Epilogue
Lily
Five Years Later
* * *
I smile lazily at my husband.
From where he kneels in the snow building a snow man with our son.
The war with Sorrentino never came, not the way Noah braced for that first winter.
Word came through Matteo eight months after our wedding that the old man had been found in his own driveway, a rival’s message written in the kind of language men like that understand better than words.
Noah didn’t celebrate. He just got quiet for a few days, the particular quiet of a man recalculating how much peace he’s actually allowed to trust, before he finally exhaled and let himself believe it might really be over.
These days the only battles he fights are with a stubborn carburetor and a toddler who refuses to nap.
Matteo still comes around sometimes, always with a gift for the baby that’s wildly inappropriate for his age, always staying for exactly one beer before he disappears back into whatever quiet, careful life he leads now that Noah’s mostly out of that world for good.
I like him. He calls me Mrs. Rickson with a straight face every single time, like it’s a private joke between the two of us, and maybe it is.
He was there the night everything nearly fell apart, and I’ve decided that makes him family whether Noah ever officially says the word or not.
Now we live in a bigger house, just our small family.
Our son is a year old and our daughter, who is due any day now, is kicking my stomach in excitement.
We spend our days tending to his garage and my garden while he visits his company a few times per month.
He said he will return full time, when the kids are a bit older, so they don’t give me a handful.
We got married in the backyard under the old oak tree his grandfather planted, just close friends and Priya as my maid of honor, Knox standing up for Noah looking more uncomfortable in a suit than I’ve ever seen him look holding a wrench.
It wasn’t fancy. It didn’t need to be. Every promise either of us made that day, we’d already been keeping for months.
I finished my nursing degree two years ago, online classes squeezed in around a newborn and a garage that somehow always needed one more thing from me too, and I work three days a week now at the clinic in town, the same one that used to send me home with bruises nobody asked about back when I was a kid who couldn’t afford to see a doctor for anything less than an emergency.
There’s a particular kind of justice in that, treating other people’s scared kids with the gentleness nobody bothered to show me.
Noah says I’m better at my job than anyone he’s ever met at being calm in a crisis.
I tell him he’s had a lot of practice comparing me to men who carry guns for a living, so the bar was somewhere around the floor.
Some nights, rocking our son back to sleep in the nursery Noah built with his own hands, I think about the girl I used to be, the one who walked past a garage three mornings a week just to catch a glimpse of a man she had no business wanting.
I think about how certain I was back then that wanting something always meant losing it eventually, the way everything good in my life up to that point had a way of disappearing.
I was wrong about that, as it turns out.
Some things, if you’re lucky and a little bit reckless, actually stay.
Not in a million years could I have imagined the perfection we’ve found. That I have now.
My mother still calls sometimes, tentative in a way she never used to be, and I let her talk to her grandson for a few minutes before I hand the phone back to Noah, who is unfailingly polite and unfailingly firm about the boundaries that keep our little family safe.
She’s never set foot in this house. Some doors, once you learn to close them, are worth keeping shut.
She paid off her debts eventually, on her own, the hard way, waitressing double shifts at a diner two towns over.
I like to think some part of that night changed her too, even if we’ll never be close the way mothers and daughters are supposed to be.
I’ve made my peace with that. Some relationships you just learn to hold at arm’s length and call good enough.
Knox stood up for Noah at the wedding not because they’re blood, but because fifteen years of covering for each other in a garage bay tends to build something sturdier than blood most days.
He’s the closest thing to a brother in law I never expected to gain, always the first to show up with a casserole when I’m too tired to cook and the last to leave when something needs fixing around the house that has nothing to do with cars.
Thorn and his wife still bring their cars to the garage twice a year, more out of loyalty than need at this point, and Knox runs the place well enough now that Noah only has to show up when something truly stumps the newer guys.
Jacob finally worked up the nerve to tell Katie how he felt, and if the wedding invitation on our fridge is anything to go by, it worked out for him too.
Priya still calls every week without fail, even now that she’s three states away finishing her own degree, and every summer she comes to stay with us for a few days, sprawled out on our porch swing telling me all about the life I sometimes think I might have missed out on if I’d taken a different path.
