Total pages in book: 139
Estimated words: 133321 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 667(@200wpm)___ 533(@250wpm)___ 444(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 133321 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 667(@200wpm)___ 533(@250wpm)___ 444(@300wpm)
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.” I swallow hard. “I hate that my mother isn’t alive to know you.”
“As do I of mine, Mia.”
It’s one of the things we’ve bonded on. The love of our parents. The loss of our mothers. Mine to cancer two years ago and his to a car accident five years ago. “Does your father know?”
“Not yet, but he loves you. He’ll be happy, but Mia, he’ll be harder on you at work. You need to be ready for that.”
“I want to prove myself. You know I do. I can handle it.”
He cups my face. “It doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you. Just the opposite. He’s hard on me. He always has been.”
I can’t think about his father right now. I smile. “We’re getting married.”
He smiles. “Yeah, baby. We’re getting married.”
Chapter eleven
Mia
The present
“We will not part ways in the middle again. I want you. I will fight for you, but we’re in or we’re out. We’re together or we both move on once and for all.”
I’ve told myself that I’m “out” with Grayson, right now—as much as I know I have real reasons for that choice—standing here with him, his body pressed to mine, his words in the air between us, it’s not that simple. Especially not here, in the lighthouse where he proposed to me. Right here, right now, the idea of never seeing him again is unbearable.
He cups my face and tilts my gaze to his. “You aren’t going to tell me you’re already out?”
“No,” I say. “And I should, but no. I’m not.”
He strokes my cheek, studying me for a long moment before he says, “Everything I could say to the ‘I should’ part of that statement, I won’t. Right now, I think we both just need to be us again. To just live in the moment.”
“I can’t do that here. There are too many memories here. Too much to question.”
“If you keep saying things like that, I won’t hold back what I have to say.” He leans in and kisses me. “So yes. Let’s leave. Let’s go to the house.” He doesn’t wait for the confirmation that he knows he’ll receive. I’m the one who didn’t want to clutter all my good memories of us in this place with the way we are now.
He links the fingers of one of his hands with mine and turns toward the stairwell, leading me that direction, but he doesn’t urge me in front of him, as the gentleman that he is might do another time. He goes first. A choice I understand, because I understand him. God, I really do understand this man. Being at my back would have been dominant, and while he’s dominant without question, he doesn’t want me to feel that he’s suffocating me with that dominance. Even so, he doesn’t let go of my hand the entire walk down the stairs. He holds onto me and keeps me close and the thing is, I want him to hold onto me. I want him to prove what can’t be wrong. That’s why I haven’t let him try. I know he will fail. I know that once he does, I have to say that final goodbye and I don’t know how I survive that. Not now that I’m with him again. That’s why I don’t want to talk right now. I just need to pretend none of the bad exists. I just need to be with Grayson, and I can’t seem to find the will to fight that need.
We step onto the beach, and his arm slides around my shoulders. “What did Eric and Davis say about Ri?”
“Let’s not talk about Ri,” he says. “That’s part of the bad and we don’t want that right now, right?”
“Yes. Right.”
“What were you thinking about in the lighthouse?”
“Good memories. Not bad. I was standing on the beach, looking at your house, and I just—felt like I was suffocating in everything bad and so I ran there.”
“I still went there until after the funeral,” he says. “Alone.” He looks down at me. “I went there alone, thinking about when I went there with you.”
My teeth scrape my bottom lip and I cut my stare. “Before the funeral,” I whisper. “You mean before the second time I left?”
“Yes, Mia,” he says, “before the second time you left.”
We don’t look at each other, but that reality hangs in the air between us. That’s when he stopped trying to tear down my walls. That’s when he let me slam them down between us and keep them down. That’s when he moved on. I don’t like the idea of him moving on. I’ve never liked the idea and yet, I have no right to care. I walked away. It doesn’t matter that it killed me to do it.
We reach the house and enter through the patio and the minute we’re inside the living room, he turns me to him, his fingers lacing into my hair. “After the funeral because you left me not once, but twice. After the funeral, because I needed you so fucking badly and you still left. Again. After the funeral, because that’s when I started to question us. That’s when I decided that if what we had was real, then you wouldn’t have written me off without really hearing me out.”