Chapter 43 firgun
firgun
The bicentennial lasted until dawn, but I certainly didn’t.
There was music, and dancing, and at some point Eula locked eyes with me from across the Grove and immediately noticed Cyrus beside me.
She gave a not-so-subtle thumbs-up. I quickly looked away, pretending like she didn’t just aim that straight for me, but who was I kidding?
Eula was as subtle as a fire truck coming up the drive.
Sometime around midnight, after dancing and singing along to Wykofski’s very nineties selection of songs, watching Juliette fall deeper and deeper for Oliver, I found myself on the outskirts of the party, content to watch.
Rus found me, and pressed his mouth against my ear and asked, “Are you ready to go?”
And I all too gladly slipped away with him into the darkness of Lilymoor.
The path back to the cottage was lit with fireflies, and I wanted to burn the way he looked in the moonlight into my memory.
The soft lines of his face, the shimmer of his hair, the gentle touches of his fingers against my lower back and the way his arm wrapped around mine, sure and solid and here. Because I had saved him.
But I think, in other softer ways, he’d saved me, too.
The next thing I knew, we were in my cottage, and we were closing the door, and his mouth found mine. We stumbled, tumbling, across the living room, where I pushed him down on the couch. It creaked with his weight, and then mine as I climbed atop him.
He gazed up at me, unkempt and unraveled. “There you are,” I whispered, because it was a gaze I’d seen so often from him in the garden, raw and laid bare and wanting. I leaned over him, raking my fingers through his lovely curls. “There you are,” I repeated.
My Rus.
He cupped my face in his hands. “You’re so beautiful, Sophie.”
I kissed him, tasting his words. Straddling him, I felt him—and god, did I love that he already wanted me so much. I rocked against him, slowly.
“Sophie.” He groaned my name like a prayer. “I think …”
I kissed his cheek. “You’ve thought of me?” I teased.
His fingers, delicate, slid up under my borrowed dress.
“All the time. Ever since I met you. Every time you left.” As he said it, he traced my bottom lip, as if wanting to memorize every curve.
“I was always so afraid you’d never walk through that door again.
Or worse—that you would, and you’d just hate me more. ”
“I thought you hated me.” I traced the hardened planes of his chest down toward his stomach, then the buttons on his trousers. I’d wrestled them off before, though then it had been under a willow tree. The cottage was decidedly different.
“Hate you? Never. I think I fell in love the moment you threatened to throw me off the cliff.”
I laughed. “I did not!”
“You definitely did.”
“I did,” I amended, “but I didn’t mean it.”
“Oh, you definitely did.”
“Well, I didn’t do it, did I?”
“No. But I wish I had taken you up on that tour of the gardens. I wish I would’ve walked with you along every path and marveled at the way you brought Lilymoor back to life.” He sounded so earnest, it made tears come to my eyes.
“I . . . had a lot of help.”
He took my hands and kissed my fingers reverently. “You’re magic, Sophie.”
My heart thundered so loudly in my chest I was sure he could hear it.
I thought about the way the flowers bloomed in our secret garden, and the way he talked to them when he thought I wasn’t paying attention, and how our hands weren’t so different when we laced them together, telling similar stories with similar calluses, though mine had dirt underneath my fingernails. “I think you’re magic, too.”
He smiled at that. “At least we’re in agreement, then,” he said, and kissed me slowly.
I sank down against him, and we savored the feel of each other.
“It’s so strange,” he murmured against my mouth.
“Kissing you feels like déjà vu. I know we’ve done this before, but .
. . it’s beginning to feel more and more like a dream. ”
“I promise you, I was no dream,” I said, my hands slipping to his chest to unbutton his charcoal shirt.
He unzipped my dress as he kissed my neck, my shoulder.
Then, when Juliette’s dress was off, he planted his mouth in the space between my breasts as he undid my bra, and took his time exploring them, as if he hadn’t already charted that course.
His fingers slipped beneath my underwear, tugging it below the swell of my hips, and then he stroked me there, soft and slow, as he brought his mouth back up to mine. I stifled a gasp against his lips.
“If you were a dream, I’d never want to wake up,” he said, and I remembered how this felt in the garden with all those lovely flowers blooming around us. This wasn’t as magical, but we still bloomed. Over, and over, and over again.
“Me neither,” I admitted, feeling my soft and vulnerable heart beating bright against my ribs.
