Chapter 8 #2
I don't stop. I drive into her harder, watching her face in the moonlight, feeling her tighten around me until she's shaking, until her whole body goes taut and then breaks.
She says my name into the dark like a promise, back arching against the grass, my ring catching moonlight on her hand as she comes undone beneath me, clenching hard around me, and the sight and feel of it pulls me over right behind her, my own climax tearing through me as I bury myself deep one final time, both of us gasping into the salt air, holding on to each other like the tide might try to take one of us if we let go.
Afterward, we lie tangled together in the grass at Driftwood Point, her head on my chest, the ocean crashing steady and endless below us, the faint sound of the party still drifting up from the compound.
"An ending and a beginning," Wren murmurs, tracing lazy circles over my heart.
"Braided together," I agree, thinking of every great story this club has ever told itself, and how ours just became one of them.
We lie there a long while, neither of us in any hurry to rejoin the party, watching the stars shift slowly overhead.
I trace the line of her spine with idle fingers, memorizing this exact moment — the cool grass beneath us, the salt air, the weight of her against my chest, the ring catching starlight on her hand every time she shifts.
"Tell me something," she says, voice soft in the dark. "When you pictured this — proposing, all of it — did you imagine it happening like this?"
"Honestly? I never let myself imagine it in enough detail to compare.
I was too scared of wanting something I didn't think I'd ever get.
" I press a kiss to the top of her head.
"But if I had imagined it, I don't think I could have dreamed up anything better than this.
You, this cliff, this ocean, everything we just survived together.
It feels like exactly the right ending to exactly the right fight. "
"It's not an ending," she reminds me. "It's a beginning too. You said so yourself."
"Both, then. Exactly both."
She tips her face up to kiss me again, unhurried, and we stay tangled together until the first hints of dawn start to color the horizon, both of us reluctant to let the night end, both of us fully aware that whatever comes next — a wedding, a shared life, decades stretching out ahead of us — is going to be built on exactly this kind of quiet, certain happiness.
We stay up there until the stars start to fade, engaged, exhausted, entirely certain of each other for the first time in fifteen years, and when we finally walk back down to the compound hand in hand, ring catching the porch lights, the whole party erupts into cheers loud enough to wake the harbor.
Piper spots the ring first, shrieking loud enough to draw the whole compound's attention, and within seconds we're surrounded — Gemma hugging Wren so tightly she nearly lifts her off the ground, Rhett clapping me on the back hard enough to stagger me, Dominic grinning wider than I've seen him grin in years.
Someone puts on music. Someone else produces champagne from somewhere, and the celebration that had already been the biggest in club history somehow finds another gear entirely.
"Fifteen years," Rhett shouts over the music, raising his glass. "To Barrett finally catching up to the rest of us!"
The toast draws a roar of laughter and agreement, and I pull Wren close against my side, laughing along with everyone else, no longer even slightly embarrassed by how long it took me to get here. Some things, I've learned tonight, are worth exactly as long as they take.
We dance eventually, badly, both of us laughing too hard to manage anything graceful, surrounded by every couple who's shaped this club's history over the years.
I catch sight of Sullivan and Darcy near the fire pit, of Holden and Ivy stealing a private moment by the gate, of Corbin and Stella dancing close together, and I think about how many stories this compound has held over the years, how many of them started exactly the way ours did — two people who almost missed each other, saved at the last possible moment by finally telling the truth.
Dominic finds us near the end of the night, pulling us both into a hug that says more than words could.
"Dad would be proud of both of you," he says, voice thick with emotion he rarely shows.
"The marina, the clinic, and now this. He always said the club wasn't really about the buildings. It was about who you build them with."
Piper joins us a moment later, hand resting on her stomach, smiling at the two of us with real warmth.
"Welcome to the family, officially," she says to Wren, though we all know Wren's been family for twenty-five years already.
"Try not to make the rest of us look bad at weddings. We've got a tough act to follow now."
The party winds down slowly as the sky starts to lighten, guests drifting home in twos and threes, the compound gradually quieting from its earlier chaos into something softer and more content.
Wren and I stay until nearly the end, reluctant to let the night close, both of us still riding the particular high of a day that started with a legal battle and ended with an engagement.
"Best day of my life," Wren says, leaning against my shoulder as we watch the last few stragglers say their goodbyes.
"Mine too," I agree, and mean it more completely than I've meant almost anything.
We finally head home as the sun starts properly rising over the harbor, exhausted in the specific, happy way that follows a night like this one, and I drive us both back to her apartment above the clinic, neither of us quite ready to be apart even for the length of separate cars.
We fall asleep almost as soon as we're horizontal, still in our party clothes, her ring catching the early morning light on the pillow beside my face.
When I wake a few hours later, she's already up, standing at the crooked window in one of my old T-shirts, coffee in hand, watching the harbor with an expression of quiet, settled peace.
"Regretting it already?" I tease, propping myself up on one elbow.
"Regretting what — marrying my best friend, saving my clinic, and getting the best night's sleep of my life, all in the same twenty-four hours? I think I'll manage."
I get up and join her at the window, wrapping my arms around her from behind, both of us looking out at the marina that's staying exactly where it belongs, at the town that fought for itself and won, at the whole stretch of coastline that's finally, fully secure.
"Fifteen years," I murmur against her hair.
"Worth every one of them," she says, leaning back into me, and we stand there a long while, watching Anchor Bay wake up around us, both of us fully, finally certain of the life we're about to build together.
Twenty couples. Twenty love stories. One brotherhood.
And finally, after fifteen years of waiting, mine.