Brody
The Beach
Five Years Ago
“Damn it, Maggie. Would you just let me catch you already?”
The beach was empty, save for the two of us. Thank God, because from an outsider’s perspective, we must’ve looked like a pair of children running circles around each other on the shore.
Maggie laughed as she ran, sand kicking up under her bare feet the farther she got from me. She taunted me with a look thrown over her shoulder, watching as I struggled to catch up with her.
“You’re an athlete, you should be able to keep up.”
“I’m a hockey player,” I huffed under my breath. “Not a track star. If we were on the ice, it would be a different story.”
“Come on,” she laughed, filling the October air with the most melodic sound I’d ever heard. Crashing waves and Maggie’s laugh and the pounding of my heart in my ears. “Don’t boys like the chase?”
“No,” I said, inches away from her now as I reached out to pull her in.
Got you, I thought as my hand wrapped around her arm. She let me draw her close to me and I sighed in relief.
This girl sure as hell didn’t make it easy on me, but I was willing to put in the work if that’s what it took to keep her.
“No?” She arched a dark brow at me, suspicious and disbelieving all at once.
“I don’t want the chase,” I told her. “I want the girl I’m running after.”
She closed her eyes, every inch of her illuminated by the moonlight. I stared at her, amazed at how someone so beautiful was standing right there in front of me.
Like a painting or a line of poetry. Something that should be reserved for better men than myself, but I’d be damned if I’d give her back now.
“You might change your mind,” she said, barely audible compared with the sound of water crashing against sand.
“I won’t,” I told her.
She said nothing, but leaned in closer, and the scent of her filled in the gaps of everything I hadn’t known I’d been missing.
“Is it too soon to say—” I started, not even knowing where I was going with it.
I want you. I love you. I already know that you’ve ruined everyone else for me for good.
But she stopped me, with a quick finger to my lips to silence me with a shake of her head.
“Yes.”
That was fine. For now. We had time. Plenty of it, as far as I was concerned.
And she wasn’t going to run from me forever. I knew that when I saw the way she looked up at me, with that look in her eyes brimming just below the surface. The one I could see she was trying her damned hardest to contain. It was the look that told me she hadn’t been running to get away.
She’d only been waiting for me to catch her.