10. Homecoming At Tide Table #3
She arches an eyebrow, before she whispers, “Anything else you’d like to admit?”
That I fucking miss you? That I want to cup your cheeks and kiss you senseless? That I’d love to peel that peachy dress off your sexy body and fuck you here and now instead of having wet dreams night after night.
“No…”
Yes. Fuck…yes. Just say the word.
I open my mouth to try to get the admission out of me, but it’s stuck in my throat, as if it’s trying to suffocate me instead.
Frustrating to say the least because I can be open with my Mother, Theo, and probably the whole town with my emotions, but I’m getting cold feet with the woman I love and yearn to fight for because I’m tired of being a fucking coward.
Which clearly I’m failing at because where the fuck is this conversation going? To Hell?
For a moment, she doesn't speak.
The green in her eyes has gone bright, and her scent sharpens at the edge, a thread of spiced citrus cutting through the apricot, which I know means anger.
I brace for its fruition.
I've earned every degree of it.
"Acknowledgment," she says, and her voice is terribly even, "doesn't repair anything, Cade. You understand that? You can name it perfectly. You can itemize your own crime like a bar tab. It doesn't buy back a single day."
Everyone is being blunt with me lately. Maybe I deserve it.
"I know."
"You keep saying that."
"Because it keeps being true, and because I'm done saying things that aren't."
She studies me, and I hold still under it, which she doesn't expect, I can tell. She came up those steps braced for the old me; the deflection, the joke that turns a hard moment soft so nobody has to sit in it.
She keeps waiting for me to reach for it and mark this into another comedic act, but I already fucked up trying to explain my emotions properly.
I’m not making this into a laughing matter when there’s nothing to laugh about.
"Fine." She pulls a breath, and the professional comes back over her like a tide filling a print in the sand.
"Then here's your clock. If you want in on this wedding, you earn the seat.
Forty-eight hours. I want a full hospitality and security proposal on my desk.
Not vibes. A professionally laid out document. "
Now we're talking.
My whole body changes register, the way it does when a broken party hands me something to actually fix.
"Walk me through the shape of it," I say, and I've already got my phone out, notes open, thumb moving.
"Celebrity couple, hers is the bigger name.
" She shifts the clipboard, and to my genuine surprise, she gives it to me straight, vendor to vendor.
"Famous guests, some of whom travel with security teams that will not want to coordinate with each other.
Private transport in and out, which means a choke point at the gates.
Restricted alcohol service, because the bride does not want a viral video of anyone.
Paparazzi are a when, not an if. Local residents who have lived here their whole lives and will not be treated like a crowd-control problem in their own town. "
"And the bride." I look up. "What does she actually need? Not the logistics. The person."
Amber blinks.
It's small. I catch it.
"She's spent her whole life being managed," she says slowly. "Handled. She wants one day that doesn't feel like a set. If your proposal turns her wedding into a compound with guard towers, it's rejected on page one, no matter how airtight it is."
"So it's not security." I'm already seeing it, the whole architecture of the night, the way I see a room.
"It's hospitality wearing security's job.
Nobody gets wanded at the door. You make the perimeter feel like a party so good nobody wants to leave it, and you make leaving it socially expensive instead of physically impossible.
You give every guest a reason to be exactly where you need them.
The locals don't get managed, they get hosted — you make them the hardest reservation in town instead of an obstacle.
And the bride never once sees the machine, because the machine is three hundred small kindnesses in a trench coat. "
Amber is quiet.
I glance up from my phone, and she's looking at me with an expression I haven't earned and can't keep.
There and gone…
The look of a woman remembering, against her will, why the difficult man was worth hiring in the first place.
"Forty-eight hours," she says, recovering, tapping the pen.
"Secure inbox, not my house, not my hand.
Golden Hour Vows, the portal, the address is in your packet.
You do not come to my door with it. You do not find me on these steps again to hand it over in person and watch my face while I read it. "
My heart aches at the reminder of the list of rules and how there’s not one rule that can be broken where I make her realize how much I fucking miss loving her the right way.
The way she caves at my touch. How my jokes would make her laugh and look like she’s on cloud nine. To witness the way I love her just by being myself and know I’ll receive her love in return, tenfold.
