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He’d only taken two steps when she impulsively called him back with her pulse skipping like crazy. When he turned around, she stepped out onto the porch and flattened her hands against his chest as she pressed close. “It seems silly for you to be going home at this time of the night. You can’t be getting much sleep once you get home.”
“I got a few hours with you.”
She took a deep breath. “What if you get all your hours with me?”
His eyebrows rose in surprise. “You mean stay the rest of the night?”
“I mean…why don’t you move in here with us instead of into my old house?”
Surprise turned to astonishment. “Move in here?”
She shrugged, trying to appear casual as she reached to pick some non-existent lint off his T-shirt. “Yeah.”
“What about Ian?”
“Ian will be fine. You’re already here almost every night anyway. Now you’ll be here in the mornings, too.” Plus, they had let him know they were dating, and even shared chaste kisses in front of him. She gripped the sides of Merit’s shirt again. “I like having you next to me in bed, and with us here at the house, and I miss you when you leave.”
“I miss you when I leave, too.”
“It’s more than that, though.”
“What do you mean?”
“I miss you because…”
“Because?” He tilted his head slightly, eyes questioning.
Because I love you.
She hesitated, the words right there on the tip of her tongue. Then again, if she was asking him to move in, wasn’t it about time she admitted the true depth of her feelings?
Another deep breath gave her the courage to finally raise her gaze to his and say what was in her heart. “I love you. I know it’s fast, and moving in together might be fast, too, but we’ve done everything fast, so this seems normal for us, you know?”
She forced herself to stop babbling. Her heart thudded hard as she waited for his response. Then she second-guessed hersel
f and wished she’d waited for him to say it first.
But he didn’t look panicked, and after a couple of seconds that felt like a lifetime, he reached to cup her face in his hands and leaned to rest his forehead against hers. “I love you, too, Mae.”
Tears pricked her eyelids, and she smiled through the water gathering in her eyes. He grinned back before giving her a slow, tender kiss that grew heated as the seconds ticked by. All of a sudden, he dragged his mouth from hers and crushed her against his chest, his face buried against the crook of her neck.
On her tiptoes, she hung on with her arms around his neck, their hearts racing together. “So, is that a yes to moving in?”
His breath whooshed out against her skin. “Before I can say yes, we have to talk.”
Her stomach fell out from under her in a second flat. She loosened her hold on his neck and lowered so her sock-clad feet were flat on the porch. “That’s never a good thing to hear.”
He avoided her gaze in the dim light barely reaching them from out by the street. “Maybe you could see if Honor and Asher could take Ian for a couple hours after school, and I could meet you after work?”
“Seriously?” She pushed out of his arms.
“What?”
“You want me to wait to hear whatever it is you have to say until after work?”
He shifted uncomfortably. “It’s past three in the morning. I don’t want to keep you up.”
“Then you should’ve just said yes and then told me whatever it is later. Because if you don’t tell me now, I’m not going to get a minute more of sleep the rest of the night. And that’s really going to suck for a whole day at work.” Not to mention the stress of worrying all day about what he had to tell her.
