CHAPTER ELEVEN

Mia

The present…

“We will not part ways in the middle again. I want you. I will fight for you, but we’re in or we’re out. We’re together or we both move on once and for all.”

As much as I’ve told myself that I’m “out” with Grayson, right now—as much as I know I have real reasons for that choice—standing here with him, his body pressed to mine, his words in the air between us, it’s not that simple. Especially not here, in the lighthouse where he proposed to me. Right here, right now, the idea of never seeing him again is unbearable.

He cups my face and tilts my face to his. “You aren’t going to tell me you’re already out?”

“No,” I say. “And I should, but no. I’m not.”

He strokes my cheek, studying me for a long moment before he says, “Everything I could say to the ‘I should’ part of that statement, I won’t. Right now, I think we both just need to be us again. To just live in the moment.”

“I can’t do that here. There are too many memories here. Too much to question.”

“If you keep saying things like that, I won’t hold back what I have to say.” He leans in and kisses me. “So yes. Let’s leave. Let’s go to the house.” He doesn’t wait for the confirmation that he knows he’ll receive. I’m the one who didn’t want to clutter all my good memories of us in this place with the way we are now.

He links the fingers of one of his hands with mine and turns toward the stairwell, leading me that direction, but he doesn’t urge me in front of him, as the gentleman that he is might do another time. He goes first. A choice I understand, because I understand him. God, I really do understand this man. Being at my back would have been dominant, and while he’s dominant without question, he doesn’t want me to feel that he’s suffocating me with that dominance. Even so, he doesn’t let go of my hand the entire walk down the stairs. He holds onto me and keeps me close and the thing is, I want him to hold onto me. I want him to prove what can’t be wrong. That’s why I haven’t let him try. I know he will fail. I know that once he does, I have to say that final goodbye and I don’t know how I survive that. Not now that I’m with him again. That’s why I don’t want to talk right now. I just need to pretend none of the bad exists. I just need to be with Grayson, and I can’t seem to find the will to fight that need.

We step onto the beach, and his arm slides around my shoulders. “What did Eric and Davis say about Ri?”

“Let’s not talk about Ri,” he says. “That’s part of the bad and we don’t want that right now, right?”

“Yes. Right.”

“What were you thinking about in the lighthouse?”

“Good memories. Not bad. I was standing on the beach, looking at your house, and I just—felt like I was suffocating in everything bad and so I ran there.”

“I still went there until after the funeral,” he says. “Alone.” He looks down at me. “I went there alone, thinking about when I went there with you.”

My teeth scrape my bottom lip and I cut my stare. “Before the funeral,” I whisper. “You mean before the second time I left?”

“Yes, Mia,” he says, “before the second time you left.”

We don’t look at each other, but that reality hangs in the air between us. That’s when he stopped trying to tear down my walls. That’s when he let me slam them down between us and keep them down. That’s when he moved on. I don’t like the idea of him moving on. I’ve never liked the idea and yet, I have no right to care. I walked away. It doesn’t matter that it killed me to do it.

We reach the house and enter through the patio and the minute we’re inside the living room, he turns me to him, his fingers lacing into my hair. “After the funeral because you left me not once, but twice. After the funeral, because I needed you so fucking badly and you still left. Again. After the funeral, because that’s when I started to question us. That’s when I decided that if what we had was real, then you wouldn’t have written me off without really hearing me out.”

I lower my chin, trying to catch my breath, my hand flattening on his chest. “Words won’t fix this.”

“Mia—”

I jerk my gaze to his. “And I’m going to tell you what I admitted to myself walking with you from the lighthouse. I didn’t want you to try to explain because we both know you can’t, and once you can’t, we’re done. Some illogical part of me, and you know I’m not an illogical person, felt that if you never tried, I could keep clinging to maybe, to that possibility that what we had was real.”

“It was real,” he says, stepping into me, his hand flattening on my lower back, fingers tightening in my hair. “It is real.” His mouth comes down on my mouth, and when his tongue strokes mine, I don’t even consider holding back. I have craved this man forever it seems. I have needed him eternally. I sink into him and the kiss, I drink in the taste of him, the feel of him, the absolute perfection of him.

His hand slides up my back, settling between my shoulder blades, molding me to him. “I can’t stop needing you, Mia. I shouldn’t have tried.” His mouth is back on mine before I can even fully process those words, his tongue licking into my mouth, stroking and tasting me the way I do him. And he tastes of those words, of need and hunger, of regret and passion. Suddenly I can’t get close enough to him, I can’t get enough of him.

My hands slide under his T-shirt, a raw need clawing at me. I need and need and need some more. I shove at his shirt and he pulls it over his head, but my hands never leave his perfect body, which he spends hours in the gym making that perfect. I kiss his chest and he drags my sweater over my head, his hands settling on my face, even before it hits the ground. His lips are on mine. We’re wild and hungry, and he scoops me up and starts walking. That’s when reality hits me.

“Stop!”

He halts, his lashes lowering, and I can see him reaching for restraint. “What are we doing, Mia?” he asks softly.

“Not the bedroom.” He stands there a few beats and then starts walking again. “Grayson.”

He doesn’t reply. He doesn’t stop again until he’s laying me down on the bed we once shared, and he’s on top of me. “This is our bed. That lighthouse is our lighthouse. We’re these things, and we need us right now. So yes, Mia. In the bed, our bed, where I plan to fuck you and make love to you as many times as humanly possible this very weekend and the rest of our lives if I have my way. If you have a problem with that, I need to know now.”