Epilogue
My parents had taken the twins for the weekend.
That had been my mother's idea—a grandmother's prerogative, she'd said. It was her way of telling me she knew Hayes and I needed forty-eight hours alone without anyone demanding to be carried or shrieking about mud.
She'd become good at reading what I needed.
It had taken us a little time to find our way back to each other after everything—some difficult conversations and one very long phone call from the cabin five years ago.
But we were better now than we'd been before.
Closer. The kind of close that came from having said the hard things and stayed.
The friends I had now were mine—actually mine, people I'd chosen in this life, who knew Hayes and Wildwood Valley and the twins and showed up the way real people showed up. Enough of them that the loneliness I'd carried in Charlotte felt like something from a different lifetime. It was.
Dane had surfaced eventually. Not to me—to law enforcement, briefly, when a pattern of behavior caught up with him two states over.
I'd read about it in three sentences and felt nothing except a clean, distant relief that it hadn't been personal.
It had never been personal. I'd just been convenient, and then I hadn't been, and he'd moved on.
The story had already closed by the time I read it.
The river was low this time of year, running slow and clear over the rocks, and Hayes had his boots off and his jeans rolled to the knee like he planned to stay until dark.
I dropped down beside him on the bank and he handed me what was left of his drink without looking up. That was one of my favorite things about him — the way he made room for me without making a production of it. Five years and he still did it like breathing.
"Kids get off okay?" he asked.
"My mother handed over the snacks before they even pulled out of the parking lot."
He smiled at the river. His friend Bishop had been here earlier. But now it was just us and the water and the late afternoon light going gold through the trees.
I leaned my head on Hayes's shoulder and thought about how different this was from the life I'd been walking toward five years ago.
Hayes turned his head and kissed my temple. "Come in the water with me."
I kissed him back, deeper this time, letting the slow heat of his mouth pull me under the way the river always did. His hand slid down my back, bunching the thin cotton of my sundress, and I felt the familiar ache bloom low in my belly—the one that had only ever belonged to Hayes.
"Come on," he murmured against my lips, voice gone rough.
I nodded before I could think better of it.
We didn't speak after that. He stepped back just enough to tug his T-shirt over his head, revealing the broad, sun-warmed chest I knew by heart. I reached for my own dress, fingers trembling with the thrill of it, and pulled it off in one smooth motion.
The late-afternoon air kissed my skin—cooler than I expected—and my nipples tightened instantly under the simple white lace of my bra. Hayes's eyes darkened as he watched me, but he didn't rush. He never did.
His jeans came next, shoved down those long legs until he stood in nothing but black boxer briefs that did nothing to hide how hard he already was.
I unhooked my bra, let it fall, then hooked my thumbs into my panties and slid them down my thighs.
The fabric whispered against my skin, and I stepped out of them, leaving everything—dress, underwear, his shirt and jeans—in a careless heap on the flat rock at the river's edge.
Naked. Completely naked in the open air, with the trees rustling overhead and the slow current murmuring just feet away.
The realization hit me like a spark. Anyone could walk the trail and see us. The thought should have made me shy. Instead, it made me wet—a slick rush of heat between my thighs that had nothing to do with the water.
Hayes took my hand again, lacing our fingers, and we waded in together.
The river was shock-cold against my calves, then my knees, then the sensitive crease where my thighs met my body.
I gasped at the contrast—the icy bite of the water against my flushed skin, the way it lapped higher, licking up my stomach, my breasts, until we were waist-deep and the current tugged gently at my hips.
Hayes turned me so my back was to his chest, one strong arm banded across my ribs, and I felt the hard length of him press against the small of my back through the thin barrier of his briefs. He hadn't taken those off yet. Teasing me, the way he loved to.
His free hand skimmed down my belly, slow and sure, until his fingers brushed the sensitive spot at the apex of my thighs. "Been thinking about this all day," he murmured against my ear, voice low and dark. "You, naked in my river. My wife. Mine."
