Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 48039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 48039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
His voice breaks on the last line. Not much. Enough to make me want to turn this bench into a bed and let him rough his hands up on my spine just to unwind that sound out of him with something better.
“Ax,” I say softly.
He blows a breath out and tips his head back to look at the slice of stars between branches. “I keep thinking there’s a right thing to say,” he murmurs. “There isn’t.”
“There’s the true thing.”
His head comes down. “Which is?”
“I remember the smell of your shirts in winter,” I say. “I remember the sound you make right before you laugh, like it hurts to admit you’re about to. I remember the way you held me when the doctor told us my mom was out of time. I remember the river in your eyes when you watched my house burn and how I stopped being afraid when I found your face in that smoke. I remember wanting you at sixteen in a way that felt like a house being built and a fire at the same time. I remember leaving and hating myself and loving my choice and wishing choices didn’t tear people in half.”
His fingers flex around mine like I pulled a wire tight under his skin. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t need to.
“Tonight,” I say, “I remember this.”
He watches me like I stole his breath and he doesn’t want it back. “This?”
“This,” I repeat, squeezing his hand. “The part where we stop pretending the night is the only thing we share.”
He nods like a man hearing his sentence commuted. The relief on his face is terrible and beautiful; it makes my ribs hurt in a way I understand.
“Savannah,” he says, reverent and hoarse.
Life is short and sometimes mean; it stole yesterday already. I won’t let it take tonight.
“Come here,” I say, and there’s no tremor in it anymore.
He doesn’t stumble. He doesn’t surge. He just steps into me and his hands slide to my waist—firm, careful; possession restrained by reverence. My palms tighten at his jaw. We hang there for one suspended heartbeat in the thin air between past and whatever this is about to be.
“Tell me to stop,” he says, because he’s him and he’d rather burn than take what I didn’t put in his hands.
I rise on my toes. “I’m telling you to start.”
His mouth finds mine.
It’s not gentle. It isn’t cruel, either. It’s honest. It’s ten years of prayers snapped like dry tinder. Heat arches up my spine so fast I have to grip his shoulders to stay put. He tastes like winter and coffee and the ghost of smoke, like the night we were fifteen under the Phantom River bridge when he kissed me with wet hair and shaky hands and said, I’m going to marry you someday, don’t laugh. He kisses me now like he’s answering himself across time.
I open for him and it gets worse, better, both—his tongue sliding against mine, a slow stroke that steals thought and leaves appetite. A sound escapes me, unpretty and right; he swallows it like he’s starved. His hands tighten on my waist, pull me to him, full to full, chest to chest, the length of him boxing me against heat. My fingers slide back into his hair, fist there, anchor. He groans into my mouth and the noise detonates low in my body.
“Savannah,” he breathes between kisses, as if he can’t stop saying my name and breathing at the same time. “God. Say—”
“Yes.” I don’t know what he asked. It doesn’t matter. My answer will always be yes.
He tilts my chin and changes the angle and the world tilts with it. The kiss goes deeper, messier, a hungry drag that says everything the letters said and everything they didn’t. His mouth claims and yields, demands and gives, a rhythm we used to know in a different language and are fluent in, still. He breaks for air and I chase him; I retreat and he follows.
Cold air licks the strip of skin at my lower back where my sweater rides up under his hand. He slides his palm there, hot, protective, a brand and a blessing. I arch; his breath breaks on a curse that’s more worship than sin. He kisses the corner of my mouth, my jaw, the spot under my ear that made me useless when I was sixteen and incinerates me now.
“You’re shaking,” he murmurs against my skin.
“You do that,” I say, ruthless with honesty.
He lifts his head, eyes black with want and wet with everything else. “Tell me if I’m moving too fast.”
“You’re ten years late,” I say. “Catch up.”
He laughs against my mouth, wrecked and beautiful, and kisses me like a man who has no intention of ever being slow again. The world narrows to heat and pressure and the way his thumb draws a slow, destroying line at my waist. I feel giant and small, solid and new. I feel fifteen and unscarred and twenty-six and aware and all the ages of me at once.