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I sensed the trap, but I was too convinced of my ironclad control over my vulcanized rubber heart. Hard like a hockey puck. Nothing getting through. Certainly not a raggedy team of lost ducklings looking for their new imprint.
We’d been tossed together because of bad fucking luck. By all rights, we should have collapsed. It started with the little things. Each day seemed to shape us, minutes and moments that snapped us into new configurations, all our complicated cracked edges overlaid. We found each other’s gaps and broken spaces and filled them in, and we came together like a kaleidoscope forming shimmering fractals out of piles of nothing. Every time you looked at us, we were different.
Don’t do this to me, Shea. Don’t be wonderful. God, he was, though, and every day, he proved it.
We were on the edge of a moment, like we’d been on the plane, like we’d been in the kitchen. We were on the edge of something I’d thought I’d locked down and put away.
My shift to Shea was automatic. I needed— Something, and my primal, gut instinct was that he could give it to me. He hit me with those level, steady blues, a smile buried in their deep-water depths. He was as solid as the bedrock that lined the bottom of the ocean. I could rely on him like I could rely on the sunrise.
I was all up in my head, giving a lot of shit about all the things clawing at my mental walls. My mind could grind through every gear until my body was overflowing with tension and I’d jammed myself up into barbed wire and bear traps. One of Shea’s gifts was how he could draw me out of all that shit, pull me from my spiraling and settle me on solid ground. I loved it. It felt like I’d stepped into someone else’s life, like I could be a different person when I was around him. I was someone who could make him laugh, keep him laughing.
I wasn’t at all packaged or put together. Take one look at me, and you knew something wasn’t right. What had happened between us—our kiss, our bodies moving together, his moans, his sighs, his question—was a lit match in my mind. I’d like to date you.
He smiled, and it was like a million sparklers went off at once, a million little flashes of light in the depths of his eyes. The shine of him, the glow. He was incandescent. Wondrous. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. I was so, so fucked.
So even when everything was upside-down, even when we were sharing ice cream and brushing our sandy toes together, even when we were pressed from shoulder to shins in the dressing room, even when we fell asleep on each other in the plane and in our hotel rooms, that was the compass I followed. Not me. No matter what, not me.
It was the most intimate I’d ever been with anyone. I could feel his heart beating. His warm exhales were butterfly kisses on my cheeks. My fingers kept moving over his spine, dipped beneath the waistband of his jeans. His breath stuttered, lips parting— I drew my hand back. “Let me make you breakfast,” I whispered.
But he was a glimpse of a future that I wanted. He could be my forever, the rest of my life, if I tried my fucking hardest. There was nothing, nothing at all, more terrifying than squaring up to myself at three in the morning last night and asking how badly I wanted to be with Shea. How much was I willing to risk? To give? Everything. All of me, every part. My heart, my body, my molecules, my atoms. My past, my present, my future. My dreams, my hopes, all of it, every single thing; they all belonged to Shea.
“No. Whatever you’re thinking, no. What I want is you. All of you, Shea, and that means more than your body or getting you into bed. I want your hopes, your dreams, your desires, and more than that, I want to be responsible for bringing those to life. You want to wait. You want to find your one and only, and I want to be a part of that.”
“Shea,” I started again. My voice cracked, wavered. “You are every dream I didn’t know I had, and every future I never knew I wanted, come true. I didn’t know it was possible to be this happy, or to love life this fully. Loving you has changed everything. Now, my future is yours, and my hopes and dreams are tied tight to your hopes and dreams.” My hand fumbled in my pocket for Shea’s ring. I’d kept it in the pocket of my shirt right over my heart, keeping it warm for him, and I held it at the tip of his ring finger. A sunbeam caught the diamond and fractured, scattering rainbows across the
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We didn’t separate. Instead, we stood with our foreheads together as Shea began to whisper his vows. “Morgan,” he started. “I love you for exactly who you are today, and for who you have always been: the man of my dreams, and the man I’ve waited my whole life for. I marry you today, loving each and every one of your very many strengths and your very few faults.” He grinned as I chuffed out a single laugh. My cheeks were burning. “Forever is not long enough with you—” Shea’s voice wavered “—but from today forward, every moment is ours.”
All this time, the whole time we were dating, Shea was the one who said he was waiting. No, wrong. I’d been waiting my entire
life for him. For our love, for our marriage, and for this exact feeling, right here, right now, of pure and perfect wholeness. Every choice, every step, every thought, every feeling I’d ever had, all of it, had laid out the path of my life that brought me here, into Shea’s arms and his heart and his bed, and into this life and our love.
“Now,” Owen said, “that monster put my son through hell. He sent him so far to the edge of himself that he nearly leaped into that forever darkness. I’ve got two people to thank for anchoring my son to this world. One is that damn strong man upstairs, Shea, and the other is you. Brody walked back from that edge because of you. He’s alive because of you. You showed up, Morgan. You were there for him then, and here you are, doing it again. That’s the finest thing a man can do in this life: be there for someone.”
I steadied Shea. He tucked my sweaty strands behind my ear. “So, what’s a guy like you doing in a place like this?” The memory was sharp, but sweet. I’d known Shea was a hero from that day, that moment. My heart was already lost. “Don’t make me smile,” I said, ruining it by smiling at him. “Ah, but you have a good one.” He leaned in, kissed my cheek. “I love you.”
“Sign that contract today,” I told him. “I’ll be an Outlaw until I die.” “They’re going to retire your number.” I could hear his pen moving across the paper. “I don’t know what you did down there, Moogs, but whatever it was, keep doing it. Goddamn.” “I showed up,” I said. You showed up, Morgan, when you didn’t have to. That’s the finest thing a man can do in this life: be there for someone.
I wouldn’t be in this chair, holding my husband’s legs across my lap and watching the sunlight slide across his freckled face as my heart skipped and skidded. Shea turned to me, a soft grin stretching his cheeks. “Whatcha looking at, Husband?” You are everything to me, Shea. You are my mornings and my midnights, my days of sunshine and my nights of candlelight. You are my everything, and my love for you has no end. I smiled. “You.”
