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A soft moan spilled from her when I broke the kiss by biting her bottom lip.
“I’ll be back,” she said.
“I want to talk, Stripes.”
She rocked her core against my steely-hard length. “Me too. I loved how we talked last night.”
“Baby, you’re killing me. Am I going to have to keep chasing you everywhere for the next fifty years?”
Some of the pink faded from her cheeks, and she drew back, giving me a serious, contemplative look. “No, I don’t want you to chase me, and I won’t make you beg. It’s just…the physical is easiest for me at this point. I haven’t had a chance to wrap my head around everything else. Don’t take my avoidance of answering about this being a fresh start as some kind of denial. I don’t know what this is. I don’t know what it means to simultaneously want to spend the day in bed with you and bury my head in the sand. Some aspects of who I am have changed, but the way I make decisions and consider my next steps hasn’t. I try to be rational, but it’s nearly impossible to be that when you’re looking at me the way you are and telling me you think of me as yours.”
“That you’re even thinking about any of it is enough, Tali.”
It had to be. Tali’s nature was to be circumspect, and I fucking loved that about her. I was the one who made rash, unwise decisions. She would forever be judicious before making any move. It’s why we’d worked so well together. We balanced the other, even if we hadn’t known that was what we were doing.
She gave me another hard kiss. “I’ll come back,” she said again, before peeling herself off me to go get dressed.
I lay there watching her as she flitted around the room, getting ready, and something dawned on me. An awareness of a feeling wholly unfamiliar, but at the same time, utterly recognizable: hope.
I wasn’t hopeless before that moment, but I never really counted on hope. If I wanted something, I worked for it—my music, my sobriety, my job. And when it came to Tali, I’d work myself to the bone to make her realize she was mine again. The thing was, work only went so far. Tali had to do the rest. She had to decideIwas worth the trouble.
When she saw me still watching her, she tossed her thick waves behind her shoulders. “Your smoldering is distracting me.”
I held up my hands in innocence. “Want me to leave?”
Her dark eyes slid over me before her lips curved into a smile. “No, not yet.”
Hope. Yeah, I had it.
