12. Fucking Hypnotizing
CHAPTER
FUCKING HYPNOTIZING
ADAM
Perfection exists,
and it’s right here in my arms.
It’s soft green eyes that light so easily, giving way to every emotion that passes through her. It’s a heart-shaped mouth, rosy lips that give way to a smile that knocks the air from my lungs. That sun-kissed nose and the way it crinkles every time she laughs.
The way she feels in my arms in this very moment, warm skin that melts into mine, the dip in her waist where I grip her, the roundness of her intoxicating hips, begging me to drag my hands lower, to explore every inch of her.
I could float through the rest of my life content in knowing I’ve held perfection in these arms.
Rosie lays her cheek on my shoulder with a soft sigh, tucking her face into my neck, like I’m her safe space. I think she might be mine.
“You feel really nice,” perfect lips murmur against my skin. “Solid. Steady.” Another sigh. “Safe.”
“I’ll be anything you want me to be.”
“Just you, Adam. You’re enough exactly as you are.”
Her words tug at an invisible string, pulling everything in my chest tighter. I want to be enough for her, but I’ve spent the last year and a half not feeling enough for anyone. But with her, right here, right now? There’s no hockey, no superstar goalie, no millionaire athlete.
There’s just me, and she says I’m enough for her.
My mind races with thoughts of a life I’ve always dreamed of. My family in the stands, and me making them proud. Quiet Saturday nights, take-out containers, wrapped up in each other. Slow Sunday mornings, pancake breakfasts, and cartoons on TV.
Suddenly, it feels like I’m finally being gifted it.
But I know this life can’t truly be mine until I give Rosie all of me, and right now, I’m struggling to find the words that give her those pieces.
So I swallow them down, bury them a bit deeper, and hope when she says I’m enough for her, she means it.
“How you doing?” I murmur against her hair, honey and rose gold tresses weaved into a braid.
“Good. I think.” Her gaze lifts to mine, uncertain. “Am I doing okay?”
I chuckle. “You’re doing great. Let me know if it’s too much.”
“It’s…not. I thought it might be, but it feels okay. Though it might have something to do with the giant man I’ve attached myself to like a koala.”
“I’m honored to be your tree branch.” Questions about her past crawl up my throat, searching for answers she doesn’t owe me. Instead, I tell her I’m proud of her.
“What for?”
“It’s hard enough to conquer our fears, and there’s a certain pressure when you’re not just doing it for yourself. It’s admirable that you’re facing your deepest fear for both yourself and for your son.”
Her lower lip slides between her teeth as she thinks.
“I think my deepest fear is just…losing it all. Connor. He’s my whole life.
So, swimming after nearly drowning? Hard as it is, it feels like nothing more than waking up on a rainy morning in comparison to even the briefest thought of life without each other. ”
“Do you think about that often? Life without each other?”
“Mostly I think about having to say good-bye, how impossible that would be, but having to do it anyway. How hard it would be knowing it was the last time I’d see his face, praying that the world would be kind to him without me to protect him.”
A tightness squeezes in my chest before it rolls up my throat. “That’s…”
“Sad,” she finishes with an anxious chuckle, shifting like she wants to pull away, hesitating because she can’t. “I know. It’s embarrassing. Most people don’t have such morbid thoughts.”
I catch one of her hands in mine, pressing a kiss to the inside of her palm before wading to the stairs with her in my arms.
“Your thoughts are painful, yes, but not morbid. I can’t put myself in your shoes, but I’d stand in them if it meant one less minute where you felt that pain alone.”
“Sometimes I think that’s what I do,” she murmurs as I set her down on a lounger in the shade, watching as she covers herself in the towel I hand her. “Put myself in my parents’ shoes.”
I sit beside her, rubbing my hair with my towel. “What do you mean?”
“Sometimes I wonder what it felt like for my parents.” She takes a deep breath, licks her lips as her eyes roam my face, searching for the courage to go on. “When they knew it was good-bye.”
Thick silence settles between us as her words settle.
My mind races, remembering the look on her face the first time I called her trouble, the longing as she explained her dad’s nickname for her.
The way she fell apart in my arms when I gave her that bouquet of peonies, when she told me about all the wonderful memories that came with the sight of them, explained that she couldn’t make more.
Because her parents aren’t here anymore.
“You had to say good-bye.”
