Chapter 40 Sydney
Sydney
Dusk falls as we land at the now familiar-to-me private airport in upstate New York. Instead of a street bike waiting for us, there are two cars, one for us and one for the two security guards to use to follow behind.
Gabriel drives into the deepening darkness toward Zack and Zoe’s little vacation cabin where I once spent so many nights fighting my feelings for him while he got his tattoos. “If you need to stop at a hotel along the way, we can do that. I shouldn’t have taken so long to pack.”
“It’s no more than an hour, and I’m not tired,” he says. “Do you mind if I turn on some music?”
“Go ahead.”
He presses play and a song filters from the speakers. After a few moments, I catch myself singing quietly to something I don’t remember hearing before. My startled gaze flies to Gabriel’s profile.
He glances my way. “This is one of your playlists. I should have thought of it sooner.”
Memory floods through me. “You took me to a concert. You sang with me in the audience and got us backstage passes. I was so happy that night.”
He’d wrapped his arms around me from behind and belted out every lyric along with me.
“You remember,” he says.
“Yes.” I indicate the volume control. “Can we turn it up?”
He does, and I know the words to song after song.
When an upbeat tune comes on next, I know that one too, though I’m not sure if it came after the concert or before.
I was washing an apple in the kitchen sink and wiggling my butt as the music played over the speaker.
Gabriel came up behind me and put his hands on my hips, swaying us both to the beat.
I dropped the apple, turned, and he pulled me into his arms with a teasing growl. We danced.
It was over-the-top and silly, with wild spins, sloppy lifts, overt butt squeezing, and a dip that took me nearly to the floor.
I never worried for a single heartbeat that he’d drop me.
We danced, and I laughed and he sang, and when the song ended, we kissed each other breathless at seven a.m. in front of the kitchen sink with golden sunlight pouring through the windows.
Gabriel keeps his eyes on the road, but he’s no longer smiling or singing along. Instead, he looks tortured by memories. When I lost me, he lost me too.
As he turns off the main road, I wipe my face surreptitiously with my T-shirt.
Then he guides the car down a winding gravel drive flanked by tall pines and past a series of cabins until we reach our destination.
The log home is lit up with a warm glow, no doubt Zack and Zoe’s doing.
In the near distance, a gleaming full moon turns the lake to glittering silver and the gritty sand beach to ripples of black and gray.
“We’re probably going to hear from the cops tomorrow. They’ll be mad that we didn’t stick around to answer more of their questions,” I say.
“They owe you a little leeway. They shouldn’t need us right now, but if they do, they know how phones work. One of the guys will take our luggage into the cabin. Do you feel up to a little walk?”
“I’d love it.”
He exits the vehicle and walks around the hood. When he opens my car door, the summer breeze wafts over me, bringing the scent of pine.
“We only flew a couple hours, but it feels like we’re in a whole new world. I love the city, but this is a little piece of heaven.” I walk beside him down the familiar moonlit gravel path toward the private beach.
“My mother is from Blackwater, like you. Do you remember that?” he asks.
“I knew Bronwyn had family there.” Somehow, I doubt she grew up “like me.”
“In a roundabout way, it’s how you and I found each other. If Dad hadn’t met Mom, and she hadn’t adopted Henry and me, we wouldn’t have spent time there. You and I wouldn’t have met through my sister,” he says.
Wind blows my hair across my face and into my mouth.
I drag the strands away. “I never liked the idea of ‘If you step on a butterfly, you could accidentally change your whole future’ thing. Maybe I just hate the idea of life being so random and easily derailed. If something is meant to be, one small thing shouldn’t bump a big one off-track forever. ”
He stops me with a tug on my hand, then, with deft fingers, he gathers the unruly mass of my hair and begins weaving it into a quick loose braid. “You’re saying if we hadn’t met through my sister, it would have been another way?”
“I have zero scientific basis for my theory. But, I like to think, when you need to learn something, life’s going to put you on that path as many times as it takes.”
Gabriel laughs as he ties off my finished braid with a hair tie he retrieved from his pocket. “Did you just call me a ‘life lesson’?”
“I think you’re teaching me things I wouldn’t learn any other way, and you’re the only one who could do it.
Sometimes learning something is the same as healing, especially when the lesson is here”—I point to my chest—“instead of there.” I indicate my head, reminding us both of our conversation at the hotel in Hawai’i.