He pressed a kiss against my cheek, my jaw, my ear, before he whispered, “Then let’s make sure this is real. We have to be thorough, I think.”
“And then?” I wondered, hopeful. “Once we make sure we’re real?”
He pulled away a little. Just enough for me to see the spark of challenge in his eyes, wild and feral. His fingers stroked me again, his thumb circling. “What would you want? Within reason,” he added, echoing that promise from weeks ago.
I wasn’t sure if I could fall deeper in love with a man I had only met a month and a half before, but I was falling, nonethe-less. “You,” I replied simply, earnestly. “All of you.”
And so that was exactly what he gave me.
I awoke as morning light streaked through the room.
It bounced off the crystal chimes that were hung in front of the window, slinging prisms across the walls. I didn’t remember when we left the couch and came to bed, but here we were. The alarm clock on my nightstand read 6:37 a.m. I needed to get up soon—until I remembered that I didn’t.
That the bicentennial was over.
My job was done.
I still hadn’t signed the new contract from yesterday.
I wasn’t sure about it. I wasn’t sure about anything.
Quietly, I went back to my pillow and turned to watch Rus sleep.
His hair looked golden in the morning light.
I still couldn’t believe he was here in my cottage, after I’d only seen him in a magical garden, and only in that same charcoal shirt and black trousers.
I realized quite a few things last night when we returned to the cottage.
One, that I rather liked the roughness of his five-o’clock shadow.
Two, that I much preferred him either in nothing at all or in navy blue, because it brought out the storminess of his eyes.
And three, I was ridiculously and hopelessly in love with him, and I wasn’t sure how to tell him.
He cracked open an eye and caught me staring. “That’s not creepy,” he mumbled sleepily.
“When did we go to bed?” I asked. “I don’t remember.”
“Late. We took showers and I came to bed with you,” he replied. “My back was starting to hurt on the couch—ow,” he hissed as I poked at the bruise on his cheekbone. “Stop, it’s tender. Does it ruin my good looks?”
“Tragically,” I reported.
“There goes my modeling career.”
I curled up against him, my head on his chest. His hands gently combed through my short hair, and it felt grounding. Like we could stay in this moment forever. I wanted to grow roots. I wanted to be here.
Maybe in a way, we could.
“Let’s stay here forever,” I muttered into his chest as it rose and fell with each breath.
His fingers stilled against my scalp. “You know I can’t, sunshine.”
I propped myself up on my elbows, studying his face in the early-morning light. “Can’t, or won’t?”
“There’s nothing here for me.”
“But there could be everything.” I sat up then and turned to him.
“I’m not going to try to convince you because we’ve been back and forth with this before.
I just know that …” I took a deep breath, and I steadied myself as I took his hand, and threaded my fingers through his.
They were so warm. “I know that I want to stay on for another season, and maybe another, and another. I like it here—it’s the first place where I’ve ever felt like I belong.
I want to see if Juliette finds her true love and I want to go to a bro night with Wykofski and I want Damnit to like me someday, which probably won’t happen but I like the idea.
And … and I know you have a career that you’ve worked hard for, and I know that you have a complicated relationship with Lilymoor, but …
I love you, Cyrus Beck, and I want you to be a part of my life here.
Please,” I added softly, searching his face.
For a long moment, I wasn’t sure if he’d get up and walk out or gently break my heart—but he ended up doing neither of those things. He simply leaned forward and gently kissed me on the lips. “You’re right,” he said, “there could be everything.”
My heart fluttered in my chest. “So . . .”
He tilted his head. “I should probably talk to Oliver first, but before that, I think I desperately need some coffee.”
I laughed, and the sound chased away the nerves that had seized my body. “I think coffee is a perfect idea.”
So we got up, though while I fixed the coffee, he hunted in my refrigerator for breakfast, and took out some eggs and butter and toast, commenting that I needed more groceries.
“I was leaving today,” I remarked.
“Well, you aren’t anymore,” he said, and I watched as the man I fell in love with in a secret garden made me scrambled eggs and toast, and I thought I could get used to this.
There were quirks about him that I hadn’t seen in the garden, like how when he stood still he balanced on one foot, or that he took his coffee with two sugars, or that he ate faster than my stepfather, which was a real feat.
“I guess I’m the black-coffee guy in this relationship,” I muttered, more to myself than to him, absently rolling the Magic 8 Ball around in my hands.