Dreams of 18(110)

“Is that why you were in Denver?”

He studies me a beat and then nods.

“Is that why it took you so long to come? And you sent Brian, instead.”

“I wanted to make sure I knew everything. I wanted you to trust me.”

I laugh, then.

It’s not a loud laugh or anything. In fact, it’s laced with tears. But somehow, it’s the purest, most joyful laughter I’ve ever produced.

It’s acceptance.

It’s what I felt the day I accepted that I loved him since the beginning.

This is what I’m feeling right now. Accepted and loved.

I laugh and I cry and my head drops down to his chest.

God, I love him. He’s an idiot but I love him.

He buries his hand in my hair and presses my forehead into his chest even more. I take a second to rub my nose in his shirt, smell his thick, outdoorsy smell. It reminds me of the cabin so much – our rose garden, the bed, the woods surrounding our home.

I have to pull myself away and tell him. I’m getting so impatient now. I need him to take me away.

“I’ve been so mad at you, you know. You hurt me in the worst possible way. You made me cry and everyone kept saying that you wouldn’t come. That you didn’t care.”

“Baby, I –"

I put a finger on his mouth. “But I knew. I knew you’d come. Do you know how I knew?”

He swallows another lump of emotion and breathes against that finger of mine, shaking his head once.

“You kissed me,” I whisper. “That day. When you sent me away. You stepped up to me and you wiped my tears off and you kissed me on the forehead, and you said what you did on my eighteenth birthday. You said, go home. Even though you wanted to kiss me that night, you kept pushing me away. You kept denying yourself. You kept doing the right thing. And I knew. I knew you were doing the right thing on my nineteenth birthday too. You just needed to realize that what you thought was the right thing wasn’t really the right thing. And I knew you’d realize it. I knew that because I trusted you. I did and I do. I trust you, Graham.”

A breath rushes out of his mouth and my finger absorbs it. It travels down my veins and spreads across my body. That breath of relief.

I take off my hand and shake my head at him. “And you’re so stupid if you think that you can make me hate you.”

I see the full impact of my words register on his body bit by bit.

At first, he frowns but when he realizes what I’ve said, his eyes sweep across my face to confirm it. His lips part and the biggest impact is how he tightens his hold on me. How his fingers in my hair spasm and jerk before he digs the pads into my scalp.

Finally, he says in a rough but relieved voice, “Thank fuck you’re smarter than me.”

“Duh.”

His lips stretch into a lopsided smile that I absolutely adore, and I step up on his feet. “I wanna go home. I don’t like it here.”

He shifts a hand down my spine and splays it on my lower back, pressing our bodies together. “Home. Yeah. It didn’t feel like home before.”

I grab the collar of his shirt and tell him sternly, “It’s our home now.”

His eyes flare with emotions. “It is.”

“Good.” Then, “And I think we need new floors.”

His chest reverberates with a chuckle. “We do?”

“Yes. We also need a bigger rose garden because I have ideas.”

“You have ideas.”

I nod slowly, biting my lip and peeking at him through my eyelashes. “Yes.”

A current passes between us, or rather we absorb each other’s desire since there’s hardly any space left between us for anything to pass.

I wind my arms around his neck and he puts his hands under my ass to lift me up. I hang onto him like a spider monkey.

When I’m all adjusted, he grabs the back of my neck and demands, “Tell me about them.”

I rub my fingers in his thick beard and kiss his cheek softly. “Only if you kiss me right now.”

“Yeah?”

“Uh-huh. And I don’t want it here.”

“Where do you want it?”

God, his sexy voice always gets me. Always.

It makes me wild. The thing I become when I’m with him.

“In your old backyard where everything started.”

He tightens his hold on my neck as his eyes narrow. “You know there are other people living there now, right?”

“Yup. There’s this lady with a bunch of cats. And I think her husband keeps staring at me.”

I don’t know, actually. I caught him staring once but I don’t know if he keeps doing that. I just said it because I want my beast now.

I want him to come out in all his possessive glory.

“Does he now?”

His dangerous voice sends a dark thrill down my spine. “Yeah. So you should just claim me, you know. Show him that you’re my boyfriend.”

“I’m your boyfriend.”

I wrinkle my nose. “Yes. You are. That’s what the kids my age are calling it these days.”

Amusement flickers over his features as he begins to move. “Yeah, I wouldn’t know now, would I?”

Laughing, I kiss him while he walks us to the very spot where everything started. There’s no rose garden there; it’s covered up by a patch of grass and the loungers and things are different.