Heathen & Honeysuckle (Pacific Shores, #1)

by Sarah A. Bailey

“I–I’m sorry… I thought…” My eyes flicker to his cock again, and I lose all coherency. “I thought I heard my name.” I bite my cheek, allowing myself one last glance as I slowly step through the threshold of the bathroom, but before I can shut the door, I hear him softly murmur, “You did.” I lift my head to meet his gaze. “What?” He doesn’t shy away. “You did,” he says, louder this time. “You did hear me say your name. The name I’ve been moaning every time I fuck my fist for the last ten years.”

“Darby,” he rasps. I look at his eyes again. “Do you ever think of me?”

“Yes,” I whisper.

“When?”

“Every time I close ...

“Will you show me?” he asks quietly, his bright blue eyes blazing through me with such ferocity I’m not sure how I’ll survive the night without touching myself anyway.

“Yes.” His chest is heaving rapidly, and I feel my thighs clench together, feel my body flood with heat as I watch his hand resume its earlier motion. My gaze bounces rapidly between his eyes and his cock.

“Did you mean what you said? That you think of me every time you close your eyes?” His voice is strained. “Yes,” I say, soft but clear.

I’ve never really had a role model, nobody I particularly looked up to and wanted to be like, but I think I may want to be like her when I’m older, in her house on the cliffside, overlooking the sea, spending her days tending to her garden, attending the farmer’s market, sitting on the porch reading steamy romance books and drinking wine. I can only hope I’ll have a lifetime of love to go along with it, a person to hold my hand in those rocking chairs. Maybe a career I love, too.

“You are, without a doubt, the most beautiful person I’ve ever laid my eyes on.”

always thought that if she loved me the way I loved her, she would’ve come after me. She would’ve responded to me. Her phone number had been disconnected, all her social media accounts deleted. I’d tried to find her for months afterward, tried to remind her that I was still there. Still hers. And I thought I had. I thought she’d known and just didn’t care, hadn’t responded. I thought that if it had been her parents keeping her away, she would’ve come to find me after she turned eighteen. Thought she would’ve come when her grandmother’s health took a turn. When she died. But Darby never did.

She deserves so much better than all of them. She deserves me. I decide I don’t give a fuck what the last ten years have been like. I only care about the next ten, about having her in my life in whatever capacity she’ll allow me. I only care about taking that pressure off her shoulders, that hurt and that heartache. I care about giving her the wild freedom I know she was once capable of feeling when she was with me.

“When you tell me you love me for the first time, Honeysuckle, I want you to look me in the eye. I don’t want to ever hear the word maybe in that sentence either. When you say that to me, I want you to mean it.”

Pride blooms in my chest, knowing I’m capable of making her feel so safe, safe enough to close her eyes and let go of her worries while I drive ninety down a dirt road in a stolen car in the dark. I reach over and place my hand on her thigh, squeezing four times. A silent reminder that she’s always safe with me.

“You’re kind. You’re brave and smart. You’re a hard worker, you’re empathetic, and you care deeply for those in your life. You’ve made me brave. You’ve given me safety, protection, and comfort I’ve never felt before. You’ve made me feel alive for the first time in my life, Leo. That’s something she’d be proud of.” She places her hand over the one I have still resting on her leg.

“Nothing feels quite as bad when I’m with you, Heathen,” she says into my chest, and that’s when I feel it: the moment I know for certain that my heart no longer lives inside my body—it now lives inside the palm of her hand.

My heart, my soul, the entirety of my being—they all belong to Darby.

She smiles back. “Well, at least something good came out of my runaway-bride act.”

“I think a lot of good things are going to come out of this, Darby.”

I allow myself, for the first time in ten years, to feel every emotion coursing through my body, to relive the perfect moment from the perfect night all those years ago, the moment I knew I’d well and truly given my heart away to the girl in my passenger seat. I realize now that I’ve never had it back. I’ve been wandering the earth with a hollow chest all this time. I know that my heart—my soul—has been sitting right here, in the palm of her hand. Blood spreads through my veins again for the first time. It feels like life is being breathed back into me as I watch the sunset over the red rock canyons, illuminating the girl of my dreams in a golden glow.

“I need you to know that you’ve changed me.” He pauses, but his mouth still rests against the hollow of my throat. “I’m not the same person I was when I got here a month ago. I didn’t think it would be possible to grow so much in just a number of weeks, but you’ve made that happen. You’ve made me brave. You’ve made me want to find myself, figure out who I am and what I’m meant to do in this world.”

“You’ve changed me, too, Honeysuckle. You’ve made me understand what it feels like to be found. Seen. Heard. Valued. You make me believe in myself in a way I’ve never had before. You make me feel like I’m worth something.”

“You don’t need a piece of my soul, Honeysuckle. You already own the whole goddamn thing.”

I feel as if my heart could burst right out of my chest. I know that words won’t do the moment justice, so instead, I pluck the gold band from my left ring finger. I grasp his hand from where it rests on my shoulder and slip the ring onto his pinky. “Then show me.”

