Chapter 22 #3
His mouth trembles. “No. Probably not.”
I slide my hand to the back of his neck. He still doesn’t touch me, and the restraint is infuriating, and I love him, and I am done pretending otherwise to either of us.
“Are you going to kiss me?”
His eyes search mine. “Do you want me to?”
“Yes.”
He exhales, then puts his hands on my waist. He pauses there, watching my face, and only when I pull him closer does he kiss me.
The first kiss is nothing like I expect.
No collision, no desperation. His lips are soft on mine, almost cautious, and the tenderness of it breaks something open faster than hunger ever could.
I make a sound against his mouth and pull him closer, and that’s all the permission he needs.
The next kiss is harder. His arms come fully around me and suddenly I’m against him, one hand in his hair, the other fisted in his shirt, while he kisses me like a starving man who is still, even now, afraid of taking too much.
His hand starts up my back and pauses. He pulls back just enough to look at me, waiting.
I kiss him again. “Stop asking me without asking me.”
A broken laugh leaves him. “I’m trying very hard not to fuck this up.”
“You’re making me crazy.”
“I can live with that.”
I tug him toward the door, and he stops with his forehead against mine, breathing hard.
“Sienna. If we do this?—”
“I know.”
“I need to say it anyway.”
“Of course you do.”
He draws back enough to look at me, and his expression is painfully serious. “You don’t owe me anything. Today doesn’t obligate tomorrow. You can still file those papers.”
“That almost sounded like something a therapist would say.”
He stares at me for one stunned second, then laughs, rusty and startled, a sound I’ve heard from him only a handful of times since I’ve known him. Even with tears all over my face, I smile because I did that.
“I’m serious,” he says.
“I know you are.”
“I need you to know.”
“I do.” I put my hand flat on his chest. “I’m taking you to bed because I want my husband.”
His eyes close, and when they open again I can barely breathe.
“Say it again.”
I know which part.
“My husband.”
He kisses me before I can say anything else, and we barely make it down the hall.
My fingers catch at his waistband, and I see the black ink low on his hip.
I stop.
My name is there in my handwriting, with the ridiculous little duck I drew beside it.
“Cade.”
He follows my eyes. “I can explain.”
“Is that my duck?”
“Yes.”
I stare at him. “How do you even have that?”
“The note.”
It takes me a second. Then I remember the soup, the blue container, the scrap of paper I left for him because he had worked through dinner again.
“You kept that?”
“It was in my wallet.”
“Since when?”
“Since you left it for me.”
I look at him.
“All this time?”
“Yes.” His expression shifts. “I moved it whenever I changed wallets.”
The ink was one day’s decision. The note was every day before it.
“The night I came here in the rain, my wallet got soaked. The ink started running.” He glances down at the tattoo. “I couldn’t bear to lose it.”
“So you had it tattooed on you.”
“Yes.”
I touch the little duck with one fingertip.
“Oh, Cade.”
His eyes lift to mine.
I understand something then that his confession alone couldn’t have given me. He hadn’t started loving me after I left.
He had loved me for a long time.
At the bedroom door he pauses one last time, and I look at him, at the exhausted, wrecked, hopeful man in my doorway, and I understand what I’m choosing. There are a thousand things still between us. None of them disappears because I reach for him. I know that.
I think Cade knows it too.
I am still angry. But I want him, and today I don’t make myself deny that.
He tells me he loves me against my mouth and later against my skin, more than once, as though now that he knows the words he can’t keep them in. Each time, I let myself believe him.
Later, the room is going gold around us and my head is on his chest, and neither of us has spoken in a long time because nothing needs saying yet.
His fingers move slowly through my hair.
Every so often his hand goes still, like he’s fallen asleep, and then it starts again, like he keeps checking that I’m real.
His lips touch the top of my head.
“I love you.”
“You already told me.”
“I wanted to say it again.”
“Planning to repeat it?”
“Forever.”
I smile against his skin. “That could get annoying.”
“I’m willing to risk it.”
I lift my head. He looks happier than he has any right to look after a morning like this one, and underneath the happiness there is still caution. He isn’t assuming anything, not one thing, and that matters too. I touch the exhaustion beneath his eye.
“I don’t know what happens tomorrow.”
His hand settles warm at the back of my neck. “Then we don’t decide tomorrow tonight.”
“That was annoyingly reasonable again.”
“I’m having a terrible week.”
I laugh, and this time nothing about it hurts. Cade smiles, a real one, the rare unguarded one, and I lay my head back down on his chest.
For the first time since I married him, I believe it.