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He wouldn’t have brought it up if he didn’t want to tell me. So I asked. “What did the note say?”
“That she changed her mind. That she was releasing me of the demand for me to go to college. She told me that while she had enjoyed her job, it had fulfilled her in one way, the endless pursuit of upward mobility, that she realized as her time was running out that she wished she had taken some of that time and spent it pursuing love. And that she wanted me to promise her to do that myself, to find a woman, to love her with everything I had, to not let anything get in the way of that. She wasn’t around to make the promise to anymore, but I made that promise to her memory.”
Suddenly, it all made sense.
And I felt badly for any negative thought I may have ever had about his endless string of girlfriends.
It wasn’t that he was fickle, or that he thought one woman was just as good as the next.
He was trying to keep a promise his dying mother had asked of him.
Maybe the actions were a tad bit misguided, but he was doing his best.
“Hey, none of that,” Lincoln demanded softly. It took me a long moment to realize I’d been crying into his neck, unexpectedly overwhelmed by his attachment to his mom, the loss of it, and his effort ever since to make her final wish come true.
I’d never had any doubt about Lincoln being a good man, but knowing this about him was only reinforcing what I already knew. And I was maybe a bit overcome with how lucky I felt to call someone like him a friend, let alone something more than that.
“Sorry,” I told him, sniffling, as I pushed back.
Before my hands could even raise to swipe the tears, his were there, doing it for me.
“Is it a pain in the ass to feel things so deeply all the time?” he asked. Not condescending, genuinely curious.
There was no use trying to deny that I was definitely an emotional person. I felt. And I felt it to the core. All the good and all the bad.
“It can be,” I admitted. “It’s why I can’t watch the news. My heart just can’t take it. But I think I prefer feeling it all then not feeling it.”
“Even if it makes you cry?”
“Maybe especially if it makes me cry. We’re supposed to feel things. Denying them or pushing them down is why people are such a wreck of nerves and unhappiness. I might cry more than everyone else, but it lets me get it out. I don’t have to have it living inside me for months or years. I feel it, release it, and I can move on. What?”
“Some day,” he said, voice serious, “I would like to bring you to go meet my father. I think the two of you would really get along well.”
“Yeah?” I asked, feeling a sting behind my eyes, but this time, it was out of pure joy. That he was thinking that far down the road, that he thought I was important enough to meet his father.
“Abso-fucking-lutely,” he agreed, the sadness gone from his eyes, replaced with a brightness that warmed me from the inside out. “We’ll have to get you a giant brimmed hat,” he went on, fingers tapping across the top of my cheek, touching my freckles. “You have to sunburn with skin like this.”
“I sometimes get sunburn on my left arm from driving with it resting near the window. I don’t mean on a long road trip, either. Just driving to work.”
A low chuckle moved through him, vibrated into my own chest.
My hand lifted, pressing against his cheek for a second as I tried to memorize the look on his face.
But at my touch, his gaze heated.
And, well, my body responded.
My lips sealed over his.
And his greedy hands moved down my back, sank into my ass, yanking me higher onto his lap.
We were good at this.
At giving into the seemingly insatiable needs of our bodies.
We spent a lot of our time the past few days exploring one another’s bodies, but somehow, each time felt like the first, like something entirely new.
My body trembled as his cock pressed against me, as my body moved against him on pure instinct, the pressure at the exact right place making a ragged moan escape me, muffled by his lips on mine.
His teeth snagged my lower lip, biting hard enough to sting, to likely leave little bruises on the inside for a day or two, a fact that made a thrill move through me.
I’d never been into the idea of being branded by someone, having their marks on me, but there was no denying that I was excited at the idea of having evidence of his desperation for me even when he wasn’t around.
