25. Buzz #3
I lifted one hand to her cheek, slow enough that she could stop me. She did not. Her skin was warm beneath my palm. Her curls brushed my knuckles. Her glasses shifted slightly between us, and she made a small frustrated sound against my mouth before pulling back just enough to take them off.
I stopped breathing.
She set them on the table beside our glasses.
Then she came back to me.
Her hand found my chest, fingers curling in the front of my hoodie, and the kiss changed.
Deepened. Grew teeth. Grew history. Eight years of restraint collapsed into the space between one heartbeat and the next, but not cleanly.
Never cleanly. There was too much grief in it.
Too much relief. Too much of the life we had not lived pressing against the life we had somehow reached.
I kissed her like I remembered and like I did not.
Because she was not a girl in my truck anymore. She was a woman on my couch with firelight on her face and winter in her hair and walls I had helped teach her to build. Her mouth was familiar, but the shape of her now was not. Softer in some places. Sharper in others. Stronger everywhere.
My hand slid from her cheek into her hair. Hers moved up my chest, over my shoulder, into the back of my neck, and I almost lost the last of my sense right there.
I made a sound I could not stop.
Lucy answered it by moving closer.
The couch shifted under us. Her knee pressed into my thigh.
My arm went around her waist, pulling her toward me because every instinct in me trusted touch more than words and my body had been starving for the truth of her.
She came willingly, one hand still in my hair, the other braced against my shoulder.
Dottie snored loudly.
Lucy laughed breathlessly against my mouth.
I laughed too, low and wrecked, my forehead tipping against hers for half a second. “She has timing.”
“Terrible timing,” Lucy whispered.
I smiled because she was smiling, and then she kissed me again, and the smile disappeared under something deeper.
I forgot the cold outside. Forgot the flight from Denver. Forgot the ache in my legs and the stiffness in my back and the hour and the season and the team and every version of myself that had ever been easier to be than this one.
Lucy shifted closer, and I went with her.
My hand spread at the small of her back.
Hers tightened in my hair. The kiss turned hotter, messier, still tender somehow beneath the want.
Her sweater bunched under my fingers. Her breath caught when my mouth moved along the corner of hers, then lower, just beneath her jaw.
I felt the sound in my chest. Felt it everywhere.
I wanted to lay her back against the couch.
I wanted to carry her upstairs.
I wanted to make every empty room in this house learn the sound of her.
The wanting scared me because it was not only physical. Physical I understood. Physical had rules. Limits. Consequences. You could want a body and still walk away from the feeling after.
This was Lucy in my house, in my arms, making the whole place feel like it had been waiting for her to breathe inside it.
This was the life I had built by accident showing me exactly what it had been missing.
This was my hand on her back and her fingers in my hair and the unbearable certainty that I had never stopped belonging to the moment before everything went wrong.
I kissed her slower.
Tried to.
Failed when she made that tiny sound again and pulled me closer.
“Luce,” I breathed against her mouth.
Then she pulled away.
I let go immediately.
Both hands off. Space open. Breath wrecked.
Lucy sat back, one hand pressed to the couch cushion as if she needed to steady herself.
Her lips were swollen. Her curls had fallen wild around her face.
Without her glasses, her eyes looked too exposed.
Too brown. Too full of everything she had been trying not to let me see.
“Okay,” I said quietly, though nothing was okay. “Okay.”
She reached for her glasses with fingers that were not steady. Put them on. Blinked once behind the lenses like she needed the world to sharpen before she could survive it.
I moved back another inch.
Dottie kept sleeping.
The fire kept burning.
The lake stayed dark beyond the glass.
Lucy looked at me, and whatever I saw in her face cut straight through the want, through the hope, through the stupid, beautiful dream I had let myself touch for one breath too long.
She was wrecked. Guarded because she had to be, not because she wanted to be.
My throat tightened. “Luce.”
Her mouth trembled once before she controlled it. “I don’t know how to trust you not to break me again,” she whispered.
I could not answer. There was nothing I could say that would not ask her to believe me before I had earned it.
So I stayed still.
Her eyes filled, but no tears fell. She looked at me like she wanted the answer to be somewhere in my face, somewhere in the house, somewhere in the fire or the frozen lake or the old photograph on the mantel of a boy who had not known yet what he would lose.
Then she asked the question that took the whole room down to bone. “How do I ever trust you again?”