I never feel like I did, though. Not once.
Some people are built for adventure. I was built for this, this quiet, steady, impossible seeming happiness I never once let myself believe I deserved.
Watching the two of them together, dark head bent over blond, I think about how close I came to never having this at all, how one wrong turn down a different street, one door that didn’t open when I pounded on it, and none of this would exist. I don’t believe in fate the way I used to when I was young enough to still want to.
But I believe in this. I believe in a man who turned his whole dangerous, complicated life inside out to make room for a girl who showed up bleeding on his porch, and I believe in the family we built out of that unlikely beginning, brick by brick, promise by promise, the same patient way his grandfather built the house we live in.
A shadow falls on me and I glance up to find my husband holding my sleeping son in his arms, his little body snuggled in the arms of his father.
“Going to take him inside and put him in bed,” Noah says, his eyes lingering on my breasts which are a lot after having our son. “Meet me in five minutes.”
My pulse is already hammering. “Okay.”
I move on unsteady legs into our enormous house.
Normally I would stop to admire the decor we had both chosen for our home.
The peace and quiet. But I hurry now, focused on getting his big cock inside me once again.
We can only keep the hunger at bay for so long each day before we collide.
And a collision is imminent now. He’s waiting for me outside the door, impatient, shirtless. A beast awaiting his prey.
He grabs me by the back of the neck as soon as I reach him, dragging me into the room and positioning me in front of a full length mirror.
“Look at you,” he says thickly, breathing hard against the curve of my neck.
“Do you think it’s easy for me to wait this long?
My heart aches, my head aches, my cock aches until I have you.
I’m not human until I’ve been between your legs.
Have I given you any reasons to doubt my love and want for you, princess? ”
My folds grow slick and ready, my knees dipping under the onslaught of arousal. The hunger for him never abates. Never. It only grows. “No.”
“And yet you parade around, taunting me with these tits. Your beautiful laugh ringing in my head.” He strips the garment in question down to my knees, palms my right butt cheek roughly. Smacking it hard. “Are you trying to drive me madder than I already am?”
I lick my dry lips. “No. I just wanted to tease you a little.”
“Tease me.” His teeth rake my neck, his thick shaft pressing to my backside. His hands caress my swollen stomach.
I turn and go down on my knees eagerly sucking him through the front of his pants until my shaking fingers finally manage to get his zipper down.
I moan around the thickness that tunnels into my mouth, leaving his heady taste on my tongue.
I know he won’t let me enjoy him for long, so I take advantage of the short time I have, running reverent palms up his rocky abdomen, bobbing my head enthusiastically.
Never can for longer than a minute.
It’s why I love it so much.
He bucks his hips forward and makes a choked sound, salt bathing the back of my throat, his sex swelling, lengthening, thrusting down the back of my throat while he chants my name, his fingers twisting in my hair.
I look up at him with adulation in my eyes and loosen my throat, allowing him to push deep until a shudder passes through his incredible body.
“Enough. Oh, God. Enough. I need you now.”
Noah pulls free of my mouth with a grunt and I’m hauled to my feet.
He carries me to our bed. He stares down at my naked body and strokes his hand up and down his rampant erection, his breathing labored, chest heaving. “Spread for me.”
Wild, starved for his touch on me, I roll and spread open for him. Just like the first time.
He grips my hips and yanks me toward him.
Breathlessly, I wait to see what he’ll do and a keening sound leaves my throat when he presses his middle finger into my sex…
and his thumb teases my back entrance, pushing inside slowly.
He draws both fingers in and out in a sensual rhythm, my arousal creating a wet soundtrack to his ministrations.
“You want to make me wait, princess? I’ll have that ass. Soon.”
My legs almost liquefy beneath me. “Yes, Noah.” I slide my knees wider, raise my hips and thrust up to meet his fingers. “Take me.”
“It’s only fair, Lily,” he rasps. “You’ve owned my heart from day one. There will be no other. I love you.”
And when he sinks into me, it’s decadent.
The hot, slick pressure.
His hoarse groans of my name.
The way we start slow but enter a frenzied state that only we can have.
And a lifetime of loving each other.
THE END