Page 32 of Reluctant Bride

I don’t reach for it. Not yet. I tell myself five more minutes, five more minutes of her sleeping body against my chest and nothing in the world that needs my attention more than this.

It buzzes again. Then again, three times fast, the exact rhythm Mackenzie only uses when something can’t wait until morning.

I open my eyes and reach for it, and Sage’s hand closes over my wrist in the dark before I get there.

“Whatever it is,” she says, without opening her eyes, “it’s already happened.”

“That’s not a reason not to look.”

“It’s the only reason there is.” Her thumb moves once against the inside of my wrist, right over the sagebrush she hasn’t asked me about again. “Five minutes, Dawson. Then you can go be him. Right now be this instead.”

I lie there with her weight on my chest and four unread messages glowing against the wood and I give her the five minutes. Every second of it is one I’ll be paying back before the sun comes up, and I give them to her anyway, and I understand while I’m doing it that this is the first promise I’ve made her that I intend to keep.

Then I take the phone out into the hall and shut the door so the light won’t wake her, and call Mackenzie back at two in the morning to find out what my own land has been hiding.

ELEVEN

SAGE

I wake in the dark to Dawson’s hand splayed possessive over my stomach, and for one disoriented second I think I’m still twenty and none of the last eight years happened at all.

Then I feel the shape of him behind me, warm and solid and real, his breath steady against the back of my neck. His arm is heavy across my ribs. His large hand is flat against my abdomen, and it makes my skin pebble, a small shiver running down my spine.

I lie still and let myself have it. Just for a minute. Just in the dark, where nobody’s keeping score.

He stirs when I shift, not fully awake, and his hand tightens instead of letting go. His mouth finds my shoulder, lazy, and the kiss he presses there isn’t asking for anything. It’s just want, slow and lazy, the kind that doesn’t need an audience or a reason.

“You’re awake,” he says, voice deep and groggy with sleep.

“You’re handsy.”

“I’m married. I checked. There’s a license.”

“You checked the license at three in the morning.”

“I check a lot of things at three in the morning.” His fingers inch lower, and whatever I was going to say next dissolves somewhere around my collarbone. “Occupational hazard.”

We don’t talk after that. There’s nothing efficient about it, nothing braced or urgent like last night, adrenaline and eight years of wanting all crashing into one bed at once. This one keeps no clock.

He doesn’t turn me over. He just gathers me back into him, chest to my spine, his knee nudging between mine, and his hand stays where it was on my stomach, spreading wide, pressing me back until I feel how hard he is against the small of my back. His mouth drags up the side of my neck and stops under my ear, and he breathes there, just breathes, like he’s memorizing the smell of my hair in the dark.

It’s the first time I’ve woken up in this house next to him. That summer we never got a whole night. We’d stay out until the sky started to pale and then sneak back to our own beds before anybody woke up. My body figures out the difference before my brain does.

His fingers slide lower, lazy, and find me already wet, and he makes a rough sound against my shoulder like I’ve handed him a gift he didn’t ask for. He circles me slow, then slower, dragging over the jewel until my hips start rocking back against him on their own, half asleep and wide awake at once.

“Sage.” Just my name, gravel and sleep. A question.

I answer it. I hook my leg back over his thigh, reach between us, and guide him to me, and when he finally moves inside me it’s patient, one inch at a time, his breath catching hot against my neck with every one of them, like he’s got nowhere else on earth to be and no intention of proving anything to either of us tonight.

He barely moves. He doesn’t need to. We rock together in the dark, small and deep and endless, his fingers keeping time with his hips, my hand over his to hold it there. The house ticks and settles around us. Cricket sighs in her sleep at the foot of the bed. Nobody’s keeping score.

I come apart against him with barely a sound, a long, shuddering pulse that curls my toes and pulls every muscle in me tight around him, and he holds me through all of it, murmuring things into my hair I can’t make out and don’t need to. He follows a heartbeat behind me, my name rough against my neck, and then we’re just breathing together in the dark, tangled up in a way I haven’t let myself be tangled up in with anyone since I last made love to him on this same porch, right downstairs from where we’re lying right now.

I fall back asleep with his heartbeat under my ear and don’t dream about anything at all.

Morning comes in, dusted pink on the clouds through the east window, and I wake up laughing before I’m even fully conscious of why.

Dawson’s got one hand braced on the headboard and the other doing something entirely unfair to the back of my knee, and the whole production is somehow both filthy and ridiculous at once, the two of us fighting for space on a mattress that was plenty big enough for one person and apparently declares war the second you add a second one who refuses to stay on his own side.