If Elliott turned around one more time to check for Peggy, his neck was going to get a crick. He’d walked into the middle school auditorium, prepared to find an empty seat without any fanfare, but he’d been ushered to the front row by a student with a cowlick and a blazer. Now the seat beside him was the only empty one in the whole damn house, and Alice’s performance was set to begin any minute. Already the lights were dimming in preparation for the curtain to go up, and there was no sign of Peggy.
A fine time for her to be late when he still couldn’t believe his own fortune. Maybe he’d imagined carrying her off the stage and the two nights she’d spent sleeping in his bed, having breakfast in his kitchen, riding along with him to drop Alice off at school that very morning. An elaborate dream created as a coping mechanism by his brain because in reality she’d never agreed to stay in Cincinnati and become his wife. That had to be it, right? He couldn’t possibly deserve to have the most extraordinary woman on the planet sit beside him in the front row.
“Sorry, excuse me, sorry.”
Elliott shot to his feet as Peggy scooted past the other parents in the row, using the sleeve of his dress shirt to dry the sweat on his upper lip. “You’re here,” Elliott said gruffly, glancing down at the giant bouquet of flowers Peggy was cradling in her arms, but unable to keep his attention off her face for too long. “Lord, you don’t stop getting prettier, do you?”
When a scattering of sighs went off around them, Elliott realized he’d spoken out loud. But it was worth the slip when Peggy eyes softened and she did a little twirl, fanning out the edges of her bright green dress. “I knew you’d like this dress because it’s the color of a football field. You’re too easy, Coach.”
“I didn’t even notice.” A smile twitched his lips as he reached out, sliding a hand around her waist and tugging her close for a kiss. “But now that you mention it…”
She laughed against his mouth. “You’re crushing the flowers.”
“If buying flowers is why you were late, they better have magical powers.” He allowed his nerves to show, because there was no more hiding between them. “I was about to send out a search party.”
Sympathy flitted across her expression. “Let’s say they do have magical powers. What would you wish for?”
“A thousand years of you,” Elliott murmured, rubbing his forehead side to side against Peggy’s. “I wouldn’t even have to think about it.”
“Wish granted,” she whispered, sounding a little breathless. “Except for the whole thousand years part.”
Elliott dropped into his seat and pulled Peggy down onto his lap, already knowing they wouldn’t be needing the second seat because he wasn’t letting go of her for a single damn second. And he didn’t give a damn who was watching. When you were granted the love of a woman you, by all rights, should have lost, you didn’t pause to worry about any other perception of yourself save hers. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said into her hair. “If I can get lucky enough to put a ring on your finger, I have to believe anything is possible. Even a thousand years together.”
She looked up at him, contentment making her eyes shine. “There’s nothing to stop us from trying. Maybe if you want something hard enough, it comes true.”
His heartbeat went wilder than any crowd he’d ever heard at his back. “Then consider it done.”
A moment later, the curtain went up and Alice took the stage with her cast mates. After delivering the opening line, her voice only shaking a little, she found Peggy and Elliott in the audience and smiled.
* * *
In all forms, change was the enemy. When things changed, there was a domino effect. Belmont could hear the clacking of the tiles now as they tumbled on their newfound course and the earth took a new shape, a new perspective. So he did what he’d grown far too accustomed to doing when a new situation presented itself and gave him no choice but to get on board or lose…something, because there was always something or someone to be lost, wasn’t there?
He focused on Sage.
And the clacking ceased and his blood stopped raging to get out of his veins and her scent kicked him in the back of the throat and coasted down, down, down, until it coated his heart and made his bones feel less brittle. He couldn’t allow them to be brittle around her because she might have need of them. To lift or carry or fight on her behalf.
Belmont opened his eyes—when did he close them?—and realized he was holding Sage two feet off the ground, her slip of a body wedged between him and the Suburban. His mouth was open on her shoulder, the way it had been doing too often lately, trying to steal a small taste. Anything of her or from her. But even when the catastrophe of change showed up on his doorstep, his mouth didn’t dare take that sample. No, even when his brain grew fevered and the dominoes began to fall in their twisting paths, he remembered to keep his goddamn tongue inside his mouth and off the glowing perfection of her skin.
Perfection. What was he doing holding her so close? He could snap her like a twig if he didn’t get a grip on himself. Problem was, he couldn’t seem to accomplish calm unless they went through this ritual. This ritual of trying to meld their bodies together without crossing the line he’d drawn in the sand for himself. Hold. Cherish. Benefit just enough from her grace to retain normalcy, but not enough to use her or take advantage. God forbid. God forbid anything ever happened to her.
That was just it, though. He’d happened to her. His family had tried to downplay the fact that they’d sent for Sage back in New Mexico when he’d started to get a little too restless, making them nervous. And now it was just the two of them. Just him and the woman he alternated between wanting to carry around on a plush pillow and…wanting to use one hand to tear her dress down the center, while the opposite one climbed up her thighs. What did she look and smell and feel like between her legs? Would she smile if he kissed her there? Or be angry?
Stop. Stop. Never happening. Look at him. He was a fucking disaster. Couldn’t handle the slightest change to his schedule or the prospect of new, untraveled roads ahead for him and Sage. All the unknowns that could touch her while she was in his keeping. So he rocked her side to side on the Suburban and listened to her summer wind of a voice counting one to ten, one to ten, until he joined her. Their heartbeats began to slow down, like the wing beats of bees that had flown straight into a jar of honey. He’d done heroin a few times trying to cope with the anxiety, and this was what the come down had felt like. Lethargic and awful and beautiful and fleeting and forever. But there had never been Sage on the other side of heroin, the slow motion butterfly of her, dancing on the breeze and beckoning him toward sanity. Sage, Sage, Sage.