I miss our Sweet Apricot, and I just have to be compliant for the sake of our sanity…
For the sake of not pushing her away a second time and never having the opportunity to be in the same orbit as hers…
"Wouldn't dream of it."
"You would. It's your whole nature."
She's already turning, already climbing back toward Main Street, already gone in every way that counts. "Impress me on paper, Mercer. It's the only place you're allowed to."
A reminder of the rules.
Then again…rules are meant to be broken…right?
I let her go up the steps without a single word chasing her, which is the hardest and best thing I do all day.
Watch me, my Sweet. I’ll prove I’m no longer a coward in a better way than with words…
The wanting doesn't hit me until I'm alone.
That's always how it works with me. I can stand in front of her and hold a plumb line, level and useful and behaved, and then the door of my old room closes at my Mom’s house that night and the whole held ocean of it comes down on my head at once.
I sit on the twin bed I slept in as a kid, in the dark, with my forty-one glasses still boxed in the corner because unpacking them means staying.
The window's cracked to the harbor. And her scent is still on me somehow, a ghost of apricot caught in the collar of a jacket that stood too close to her on the steps, and that's all it takes.
Don't.
I lie back anyway.
The memory doesn't ask permission.
It's an August night five summers before we ruined everything — the back deck of a wedding I'd worked, everyone gone home, just the two of us and a bottle of something good I'd built the bar around.
She's still in her work dress, shoes kicked off, feet in my lap, and she's laughing at something I said, head thrown back, throat bare in the string lights.
Our Sweet Apricot.
My whole nervous system in one woman.
"You're staring," she says.
"You're worth staring at. It's just good sense."
Then she's climbing into my lap, that easy, that certain, the laugh gone low in her throat and turning into something else.
Apricot blooming warm and ripe as she settles her weight against me.
My hands find the backs of her thighs under the dress like they were built for the exact measurement of her.
In the dark of my childhood room, my hand goes to my belt.
Coward, I think, and I do it anyway.
The memory floods in vivid and cruel.
Her mouth on mine, coffee and wine and want, her hips already rolling.
The dress rucked up around her waist. My fingers finding her through soaked lace and her breath breaking apart against my jaw, that gasp, that specific gasp, the one I have not heard in five years and could pick out of a stadium.
"Cade—" she breathes in the memory, and I'm gone.
I free myself and wrap a fist around the ache of it, and the salt-and-caramel of my own scent floods the little room, my Alpha half answering a woman who isn't here and hasn't been for years.
She sinks onto me right there, raw and unhurried, our bodies rocking together in a series of lazy, perfect waves.
It’s not frantic, not even a little bit.
It’s the kind of sex people write songs about, deep and slow and so good it’s almost embarrassing to admit you ever fucked anyone else.
Her hands are in my hair, then scraping down my back, then planting on my chest as she rides me with the confidence of someone who knows exactly what she does to me, what she’s always done.
The shift of her hips, the flex of her thighs, the tiny, involuntary shake in her knee when she’s close—every piece of it is scored into my bones. She leans in, mouth hot against my ear, and says, “Don’t you dare come until I tell you,” and I nearly lose it then and there.
She’s a little mean when she wants to be, my Apricot.
Even in memory, she grins at me with that wicked, dimpled smirk and rolls her hips slow enough to be torture, drawing out the moment like we had all the time in the world—because that night, we really thought we did.
The string lights overhead blink and sway with the movement, and her scent—apricot, citrus, that faint hint of rum—spikes hard and sweet every time she rocks forward, taking me deeper.
She’s panting, flushed, a sheen of sweat at her collarbone, and when I palm her ass to pull her in closer, she laughs low and breathes,
“Greedy.”
I am. Always have been.
When she tips her head back, nails biting into my shoulder, I see the whole shape of her face in the warm lamplight—the high color in her cheeks, her mouth swollen and parted, the way her eyes flutter half-shut when she’s about to fall apart.
I remember thinking, This is it.
This is what forever feels like.
I grab the back of her head and kiss her as she tilts over the edge, her body clenching so tight and exquisite around me I have to grit my teeth not to come before she’s done.