After
AFTER
My heart goes crashing into the roof of my mouth. “Hi,” I manage.
Grayson just stands there for a few heartbeats. “Hi,” he finally says. Orphaned hope fills his voice.
Kate shoots me a look over her shoulder. “I’m just...gonna go, okay?”
“Yeah. Um...okay.”
She hesitates in the entryway, seemingly intimidated by the way he fills up the entire doorframe “I’m Kate, by the way.”
His gaze flickers toward her. “Yeah. We’ve met.”
“Oh. Right. Well, guess we’ll catch up later. Or something.” She slips past him, aims a slack-jawed glance from behind his back while dramatically fanning her face, then jumps into her Suburban and peels out.
I drift over the threshold and out into the rain. Icy rivulets stream down my back, but I barely feel the cold.
“You’re getting wet,” Grayson says, but makes no move to stop me.
“I am.” I edge closer. The force of his scent and his gaze hit me at the same time, a double dose of intensity that arrows into me and just keeps on going. “How’re you even here right now? It’s a three-hour drive. I texted you two and a half hours ago.”
“I drive fast.” He clears his throat, looking more unsure than I thought possible. “And your message gave me extra motivation.”
Despite the rain, heat splashes across my cheeks. “But why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”
“Well, I’d like to say it’s because I’m altogether that confident. But you said you wanted to see me, and the truth is I didn’t want to give you a chance to change your mind.”
“I wouldn’t have.”
“Oh. Okay, then.” He pushes his sopping hair out of his face. Light sparks in those unforgettable eyes. It looks a lot like yearning. “You had something to say?”
“I did.” I balance there, caught in a moment that seems to funnel my life back onto its charted course. Finally. I’m a soaring bird, stabilizing on an updraft. A ship righting itself in the current.
I reach for his saturated shirtfront. It doesn’t feel like three months have passed since I stood with him like this. It feels like I’ve always been right here, one half of this perfect circle. Which makes what comes next feel absurdly natural. “I’m desperately in love with you. I want you to know that.”
Grayson’s whole body stills. “I’m desperately in love with you, too.”
That’s it. It’s just...easy. True. A statement of fact that surprises nobody.
Well, maybe it surprises him, because he leans down, searching my eyes like he can’t quite believe it. “Does this mean you forgive me?”
“Yes,” I breathe.
An exhale gusts out through his nose. “And...we can start over?” he says huskily.
I tug him closer. The wet darkness falls away as the world whittles down to this single question. Grayson waits, his gaze the same one from that night on the mountaintop. And from earlier tonight, when he told me he loved me through the TV.
“I can’t start over,” I say. “But for you, I can start new. If that’s what you want.”
He closes his eyes for a moment. Opens them. “Fuck yes, that’s what I want.”
And then we’re kissing. Falling into each other like we’ve crossed an ocean of years to arrive at this place. I go up on tiptoes and fasten my arms around his neck while he folds me against the length of his body. Every ridge and valley of him, every press of his fingers against my hip and in my hair, feels like home.
I’m lost. Found. Everything at once.
Ours tongues tangle. I sigh into his mouth, losing myself in the way he tastes like he’s been waiting all this time, like his longing has been crouching inside of him for months, growing into something breathtaking and unstoppable.
“Take me inside.” I cling to him, soaked through and shivering.
In another moment, he’s hoisting me up, wrapping my legs around his waist and carrying me in. He slams the front door with his foot. “Where’s your room?” The shine of his eyes deepens by the moment.
I can barely fit the word in between my cantering heartbeats. “Upstairs.”
He carries me up. We pull off each other’s wet things and burrow into my brand-new king-size bed, naked. Grayson nestles on his side and tugs me against his chest.
I press my face against his wet skin, then kiss his tattoos and breathe in his woodsy richness. When our eyes meet again, a sense of completion flows into me, of absolute belonging.
My breath hitches. God, I was right when I told Kate I would never fall in love again. Because what I feel right now has been living inside me for all of these years. It may change, sharpen, flow into different forms, but I will never not love this man.
