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“You had to know I didn’t want to let you go, Sara. I wanted to keep you for as long as you’d have me. I swear,” he laughed softly at himself, brushing his thumb over my bottom lip. “I got so fucking addicted to that smile,” he murmured. “I hated watching you leave. I just thought it was for the best.”
“I’ve told you a million times you
don’t have to protect me,” I protested. “I don’t know what Turner said to you that night, but considering what I’ve heard him say about me, both in front of me and behind my back, I can guess.”
“He wanted me to force your compliance, Sara. He wanted me to threaten your job unless you agreed to spend a weekend with him,” Julian said, shocking me silent for several moments. That much I didn’t know. And he wasn’t even done. “People who work for him found out about your arrest. I was afraid he would hold it over you, and harass you. I didn’t know how that would affect you, Sara, and I wasn’t going to assume. Not when it involved something that hurt you so bad in the past,” Julian said, a deep frown in his brow. “I just wanted you to keep healing. You said yourself it’s a fragile process.”
“It is. But it’s even harder without the man who helped me start in the first place.”
Julian drew his bottom lip in as he smiled. It was the closest thing to a shy smile that I’d ever see on him, and it prompted my first real laugh in five weeks.
Goddammit, that beauty. I just wanted to skip this whole damned morning and be in New York with him already. I wanted to climb in bed with him, and kiss him and remember what it was like to feel good again, and whole again.
“I promise you I’m going to be okay, Julian,” I said, and I meant it. “I can do anything on my own, but with you, I do it that much better.”
The way he glowed down at me was contagious, apparently, because a trio of passing women grinned wide as they gazed at us. It reminded me a bit of the sun hat ladies at the gas station, who barely had to know me to tell me to make Julian mine. I laughed to myself as I thought about them, and I hoped that wherever Sun Hat Lady was right now, I was making her proud.
“God, you have no idea how much I’ve missed you, Sara,” Julian said as his fingers wove into my hair. He kissed the top of my head. “I dreamt of you every day that you were gone.”
My tears hung on my lashes as he hugged me tight against his chest.
“Trust me. I know how that feels.”
JULIAN
I took off of work for the first week that Sara came home. We exchanged the same knowing grin when I offered her my place to stay since she’d given up her lease. She was moving in with me. We were both well aware of that – we just didn’t say it quite yet.
But within the first three days, we fell into a perfect little domestic routine. I woke up early to go for a run, come home to shower then make us breakfast. I’d let it cool on the counter as I crawled back into bed and kissed Sara awake. We generally let breakfast go cold while having sex anywhere from the bed to the bathroom, but it didn’t matter because anything tasted good after the appetite we worked up.
During the day, we went shopping for things that she needed, that got lost or thrown out during the move. We exchanged that same knowing smirk as we purchased everything from a toothbrush to a little silver tray to hold her earrings on my dresser. After that particular purchase, she couldn’t hold her tongue.
“How long do you think I’ll be staying at your apartment?” she asked as we walked out of the store. She giggled at the smile on my face.
“My guess is awhile.”
During the night, she cooked dinner while I read or took calls from work. I could never actually be completely off, but it was certainly nice to conduct business with a view of Sara dancing in the kitchen, her ass wiggling around as she tasted her red sauce over the stove.
Like we’d established during that trip to Biarritz, she went to sleep before me at night while I sat beside her in bed, reading or preparing notes for work.
It was a routine every other couple had, and it was apparently everything I needed to be perfectly happy and content.
My favorite nights were the one when Mom or Emmett dropped by, either to drop off some home cooked food or, in Emmett’s case, to eat it. I loved those nights, because I got to hang back and watch Sara sit with them on the couch as I poured some wine. I got to listen to her talk and laugh breezily with them, as if she’d known them for years.
I’d lived in this apartment for years now, but somehow the bells of her voice were what it took to make it really feel like home.
Then again, she had a way of carrying that feeling with her wherever we went. The first time I’d felt it was when I brought her to my house in the Hamptons. I felt it more in Biarritz, and I felt it strongest now that I had her in the place I returned to every night after work.
She was my sense of home. My sense of family. She was everything I had tried to work for and pushed myself to find when I was younger. I wish I could have told myself then to save myself the pain – that if I could just wait long enough, the answer to every one of my dreams would come in the form of a girl named Sara.
She was the glue that pieced everything together for me, and she was the motivation behind my new top priority in life:
No matter what, keep her happy.
Keep her parents happy. Keep even Lia happy.
Do whatever it takes to lift even the slightest weight off her shoulders, and keep that beautiful smile on her face.
That was the new goal, and it was a lofty one. But I was known to work my ass off for something I truly wanted.
