Chapter Eleven #2
Despite her long-lived experience in not being chosen, which she had decided she would not let bother her when she was all of eighteen, even Matilda was perfectly capable of understanding that a man who had come here to order her to stay away from him would probably not smile down at her like that.
Like he’d finally discovered the sun and was sharing it with her.
Her own smile back was so wide it hurt.
“I knew the night you showed up with a puppy that you were going to be trouble,” Tennessee told her. “I didn’t want to let you in. I knew better. I knew you were a hurricane and you were going to knock the whole house down.”
“Good,” Matilda replied. “That was what I wanted. I was tired of waiting for you to notice me.”
“Oh, I noticed you,” he said, and muttered something that sounded a lot like damn swimming hole.
She told herself she was imagining things, and anyway, he pulled her a little closer and kept talking.
“I told myself it was just that I hadn’t slept, that not sleeping was what made me feel so off-kilter, but then you showed up again the next night. My fate was sealed.”
“I’ve always wanted to be fate,” she murmured, her cheeks aching, and this time from that smile she couldn’t seem to stop.
His thumbs were moving, slowly brushing back and forth where he gripped her. It sent a kind of humming all throughout her body.
She thought that maybe, just maybe, it was joy. The kind of thing she associated with the pure, uncomplicated love of animals.
But this was a whole lot better.
This was Tennessee.
“I didn’t mean to come over here that night, and I certainly meant to leave before anything happened, but instead you kissed me,” he said.
Matilda shook her head a little as she gazed up at him. “I know. I was here.”
“But what I need you to understand is that when you kissed me, that was it for me,” Tennessee told her, and he didn’t sound stern or dark or grumpy. He sounded… sure. “This might come as a surprise to you, but I’m a man of decision.”
“In fact, this does not surprise me at all.”
“I don’t waffle around. When my mind is made up, that’s how it stays.
” He was getting closer, and his hands were on her face, and she couldn’t think of anything she wanted more.
“Matilda, surely you realize that I’m not the sneaking around under cover of night type.
I thought that you were and I was trying to let you be you. ”
That made her heart flip over in her chest. “Why would you do that?” she asked, feeling her eyes go soft.
“Because I’ve been in love with you the whole time,” he told her, forthright and certain and he called her a hurricane. “I not only love you back, I want forever. And I want everything that entails. Marriage. Babies. Grandkids.”
She felt that humming inside of her getting louder, growing in intensity, so much that it almost hurt—but it felt so good, so right. Matilda wouldn’t have minded if it exploded.
“Tennessee…” she whispered, hardly able to believe that this was actually happening. That he was saying these things. That he’d come to find her instead of letting her leave.
That he had his hands on her. That he was talking about forever.
“But first,” he said in that same marvelously sure voice of his, “I think maybe we should date a little bit. Just to see how we like it. Because I think we’ve been going at this backwards.”
Matilda looked up at him and wondered if maybe her heart really had burst. If maybe this was the aftermath, except it was far more sparkly than the flu of vulnerability.
Because everything felt golden and beautiful, and she could see everything she felt reflected in his gaze. Love, admiration, attraction, and joy.
It was like a miracle.
All of this impossible joy filling her up, filling him up too, filling up this house and hell, maybe the whole of the valley besides. As if maybe even Montana’s great big sky wasn’t big enough to hold it in.
And she had tried to be careful. Considerate. She had presented her love to him and then left him to do with it what he would.
But this man had come here and told her that not only did he love her back, but he wanted all those things that Matilda had assumed for some time would never be hers.
“I know that I’m a little off the beaten path,” she told him. “I mean, as a human.”
“I’ll tell you right now,” he said, in his sternest voice, and it licked through her in a completely different way, “that I am definitely not open to hearing anybody talk shit about my girl, Matilda.” He leaned in closer. “Including you.”
She thought that her smile might crack open then and split her whole face.
Maybe it already had. She wasn’t sure she had it in her to care, not when she finally understood what all her sister’s books had been talking about all this time.
Not when she could feel it like this. That somehow they had gone from two people to one entity tonight.
There was no going back from that.
And related to that kind of magic, she knew she didn’t want to date this man.
“The thing about me,” Matilda said, “as maybe you’ve observed over the past six weeks, or, you know, my previous whole entire life, is… When have I ever done anything the way I was supposed to?”
He grinned down at her and then kissed her, just enough to get them both a little breathless. “Tell me what that means,” he said when he pulled away again.
“What if forever started right away?” she asked.
And then she got to watch as Tennessee’s smile lit him up, as if he had his own sunlight beaming out from within. As if they both did.
“If you mean what I think you mean,” he said, low and gruff and as sure as ever, “my answer is yes. A thousand times yes.”
And when he kissed her the next time, she kissed him back. Then they started celebrating right then and there, because suddenly, forever was within reach.
It was everywhere.
Early the next morning, they gathered their things from her house and then his. Matilda sat on a stool in the diner and smiled blandly at the regulars when they trickled in at five on the dot.
Then, because she didn’t like sitting around with nothing to do, when she was finished eating the breakfast that Tennessee made her—without asking, because he knew what she liked—she busied herself in the kitchen. Wiping up, washing dishes.
And when he closed the place early with a sign on the door saying he’d be back in the morning, they drove out of town. They headed down into Marietta and hit up the courthouse, where they applied for a marriage license and because this was Montana, got married on the spot.
They didn’t exchange rings. They held hands and had to stop the truck to kiss a lot all the way back up the hill to Cowboy Point.
Then they ate at Mountain Mama Pizza that same night, on their very first public date, so that everyone could start catching up to where they’d been for a while now.
And really, Matilda thought, as she sat at a table with Tennessee’s arm around her shoulders and the Bennett sisters’ delicious concoctions on her plate and in her belly, this was the way to do it.
Forever was already sorted, so they had all the time in the world to figure out exactly what they wanted that to look like.
Because they already knew how it was going to end.
The two of them, together.
Everything else was purely optional.