“I hope you never stop looking at me like that,” I say.
Grayson rolls onto his back and pulls me with him, staring up while I straddle him. “I don’t plan to.”
We stay like that, bodies pressed together, eyes locked. He reaches up and traces my jawline as if reassuring himself I’m his. That this is real.
“Hold still.” He scoots to the edge of the bed without dislodging me and fishes his phone from his pants, then aims the camera upward. The shutter snaps.
A smile graces my lips. “What’re you doing?”
He turns the screen my way. “Capturing a moment,” he says softly. “And look. It’s the best picture I’ve ever taken. The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
In the photo, I gaze down, eyes soft and brimming with love.
“You’d better not stop looking at me like that, either,” Grayson says.
I take his phone and set it on the bedside table. “I don’t plan to.”
He pulls me down against him, chest to chest. “You know, I’d ask you to prove it, if we weren’t in Michael’s bed right now.”
“It’s not Michael’s. It’s mine. Everything in this house is brand-new.”
He pauses. “You mean you haven’t christened this thing yet?”
“No. Or any of the other furniture in this house. I was waiting for you, I think. It just took me a while to actually figure that out.”
“Well.” His fingers drift into my hair, twining in my wet locks. “I was waiting for you, too. And we have a big job ahead of us, from the sound of it. Maybe we should get started.”
I make a thick sound of pleasure as he kisses me.
It starts slow. And stays slow. It lasts and lasts, stretching into something ageless and powerful and pure. Our hands rove, exploring wet skin, teasing and claiming and worshipping. We kiss and slide into each other until I lose track of where I stop and he begins.
When I finally come rocketing apart, he crushes me close, his lips locked against mine as I cry my pleasure into his mouth.
ward, he tucks my head into the crook of his arm and traces the rise of my ribs with one finger. “You’ve gained weight. You look beautiful. Healthy.”
I smile. My eyelids feel too heavy to open. “Thanks. I’d like to say I fixed myself, but I think you healed me, too. Not just the other way around, like you said.”
His fingers pause. “You saw the show?”
“I did.”
“What’d you think?”
I wriggle, prompting him to resume his caress. “It made me finally realize how I felt. And that I should text you. So, mission accomplished?”
“Wow. I was about ninety percent sure you’d never speak to me again.”
“That’s only because you one hundred percent don’t know me.”
He chuffs a laugh. “The hell I don’t.”
I pry my weighted lids open. For long moments, we stare at one another, the silence overflowing with a thousand words we don’t need to speak aloud.
Finally, I say, “I’m going to Greece tomorrow.”
He smiles. Actually smiles. “For Travelique?”
“Yeah. They want me to do an extended series on finding yourself in the Mediterranean. Which Siobhan told me had everything to do with you. I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you for that.”
“You repaid me about five minutes ago,” he says. “But you can repay me again in five more, if you want.”
I snuggle closer. “I do want.”
He laughs. “Okay. Just give me a second to recover.”
“No rush.” Smiling, I trace my tattooed name with one finger, underlining the connected letters over and over. “This tattoo is stunning, by the way. I had no idea Arabic script was so beautiful.”
“I think so, too. Especially because of what it says.” He clasps one hand around mine and reverses the direction of my strokes. “But Arabic is written right to left, not left to right. Like this.”
I shake my head against him, awed. “Someday, I’ll know all these worldly facts you’ve got stored up inside your head.”
His heartbeat drums steadily against my ear. “Not someday. It all starts tomorrow. How long will you be gone?”
“Three months.”
His fingertips press into my side. “That’s a long time.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“Not that I’m complaining,” he says. “I’m genuinely happy for you. I’ll even give you a ride to the airport. Nat Geo ’s sending me to Malaysia tomorrow, anyway.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I’m flying to Kuala Lumpur in the evening.”
We don’t talk for a while. I run dreamy, sated fingers across his eight-pack, tracing the grooves between the muscles. He’ll wait for me, I know. And I’ll wait for him. Still, I almost ask if I can tag along to Asia. But at this point, we’ve waited fourteen years.
What difference will three more months make?