More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Mallory and I weren’t good together. We were great. We were a collision of destiny and inevitability. We were fate personified. We were everything.
“I don’t know how to let you go.” The statement is a half whisper, half laugh, but there’s nothing amusing about the way his jaw clenches after he says it. He shakes his head like he hates himself for speaking those words.
“Truth or dare, princess?” “Truth.” “Do you want to come up to my room with me?” “Yes.”
Mallory floats down the hall of my suite, and her scent floods my nostrils. It’s changed since the last time I knew her. There are still notes of jasmine and citrus, but there’s something else too. Something new that reminds me she belonged to me once, but doesn’t anymore.
Because I love you. Because I’ve only ever loved you.
“Don’t try to rush me, princess.”
For me, that word, and a million other things, will always belong to him.
“Maybe they were cool with rushing because they didn’t have anything in front of them that was worth slowing down for, but I’d stop the world for you. I’d freeze time if it meant I would never run out of opportunities to look at you.”
God, the man can make anything look sexy.
In one of his hands, there’s a cup of iced coffee and in the other, there’s a bag with food scents wafting out of it.
“Because from the second I found out Eric was gone, all I wanted to do was hold you long enough to absorb your grief. To take every ounce of the pain you’ve been holding and carry it for you. When I boarded that plane, I knew I had no right to want any of those things, to want anything from you, but I want this, princess. I want to be here for you. Will you let me?”
Her laughter touches the same spot in my chest that it did last night. Warming the scarred skin of my heart.
Because I can’t deny her anything.
He’s waiting for my answer, but I’m watching the images of the life we never got to have scroll across his features. The time we planned to spend in Charleston is trapped in his eyes. All the late nights studying with textbooks scattered across every spare inch of our dining room table caught between his brows. Conversations about our future—where he would do his residency, how I wanted to use my MBA, when we were going to get married and if we wanted to have kids—held in the curve of lips that asked for a future with another woman then, moments later, said he only loved me.
Chris’ entire expression shifts, changing from playful to serious in a matter of seconds. “Princess.”
Chris pulls back and moves his hands to my face. The pads of his thumbs run over my cheeks, gliding through the trail of hot tears. “You’ve gotta breathe, princess,” he whispers. “Can you do that for me?”
“You can.” He’s so calm, his voice so tender and soothing. “In through your nose, out through your mouth. Do it with me, Mallory.”
Chris takes each breath with me, and in that moment his life is tied to mine. Our lungs expand and contract at the same time. The air he breathes out becomes the oxygen I’m taking in, and it stays like that until every essential part of me is made up of a part of him.
“When I saw the email about the honorary degree NHU was giving Eric, when I realized he was gone, you were the only person I thought about. I got on that plane because I just had to see you, to lay eyes on you and try to figure out if you were okay or if you were falling apart.” “What were you going to do if I wasn’t okay?” “Honestly? I have no idea. My only plan was to get here, see you, and leave before you saw me.”
“Any reality without you in it is misery, princess.”
“Because it’s you and me, princess.”
“Is it another trip to Disney?” “No, not this time, princess.” Both of us catch it, the implication that there will be a next time—another stretch of stolen moments where we don’t have to deny that we were made for each other—but neither one of us address it.
I put my hands on her waist and drop a quick kiss to her lips before I answer. “A quick trip to the mountains.” Her nose scrunches up, and I don’t hesitate to kiss that too.
Chris is one of the few people in the world that I can do this with. Simply exist. No expectations for conversation or demands for attention. Just easy acceptance, anchored by the feel of his warm palm resting on my thigh.
“All the ones that matter belong to you, princess.”
“The first time I kissed you, everything before you ceased to exist. Your taste, your touch, your smell, eradicated it all. You erased me, turned me into a clean slate, a blank page that only you could fill in. There was nothing before you, Mallory, and if I have my way there will be nothing after you. You are the first woman I’ve ever loved. The only one I’ve ever chased.”
“If I run are you going to chase me?” “I’d chase you to the ends of this Earth, Mallory.”
“I would rather you hate me than let you go another day thinking that our love wasn’t enough.”
During that conversation, he also said, with earth-shattering absolution, that I was his purpose and my safety was his job.
“A future with you is the only one I want.”
“We won’t ever be done, princess. If we’re both here on this Earth, breathing, living, existing, then we are happening. Nothing is ever going to stop me from loving you.”
She thinks we’re repeating history, but I won’t allow it. I’ll turn back the sky for her. Rewrite scripture, myth, and fiction. Undo the bindings of history books, tear out their pages and fill them with the story of us. Every desperate, stolen moment, every tangled breath.