“We’re okay now,” she whispered against his neck, almost collapsing him with the soothing nature of her voice. “We’re okay, Belmont.”
“Not we,” he slurred. “Me. There’s nothing not okay about you.”
He was grateful for the evening wind hiding his slow, rasping inhales of her scent. “There’s a lot of things not okay with me,” she murmured, hazel eyes trapping him in their depths. “You just don’t want to see them.”
“I can’t see what isn’t there,” he insisted.
Her gaze took on a sheen that had premonition prickling the back of his neck. “I have to tell you something you won’t like, Belmont. I need you to try and understand.”
A circular saw started spinning in the back of his skull, sharpening his denial. She was going to cut him off and he would prolong that forever. Forever. “The way I am might be…wrong in a lot of ways. But the part of me that’s right? It would demolish whatever is making you not okay, Sage. That part of me knows exactly what it’s doing. It’s just waiting for you to ask. Or signal. Or just…” Dammit, he looked at her mouth, that double-arched upper lip that got chapped faster that her lower one. That one she was always licking when she concentrated. “Tell me what I can give you.”
His world suspended itself when she squeezed her eyes shut. There was something. Something was coming. His heart slowed under the anticipation. When the hazel was focused back on him, he almost begged her to put him out of his misery, but his cell phone rang. His cell phone? Couldn’t be. He’d recorded an outgoing message letting anyone with salvage business know that he’d be gone until further notice and turned the damn thing off back in California.
No, wait. He’d turned it back on to search local hospitals when he’d thought Sage was sick. “Answer it,” Sage said now. “I’ll be here when you’re done.”
“No. Talk to me now.”
Sage shook her head. “It could be important. It could be Peggy asking us to wait, or…” She trailed off, both of them knowing his sister was staying put in Cincinnati for good. They’d both seen it in her backbone when she started walking away. “It could be about your father.”
Not as important as you. Nothing is important as you. But when Sage tapped his shoulders and wiggled, he had no choice but to set her down or embarrass himself. Sage…wiggling. He distracted himself from the memory of the feeling by taking out his phone. Aaron? His brother? “I’ll just…” He answered the phone with a curt “Hold on,” before unlocking the Suburban for Sage and locking her inside. Keeping her within sight, he backed up a few paces and pressed the phone to his ear. “Yeah.”
“I miss you, too,” came Aaron’s dry response.
This was when Belmont would usually make an excuse to get out of the conversation as fast as possible. He kept too many secrets from his siblings, withheld so much that when he was around them for any extended period of time, the pressure of those lies by omission pushed at his insides. But there’d been rare moments of ease between him and Aaron back in Iowa, and he wasn’t ready to let go of it just yet. He sensed Aaron…needed that ease. And there was a need inside Belmont to provide for his siblings. It just was. “How is everything going?”
He could sense Aaron’s surprise on the other end over such a casual question. “Great. Really great. But…” A pencil tapping on wood. “I was calling to see how you’re doing.”
Belmont narrowed his eyes, and inside the car, Sage’s head whipped around, as if she sensed his suspicion through the glass. What does she need from me? “Why?”
“Because you’re my brother, Bel. I don’t need a reason.” He didn’t answer, just listened to Aaron’s energy shift around on the line. “How are things with Sage?”
Back in Iowa, he’d talked to Aaron about Sage because there’d been a sense of urgency building in him since she’d joined them in New Mexico. As if they were heading somewhere other than just New York, and there was a deadline to figure out where and why. And how she could make him feel so much. So damn much. “I don’t know,” Belmont said slowly, distracted by Sage’s distraction, watching her brow furrow in the passenger seat. “I’m just trying to keep from touching her the wrong way.”
Aaron was silent a moment. “What’s the wrong way, Bel?”
There was no putting the images in his head into words. Not for him. He didn’t know how to articulate wanting to make a woman one with his body so bad, he’d barely slept in two weeks. Painfully aware that even if he was allowed that entrance to heaven, he didn’t have the experience to know how to please her. Or if he would just throw himself down on her like a beast and forget how delicate she was. “Any way I touch her would be wrong. I’m wrong.”
“This. You’re wrong about this.” Aaron’s voice was more patient than he’d ever heard it. An effect of his girlfriend, Grace? Belmont liked Grace. She was just on the other side of normal, but still nowhere near him. “Don’t you see the way we all fucking orbit around you? You don’t, do you?” A beat passed. “You don’t see where this road trip is headed. I’ve had time. I see it now.”
“No, I think there’s going to be a detour,” Belmont said tonelessly, his gut tightening when Sage once again cast him a sidelong glance. “She’s finally going to need me.” The wind kicked up around the Suburban and a gentle drizzle started. He’d have to be cautious driving. “Peggy is staying in Cincinnati.”
“What?”
Belmont hung up the phone and cut through the dark to the Suburban, climbing into the driver’s side. He didn’t start the engine right away, and the only sound to be heard was their slow inhales, slower exhales, and the pattering of raindrops. “What was it you needed to tell me?”
“Nothing.” Sage laid her palm alongside his cheek. “I was just a mixture of sad and happy over Peggy. It was nothing.”
That was the first time she’d ever lied to him.
Embracing the twist in his stomach, Belmont started the engine.
He’d have to be ready to find out why.