Turning, he crouches with his back to me and his hands on his knees. “Get on.”
“On?” I squawk.
Craning to look my way, he quirks a grin. “You’re getting tired. I could do a fireman’s carry.” He makes a deliberate leering grab for my ass.
I dance back two steps. “You just want an excuse to touch my butt.”
“That’s a lesson for you. There’s not a single moment in your presence when I don’t wish my hands were on your ass. That’s never going to change.” He turns. “Your chariot awaits.”
Laughing, I press close to him, but my climbing muscles aren’t what they once were. He reaches both hands behind him, cups my butt, and boosts me onto his back.
“Smooth,” I say.
He squeezes. “I thought so.”
I breathe in and shiver, my eyelashes fluttering at the hint of expensive body wash and shampoo but, mostly, just him that fills my senses. I should be used to the way he makes me feel, but I’m not, and I don’t know if I ever will be.
The muscles of his back and shoulders flex against me, and memories flood me. Gabriel between my thighs. My husband over me. Behind me. Under me. Inside me. Other times when his cologne mixed with the scent of sex. We made love in the shower. In bed. Against a wall. In a car. In a tent.
It was so much more than physical. We loved each other with the kind of overwhelming devotion that meant I was his. Not as an act of possession, but of belonging.
Before Gabriel, I’d never belonged anywhere or to anyone.
I focused on finding a place, never realizing “home” is this.
It’s the kind of love you can count on, even when it’s inconvenient.
Even when one of you was a pain in the ass.
It’s acceptance, forgiveness, adoration, friendship—with the kind of rock-steady security that means if we need each other, we’ll be there.
My thighs tighten around him, my entire body clenching as I press my face directly against his neck.
Gabriel, completely oblivious to my soul-altering revelation, laughs. “You’re sniffing me again.”
“You smell good.” I allow my tongue to dart out and taste him. Salty and delicious.
He stumbles before regaining his footing. The muscles in his back harden beneath me, and his breaths grow shallow. “Fuck.”
I straighten and heave a big, fake sigh. “Sorry. I can control myself.”
“We’ll see about that.”
But we have an audience in the form of guards in the distance, so I keep my lips to myself. At the farthest edge of the shoreline, he lowers me to my feet. I sit, and he drops to the sand to rest beside me.
I close my eyes, my legs crossed and my hands braced behind me on the cool, damp sand. “I remembered dancing with you in the kitchen.”
“I’m glad. It’s a good memory.”
I swallow down my fear and open my eyes. “Do you think I could be that person for you again someday?”
He watches the water. I like that he doesn’t rush to answer with a platitude.
“My parents,” he says at last, “aren’t exactly the same people they were when they got married, but they love each other more, not less. When life changed them, they made a choice to grow together.”
He rests his forearms on his raised knees.
“I believe we’ll find happiness like that again.
We’ll dance in the kitchen and laugh until our faces hurt.
We’ll kiss and fight and hold on to each other come hell or high water.
But you won’t be exactly the person you were, and neither will I.
You aren’t less than she was. I’ll love what’s left from our past, and I’ll fall desperately in love with every new version of you. We’ll grow together.”
“You say it so easily. I love you.” I rub his wedding ring with my thumb.
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to pressure you.”
He clearly misunderstood me, thinking I was quoting him, not saying it myself. A lump lodges in my throat. I’ve made him feel his care for me is something to apologize for when it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever known.
I’d draw my confession in the sand if that’s what it took, write it on paper a million times over, but I don’t need to because the words are here now, ready to fall off my tongue. “No. I mean I love you, Gabriel. I love you so much that I don’t care that it terrifies me. I love you.”
For a moment, we’re a frozen tableau, then he drags me against him, one arm clamped at my waist and the fingers of his other hand curving around the back of my head. His thumb skates over my cheekbone. “You said the words.”
I nod. Even if the worst should happen in the future, and today was all I ever had with him, it would be worth it.
No one has guarantees. People have accidents.
They get sick. They die. Love is accepting that one day I could face devastating loss and knowing a broken heart, full and bleeding love, is better than one that’s whole but has always been empty.
His mouth lands on mine. I press my body against the sturdy, steadfast, promise of his.
He groans. “Sydney.”