetheart. I know.” I rub my hands over her back.
“We wasted so much time, didn’t we? I was so blind. It’s my fault. It’s all my fault.”
“It’s not,” she mumbles, and a laugh rips from me, because she’s Katie even when she’s crying on my shoulder.
“I’ll never leave you,” I vow. I mold her to me with a hand on her spine. “I will always pick you.”
“I’ll pick you,” she challenges, her voice muffled and damp.
“We’ll pick each other.”
She turns her head and we fumble briefly before our mouths connect. Hers, already open and eager, mine already seeking to devour. Our tongues meet and she whimpers. I swallow it.
She’s already shifting, fumbling for my pants, trying to straddle me at the same time.
“Like this?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says raggedly.
“We should wait and make it perfect. Romantic.” But my fingers are already flirting with the hem of her silky shorts and she’s already sucking on the side of my neck.
“This is perfect,” she sighs. “Right here. You and me. Where it all started.”
“Should have been doing this from the beginning,” I grumble. She laughs wildly and lets me slip her shorts to the side.
I tilt my hips and help her push mine down so my erection can spring free. It throbs against my stomach as I stroke between her legs.
“Tell me, Katie. Is it the love confession that got you this wet?”
“Oh god,” she chokes, but she’s laughing as she kisses me. Her hands are on my face. “I’m never letting you go,” she says fiercely. Her eyes are blazing, mismatched brown and blue gleaming darkly under the bright moon.
“So violent, Bailey,” I murmur, teasing her gently. She’s soaking my hand, then slipping against my cock. Her lids flutter as she sighs with pleasure. “I know that’s what really turns you on.”
“It’s you, Tristan.”
Our gazes connect. Electricity shoots up my spine. I push inside her before I mean to, but she’s right there and she’s so wet and swollen and ready and god, she feels good. An inch in, stretching her, watching her eyes go hazy and heavy. Her body loosens.
“It’s me, is it?”
“All I’ve ever wanted,” she breathes. “Just you.”
Another deliciously tight inch. My heart is swelling inside my chest. The foolish thing can’t seem to stop now that it’s started.
“I am going to make you tell me that every day for the rest of our natural lives.”
She throws her head back and sinks further.
“Put it on his headstone,” she teases.
“All he ever wanted was to be enough for Katie Bailey.”
I finally push all the way in. She melts against me. “And he was,” she breathes. “He definitely was.”
At eleven p.m., Katie’s on top of me again and my fingers grip her hips so hard that they make indents in her skin and I fucking love those little indents. Part of me hopes they’ll stay that way, little half-moons of ownership, better even than writing my name on her thigh.
The thought makes me feral, makes me flip her.
“How about this?” I ask. I push her legs together, fuck her in thick thrusts that make her arch and claw at the bed.
She can’t make words. I can’t either. She’s fucking soaked and she’s clenching like she’s about to come, and then she does and it’s everything. Three blinding seconds of awe before my groin twists and I empty myself inside her.
I’m slumped against her neck when she says, “Hell yes.”
An hour later, we’re elated and exhausted, and Katie’s teasing me. Her eyes are wicked as her tongue travels up my cock. I’m the one gripping the sheets now.
“Tristan,” she hums.
“Yeah?” I clear my throat.
She laughs and twines her tongue around the top of my dick. My mind blanks from pleasure.
“You like this.”
It’s a statement, not a question, but I nod anyway.
“What about this?” She spits on it, and the image is so fucking lewd, so against everything I know about her, that I come, pulsing against my stomach even as her tongue dips out like she’ll lick it up.
And god, that image. I groan, still coming, and she laughs.
“You want me to?” She gestures.
“I’ve never—” I swallow, because it seems like too much to ask.
She licks me clean, humming at the taste, laughing softly. “I’m adding it to my list.”
I lever up on my elbow, shaking from the force of the orgasm I just had, to see Katie smiling at me.
“What list? Do you have some kinky shit I don’t know about?”
“No.” Her face gets pink. “I have a list on my phone. I’ll show you.”
She gets up, and I watch her walk. Katie Bailey is naked and unashamed in front of me and I want to rewind time and leave a note for myself to remember every second of this. I want to pin my eyelids open so I never blink again.
She climbs back onto the bed and drops a phone into my lap. I do blink now. There’s a long list in front of me on her phone’s notes app, and my heart is suddenly lurching into my throat.
I scroll, thumb flicking, then slowing as I reach the top.
“Things Tristan likes.”
She looks embarrassed. “I started it—”
“I know when you started it.” Of course I know. My favorite ice cream flavor is right there at the top. The pint we shared on the roof the night of the very first birthday I had with her. Two weeks after we met.
It’s followed by a myriad of other things.
Staying up too late
Robert Frost poems
Documentaries about science
Unsolved mysteries
Singer-songwriter music
Top-down car rides
Swimming in the ocean any time of year
Would pick cheddar over mozzarella if he had to eat one for the rest of his life
Hates birthdays Tolerates birthdays
Loves giving and receiving gifts
“I don’t think I deserve you,” I say thickly.
Those old doubts and insecurities race through me, but they’re muted. They might always be there, but Katie keeps them from gaining new life.
“Of course you don’t,” she teases, but she’s biting her lip and smiling at me, and I think my stunted heart is still expanding. “We were meant to be best friends, Tristan.”
I tug her down and pull her against me, aligning us so our heartbeats find each other. “No, Katie, we were meant to be so much more.”