Two fingers parted me, gliding through the slickness, and I moaned—loud, shameless—because out here there was no one to hear.
He circled my clit with the perfect pressure he'd learned over five years, slow, then faster, then slow again, until my hips jerked against his hand and the water sloshed around us in tiny waves.
Every nerve felt alive, sharpened by the cold and the sun and the sheer wrongness of being bare in the middle of Wildwood Valley in broad daylight. My breasts floated just beneath the surface, nipples aching from the chill and the scrape of his forearm across them.
I could see everything. The golden light striping the water, the dark wet hair plastered to his forearm, the way my own skin looked flushed and glowing against the clear current.
He slid one thick finger inside me, then two, curling them just right against that spot that made my vision spark. The river carried the sound of my gasps away downstream, but I felt every vibration of them in my chest.
"Hayes—don't stop—" I was close already, embarrassingly close, the outdoor exposure winding me tighter than any bedroom ever had.
He pressed his thumb hard against my clit and thrust his fingers deeper, steady and relentless, and I came with a broken cry that echoed off the trees.
The orgasm crashed through me like the river itself—sharp, cold at the edges, molten at the center—my walls clamping down around his fingers while the water rippled outward from the force of my shuddering body.
I saw stars behind my closed eyes, and I loved it. Loved how exposed I was, how alive, how completely his.
Before I could catch my breath, he spun me to face him, finally shoving his briefs down and kicking them aside to float lazily downstream. His cock sprang free—thick, flushed dark—and he lifted me. I wrapped my legs around his waist without being asked.
The water buoyed us, making me feel weightless, reckless. Hayes gripped my ass with both hands and sank into me in one long, smooth stroke. I felt every inch—the stretch, the burn, the perfect fullness that always made me forget my own name.
He groaned against my throat, the sound raw and reverent, and started to move—deep, rolling thrusts that pushed me up and pulled me back down onto him.
The river slapped between our bodies with every stroke, cool water rushing over my clit and his balls, heightening every sensation until I was dizzy with it.
"Look at me," he rasped, and I did.
His eyes were nearly black, jaw clenched, the late sun catching the wet strands of hair falling across his forehead. I could see the flex of his shoulders, the corded muscles in his neck, the way the water beaded and slid down his chest with every thrust.
I dug my nails into his back and met him thrust for thrust, the current trying to pull us apart and only driving us closer.
The thrill of it—the open sky above us, the wild green all around, the faint distant sound that might have been a bird or might have been someone on the trail—made everything sharper, dirtier, sweeter.
I came again, harder this time, clenching around his cock while he fucked me through it, water splashing all around us. He followed seconds later, burying himself to the hilt and pulsing deep inside me, his groan vibrating against my collarbone as the river washed us clean.
We stayed tangled together, breathing hard, the current rocking us gently like it approved.
Then he kissed me, soft and slow and full of five years of certainty, and we let our bodies drift apart just enough to float on our backs in the slow current.
Our fingers were linked between us as we looked up at the sky going pink through the tree line.
My hair was soaked, and I didn't care. I couldn't remember the last time I'd cared about something like that.
I thought about the box.
I still thought about it sometimes—the myth, the woman, the moment everything spilled out and couldn't be put back.
The borrowed life, the borrowed friends, the man who'd left an address and disappeared.
All of it gone. None of it retrievable. I used to think that sounded like ruin.
Standing on the other side of it, five years deep into a life that was actually mine, I understood that what it really sounded like was room.
Room for everything that came after. Room for this river, these mountains, this man floating beside me.
Room for hope. Which was what had been waiting at the bottom all along.
Hayes's thumb moved across my knuckles, and I turned my head to look at him, floating there in the Wildwood River in the last of the evening light. Patient and certain and exactly what had been waiting on the other side of what I thought would be the worst day of my life.
I'd been living inside that hope for five years.
I tightened my fingers around his and let the current carry us downstream, slow and unhurried. Soon, we'd head home. Or maybe we were already there.