His eyes zone in on the purity ring that now rests on his own finger. We’ve never addressed it before—not directly—but I’ve seen him look at it. He knows enough of the history of my family to know that a ring on my left finger was clearly there as a...

I think I only preserved it so heavily because fate knew I was waiti...

“An angel. An angel and her demon.” I close the gap between us once more, feathering my lips over his. “A honeysuckle and her heathen.”

“Tell me more about this nickname: Heathen. Where did it come from? How does it relate to your identity as a surfer?”

“It’s a nickname given to me by someone special, but it’s also a representation of what my friends and I were like as kids. My brother and I wanted to pay tribute when we decided to open our own business in our hometown.”

“And how about those two necklaces you’ve always got on? Are those a gift from someone special too?”

“My sister made this one for me, actually. She likes to add crystals for protection and to ward off negative energy.” He chuckles. “I think this is her way of telling me to stay safe, reminding me she loves me.” His hand then slides down to the gold ring hanging at the center of his chest. “This one is…” He swallows. “It’s special. A good luck charm.”

“The necklace you do wear, that ring… Is it mine?” “Yes,” he whispers. “You’ve been wearing it all this time.” With the soft nod of his head, I feel as if some gate inside me has just opened, flooding me with every feeling I’ve repressed for all these years. Suddenly, I’m drowning in it. Drowning in him. “Why, Leo?” “It was a good luck charm at first, when I was sure that you were coming back. When I thought that you were still mine. It made me feel close to you, the same way the ocean makes me feel close to my mom.” His jaw flexes, and he refuses to meet my eyes. “Then, it became a reminder that you were real. The longer time went on without hearing from you, I began to believe I had made us up, that you couldn’t have loved me the way I thought you did. The way I loved you.”

“It represented a piece of you that would always belong to me. If I couldn’t have you. If I never got to see you again. If you…” He sighs. “If you went on to marry someone else, love someone else, give the rest of yourself to another person…” He reaches up to grab the ring hanging at his chest. “I’d have this. I’d have this piece of you, this reminder that at one point in time, you were mine. It’s a reminder that I know what love is. That I have been loved, even if I’m not anymore.”

as I realize just how broken I’d made him. All this time, I thought it was just myself I’d destroyed. I’d learned to live with it. My own kind of punishment. I never imagined he was hurting just as much as I was, that the way I abandoned him would echo so deeply and for so long.

“I was supposed to protect you,” I choked through my tears. I feel them dripping off my chin and onto my chest, but I don’t wipe them away. “I was supposed to be your person. You gave me pieces of your soul, too.”

“I took a piece of you you’d been afraid to give away, and then I left you. I broke you, Leo. I broke you, and you saved me, and…” A sob wrenches from me, loud enough to drown out the sound of the movie playing in the space around us.

“Was there a reason for it, Darby? A reason you left? A reason you never came back?” I nod against his heart. He brings his lips to my temple as he hushes my sobs. “Will you tell me those reasons someday?”

I can’t help but wonder what brought him to me at seventeen and what brought him back at twenty-seven. I think about how I used to call him mine, and I wonder how I ever let him go.

“Stop looking at me like that,” he whispers. “Like what?” “Like I own all the pieces of your soul. Like you’ve been incomplete all this time without them.”

I can’t stop looking at him that way, because that’s exactly what’s happened. He’s owned every piece of me since I was seventeen, and I only no...

“This moment is the most complete I’ve felt since that night on the beach all tho...

“Me too, Honeysuckle.”

“Leo,” I breathe. It’s all I can say. There aren’t words for the way it feels to be wrapped in his arms, the warmth of his breath and the caress of his hand along my side. The way he tightens his hand around mine in four quick motions, speaking the secret language we developed so many years ago.

“I asked you a question, baby. Are you listening to this right now? You get it?” I nod against his shoulder. He pulls back to gaze down at me, his eyes bright and pleading. “Tell me what you’re thinking about right now.”

“I’m thinking I want to dare you to kiss me.”

“You know what it means when I kiss you, right?”

“Yes,” I whisper.

I’ll never get the past back. I’ll never right my wrongs or forget my mistakes, but I’ve spent ten years without him, always grasping for and never quite finding the life I was building with him. I spent ten years hung up on two months, convincing myself that the older I got, the less it would hurt, the more it would fade. That never happened, because when my brain fought tooth and nail to convince me otherwise, my heart and soul always knew. It was him. It’s always been him. Maybe I can’t take back the past, but I can fight like hell for our future.

“Dare me, honeysuckle.” “I dare you, Heathen.” But I don’t wait. I’ve been waiting my whole life for him. I run my hand up his arm so I can cup his face and pull him into me. And finally, finally, I find my way back home.

“I hear the waves.” The loudest sound around me as they crash against the shore. “I hear the wind in the trees. I hear your breathing.”