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“You told me to soar.” I opened my arms to indicate the things around me. “That’s what I’m doing.”
Did Manning have a single clue how alone I’d felt since the day I’d met him and couldn’t touch him? Did he understand the agony of knowing I’d never call him mine?
his response slow, as if he were picking his words carefully. “My wants and needs were taken care of but never satisfied.”
“No I don’t. You kept telling me it was for the best. That it was to protect me from you. But when you married her, you shattered my world.”
“All the ugliness I tried to spare you was for nothing. You’re not safe. You’re not loved, not the way you should be. Your family is gone. You’re not soaring.”
No matter how close Tiffany and I had gotten, no matter if I’d been good for her and she for me, she’d never feed my deepest hunger. Not the way Lake could.
As much as I’d fought it, as wrong as I knew it was, I still loved her.
The longer I was in her presence, the more certain I was I had only one option left—tilt the universe until she fell into my arms.
Manning sat heavily beside me, way too much man for the creaky seats. “I don’t like when you walk away from me,” he said. “What you’re not understanding is that it doesn’t matter what you like, Manning. You have no say over what I do.”
“Because you need to hear this. Maybe back then you thought—so what, a kiss is just a kiss. Why not? But it wasn’t, not to me. You think it was easy for me, turning down your ripe fucking strawberry lips?”
said, “I knew the second I put my lips on yours, I’d be in-fucking-capable of letting you go. That was why I could never do it before. Those nights we had . . . in the truck, on the lake, and the kitchen counter . . . once I crossed the line, there was no turning back for me. I could never just wake up the next morning and not have you as mine.”
Manning was mine, I knew it in my gut.
“I worked so hard to keep you innocent,” he said quietly. “You’re no longer a kid, though. I always struggled to resist you, but I can’t anymore. I don’t want to.”
“Were you the one who had to watch the love of your life marry someone else?” “No, and it would’ve killed me, Lake.” He moved in on me, and I retreated to the curb until my back hit the side of a taxi. “Seeing you and Corbin together, knowing he’s had all your firsts when I . . . when I could’ve been the one . . .” His voice wavered with emotion. “I get it.”
“This morning,” he said, “if you had let me, I would’ve kissed you.” “But you didn’t. You never do.” “Because like I just said, if I kiss you, you’re mine. If I do it, it changes everything. So I know what my question is now,” he said, pausing. “Do you want to change everything?”
He took my chin and pulled my eyes back to his. “The stars can’t help you on this one, Lake.”
“For so long, you’ve been perfect to me. Untouchable. Unblemished. Now I want to touch you, Lake. I want to blemish you. I don’t want you perfect anymore. I just want you.”
“How can I be okay with that?” “If you can’t, tell me you’re happier without me in your life,” he said, almost pleading. “It’s the only way I’ll be able to walk away from you again. Otherwise, I’m going to take what I wanted from the start. And I’m going to erase him. For good. For-fucking-ever.”
“Corbin?” I asked, shocked that he was even on Manning’s mind at a time like this. “You know what it does to me when you say his name like that?” he asked. I knew, because he’d said her name to me, too. “I hope it hurts.” “It does.”
“I’ve always thought of you as mine, but now you will be for real. If you thought I was overprotective or possessive before, you have no idea how bad it can get. Are you ready for that?”
Manning bent his head and opened my mouth with his. Our tongues met, our lips pressed together, his hand curled into my jaw—and we kissed.
He’d sliced open a wound long bandaged, scarred though not healed, and now it wouldn’t stop bleeding.
“I want to feel every part of you against me.” He returned his hands to my cheeks and pecked my forehead, then the tip of my nose. “I want to know all the ways you fit me.”
He ran his hands up my backside and under my sweater, squeezing my waist as he dropped his forehead on my stomach. His voice nearly broke when he said, “You waited for me.” “Not waited. Hoped.
He turned his face up to mine again. “If I’d known, Lake, I never would’ve done it like that. I’m so . . . fuck, I’m so sorry. I want nothing more in this world than to worship you. To show you how much I love you because words aren’t enough.” Immediately, tears filled my eyes. “Love me?”
with all the fucked-up things I did, you can’t tell me you didn’t know, for a moment, that I was in love you.”
He stood, tilting my head up by my chin. “Being your first means everything to me. I haven’t just dreamed about it, Lake. I’ve had nightmares about it.”
“I can’t believe I’ll be your first,” he said. “And your only.” “My only,” I repeated,
how can I be in love with anyone when you exist?” He put his forehead to mine. “I’m so in love with you, I have been for so long, that there’s no room for anyone else, not even my wife.
“Promise me you’ll leave her.” All I’d done for years was analyze and resist and dream. Now, everything I wanted was right in front of me. Tiffany hadn’t hesitated to take it from me. So I would take it back.
“I promise you, Lake, it’s you and me now,”
the primal urge to procreate was specific to Lake. In other words, I wanted to put a baby in her now.
“Nothing will ever feel this good. Understand me? You and I . . . we’re going to do this for the rest of our lives and I can tell you, there’s nothing better out there.”
“I’ve loved you for a very long time. I have thought of you in every capacity possible. I thought I’d never have you, Lake, you have to understand that. I thought there was no chance. That people like me didn’t get a life like this.”
“You deserve everything.” “You are, and always have been, my everything,” she said. “If you think I deserve that, why did you take it away?”
I love you.
We’d weathered the worst of the storm—now we got to live in the sun.
“Don’t you know you’re the love of my life?”
“Those early days I met you,” he said, his gaze distant, “it was more like you were the light of my life. Maybe you knew right away that you loved me, but I had to resist it, or I would’ve caused us a lot of problems. The trouble with that, though, is that I fell in love with you anyway.” Finally, he met my eyes again. “And because I fought it so hard, that love is deep and unshakeable. That’s how I know you’re the love of my life. That love is a part of me.” In drama class, that was what
he brought me in for a kiss. “Don’t drop me,” I said. “And let you fall?” He sounded incredulous. “No way. You’re light as a feather, Birdy.”
“You can touch or kiss me when you want,” he said. “You don’t have to wait for me.”
and he nuzzled his nose against mine a few slow seconds before Hurricane Manning made landfall. Nothing felt more exhilarating than being whipped into a frenzy by his kiss,
“I have concerns. Like my temper when it comes to things I care about. So—you. And when we have a baby—our baby.”
“We’re going to be partners,” I reminded him. “We already are. We have been. Don’t you know, no matter what was happening around us, that you were always in the center of my mind? That I would never do or say anything to let anyone hurt you?”
her smile to herself, my lungs constricted. Lake had always been part of me, tangled with my insides in ways I’d often wished she weren’t.
“I have to keep waiting. It wasn’t enough that I saved myself for you and thought of you every single day we were apart.”
Lake was my star in the sky, but Tiffany needed to be the star of the show, and I couldn’t give her that.
“You can’t let me go, Lake.” I kept my nose in her hair, inhaling her. “I won’t be let go.”
Every minute I spent without her, my body ached.
I’m going to be everything my father wasn’t. You and I will have a family one day, and—” She cried more, and I had to nuzzle her to make sure she heard every word. “And I’ll spend a lifetime making up for his mistakes. I will be the best father to our children.”