“That’s the thing. I didn’t get to, because I didn’t know. But my dad…he knew, I think.” A storm brews in her eyes, angry clouds with nowhere to go. “Some days I remember everything, every single moment. Some days it’s all…blurry. Distorted. But there’s one image…it’s like it’s burned
in my brain.” The storm in her gaze dissipates, leaving behind an exhaustion I can feel in my bones, a sort of…
resignation. “The way my dad tucked my hair behind my ear when he said he’d be back.
The devastation in his eyes when he looked at me one last time, over his shoulder, and told me he loved me. ”
I wish I had the words to make this better, something to take away the grief and replace it with an everlasting happiness. But I don’t, and though I haven’t really lost anyone—not the way she has, at least—I know that’s not how grief works.
So instead, I wind an arm around her waist, bringing her body into the groove of mine, where I can keep her safe, and I press a kiss to her temple.
She swipes at a single tear the moment it escapes. “I don’t really talk about it often. It’s not that I can’t, but that I’m constantly trying to move forward, you know? I lost my family, but I’m building a new one with Connor. We’re making the memories I can’t make with my parents anymore.”
“Tell me about them. The memories. You’ve told me about the nickname, that your dad called you trouble too. What about the peonies?”
She looks up at me, her dimpled chin on my chest, bright eyes and an even brighter smile.
“Mom always wanted this huge, colorful garden, like the one she had at her house growing up. We went to this beautiful garden store at the end of September when I was eight.” Her grin widens, blooming as the memory coasts through her mind.
“I was enthralled. We were there forever, just walking around, taking it all in. Mom wanted something that would come back each spring. She said there was something about something as delicate as a flower that would bloom all over again after the harshest winter. I found this luscious peony bush. They were so pretty, the pink flowers. Not overwhelmingly bright, but this soft, beautiful rose hue that just captivated me.”
She touches the warm pink ends of her hair.
“That’s why the pink. It reminds me of my mom, but my mom always said the color reminded her of me.
That I was like the freshest bloom each spring, captivating.
” The color dotting her cheeks runs rampant, right up to the tips of her ears as she drops her gaze.
“I guess I wanted to feel that way again, like I was…captivating. For someone, at least.”
Captivating? But she’s so much more than that. She’s…fascinating. Dazzling. Fucking hypnotizing.
Doesn’t she know that?
She doesn’t knock the air from my lungs when she walks into a room; she breathes the life back into me.
If she’s the flower blooming after the harshest winter, I’m the spring.
I’m everything new and fresh, full of life and color and sunshine and hope, after it was all stolen from me the way the first bitter frost of winter steals the beauty of autumn.
Rosie gives that all to me, and she has the nerve to sit here beside me and think she’s anything less than enchanting?
That just won’t work.
“So you got the pink ones?” I ask, trailing my finger along the curve of her thigh, watching as she mirrors the movement on my own, tracing the black lines of my tattoo peeking out of my swim trunks.
“And the purple ones. The blue ones too.” She giggles. “Then the next fall, we got the orange ones, and yellow the next. We planted a new bush each fall, and I waited by the window each spring to watch them bloom. Our front yard was a rainbow. Everybody stopped to look at it when they walked by.”
“Like you, then.”
She looks up at me, a noticeable swallow in her throat as she catches the intensity behind my gaze. “Like me?”
“The burst of color and life everyone stops to look at.”
Her nose scrunches, a ruby flush painting her freckled cheekbones at my words. She keeps her eyes trained on her hand as it moves over my thigh, toying with the hem of my shorts. Her lips purse to the side, and she peeks up at me from beneath thick, sandy blonde lashes. “Can I?”
“Mhmm.”
Something tight and thick settles in my throat at the gentle sweep of her fingers, something hot low in my belly as she drags my shorts up, exposing inch after inch of inked skin covering my thigh.
The tip of her fingernail brushes over the mane of the lion painted there in black, the weathered lines of his face, the wisdom in his eyes, like he’s seen it all.
“Pretty,” Rosie murmurs, a slow, heated swipe of her hand that has muscles jumping that shouldn’t be. “Why a lion?”
“A symbol, I guess.”
“Of?”
Of everything Courtney tried to take from me, or maybe succeeded in taking from me. Of every piece of me I nearly lose with each hopeful date before it inevitably turns meaningless.
“Of strength,” is what comes out of my mouth. “Wisdom from lessons learned. A reminder to do better. That I’m in charge of my destiny, not anyone else.”