Page 88 of Reluctant Bride

“We are the event of the summer, Dawson. Try to keep up.”

“We were the event of the summer,” Maren complains, arriving with Knox and two bags of popcorn, “right up until somebody’s welcome dinner and drive-in double feature stole our whole news cycle. I’m aware and I’m bitter about it.” She winks at Sage and me.

West sets the pizza boxes out on his tailgate like a buffet nobody asked him to run, and the projector flickers to life against a sky gone indigo that means full dark isn’t far behind it. Top Gun. Somebody at this drive-in decided the whole valley needed fighter jets and Kenny Loggins tonight, and judging by the crowd nobody’s arguing.

I back my truck into the second row, tailgate down, and Sage climbs up into the bed before I can offer a hand, boots kicked off, blanket over both our laps. Two spots over, Finn’s already doing the voices.

Sage tips her head back against my shoulder, the highway to the danger zone crackling tinny through the truck’s speakers, and for the first time all night I stop counting exits.

“We never got to do this,” she says just for me. “The two of us. In front of everybody. Not sneaking around a cove or a tack room.”

“No.”

“How’s it feel?”

I look down at her, moonlight and movie light both catching the line of her jaw.

“Terrifying,” I say. “In the good way.”

I kiss her right there, in front of every last one of the people who watched us grow up and half of Rimrock’s truck beds, slow and deep and entirely unbothered by an audience, the exact kiss I wasn’t allowed at twenty-four on a porch I made myself forget. She kisses me back like she’s been waiting on it just as long, and the world blots out for a minute.

“Get a room!” Finn hollers, and Cora’s laugh carries clean across the lot.

“We have a room,” I call back, without breaking away from her mouth. “We’re using the truck bed instead. Cheaper on gas.”

“That’s the least romantic thing I’ve ever heard you say,” Sage murmurs against my lips.

“I’ll workshop it.”

I couldn’t tell you a single line of the movie past the volleyball scene. I’m too busy learning the exact way she laughs when Finn does the voices wrong, too busy being a man at a drive-in with his wife instead of a man running threat models on my family’s yard twenty miles behind us.

The house is dark when we finally pull in, porch light left on like we always leave it, and Sage has my shirt half unbuttoned before we clear the mudroom.

She makes it four steps up.

Then she turns around, one hand on my chest, and pushes, and I sit down hard on the stairs, because apparently that’s what I do now when my wife pushes. She drops to her knees two steps below me, porch light spilling through the glass in the front door and catching gold in her eyes, and gets my belt open with the same efficiency she uses on a bad contract.

“Sage.”

“You kissed me in front of half of Rimrock.” She pulls me free and wraps her hand around me, slow and firm, watching my face while she does it. “Best thing anybody’s ever done to me in a truck bed. My turn.”

Then her mouth is on me and I stop being capable of arguing anything.

She takes her time. She learned me again that first night, and she’s clearly been studying since, and she uses every bit of it, her tongue dragging up the length of me, then swirling around the head until a groan tears out of me and I’m gripping the stair rail hard enough to make the old wood complain. When she takes me deep, I hiss through my teeth and her name comes out of me in a voice I don’t recognize. She hums around me, pleased, and the vibration nearly finishes me on the spot.

I get one hand in her hair. I don’t pull. I don’t dare.

She pulls off just long enough to look up at me, lips swollen, eyes gone dark. “Don’t you dare hold back on me now. Fuck my mouth, Dawson.”

Whatever was left of my control snaps clean in half.

My fingers tighten in her hair and my hips come up off the step, and she takes every thrust and asks for more with her nails digging into my thighs, and the sounds coming out of me aren’t words anymore, just broken curses and her name, over and over, bouncing off the stairwell walls. I warn her. She doesn’t stop. She looks up at me through her lashes, deliberate, and takes me deeper, and I come apart on the stairs of our own house with a groan that’s half her name, my head knocking back against the wall and nothing controlled left in me at all.

She sits back on her heels, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, and smiles like she just won a hearing.

Then she laces her fingers through mine, twines them tight, stands, and pulls me up after her. I let her lead me the rest of the way to our bedroom and I’ve got no complaints about where I’m going.

“Window,” she says, pulling me through the bedroom door. “Leave it open. I want to hear the crickets.”