Total pages in book: 43
Estimated words: 40759 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 204(@200wpm)___ 163(@250wpm)___ 136(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 40759 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 204(@200wpm)___ 163(@250wpm)___ 136(@300wpm)
I squinted at him.
“Answer,” he prodded, brows furrowing as he stared at me.
“You know I do,” I snapped back, hoping my anger wasn’t lost on him.
“Don’t sound so happy about it,” he groused, scowling for good measure.
“I’m not happy!” I railed, frustrated and hurt and generally pissed off. “Because now I know that if I get hit by a truck tomorrow, somewhere across town you’ll fall to your knees and what? Like, three days later, you’ll just be fuckin’ dead?” I couldn’t think of anything worse than losing him. But then I wouldn’t actually be losing him because I’d already be gone. And of course, given a choice, I would die before him in a heartbeat. The idea of outliving him was something I couldn’t even fathom at this point. But by the same token, knowing he was right behind me, my last thought before I checked out, was not comforting in any way.
“Jackson?”
“I would rather you live, Raph,” I rasped, my throat tightening as I imagined him gone.
“Yeah, but I don’t want that,” he told me, closing the distance between us, not stopping until he had his hands on my face, his eyes locked on mine. “We’re together, you and me. Wherever you go, I follow, and that’s how it is. I will never be parted from you, and you knew that from the jump.”
“No, I—”
“Before you, like I said before, I had nothing. I’m not going back to that. I won’t. You claimed me, I’m yours, end of discussion, so…what the fuck, Jackson?”
What? My hackles went up instantly. “Oh no. No, no, no. You don’t get to turn this around on me and be mad. I’m the one who’s fuckin’ mad!”
“What’re you pissed about? The fact that we’re tied together even tighter, even more permanently than you thought?”
“How dare you assume I’d be upset about that, and how dare you be outraged? I’m the one who’s fuckin’ pissed off and—”
“Are you trying to get rid of me?”
“Oh, for crissakes, I— I just— I can’t even imagine anything happening to you or—”
“And I feel the same,” he stressed, his voice harsh, urgent, vibrating with need for me to hear him and understand. And just below that, there was dread, so thick that I could feel it like a damp blanket of fog wrapping around us. “So please don’t— You can’t use this as a reason to—”
“Shut up,” I growled at him, and the surprise of me being annoyed cut through his distress, his second-guessing of himself, of us, of what had been, and brought him back to the present. “I married you. If I was gonna have second thoughts, I would’ve had them already.”
He didn’t look convinced in the least.
“Do you doubt me or the vow I made?”
His gaze remained locked with mine.
“Do you?” I pressed him.
“No,” he husked.
“Do you have faith in me?”
“Yes. Always.”
“Then?” I rumbled out, waiting.
His grunt told me I had him.
Joe and Marcus had been married last August, a month after Marcus returned to us. It had been a lavish affair, here in Jael’s home.
Malic and Dylan were supposed to get married in April. Of all the horrors I could think of, that would be at the top of my list. Jesus, I’d rather have a root canal than have a wedding. I had no idea what was going to happen with that now, in the face of the new discovery, but I suspected it would go on come hell or high water. Things like birdseed in heart containers and candles with glitter in them had been ordered, after all.
Leith and Simon had medium-sized plans for the fall, somewhere between Halloween and Thanksgiving, that involved Half Moon Bay and standing on a cliff while they spoke their vows. Apparently, Simon had an enormous extended family as well. I had offered to help shuttle people to and from the airport and the hotel. It sounded horrific, and all I was doing was picking up and dropping off.
Ryan and Julian were getting married on December first of this year, and engraved invitations in envelopes so sturdy they could have doubled as a fashionable clutch had gone out last month. When we got ours, Raphael took everything out of it—the map, the RSVP card, the actual invitation envelope that went in, the tissue paper, the invitation itself, the card with the name of the hotel and the name the reservations would be under since Ryan had reserved a block of rooms—and stared at it all spread out on the table.
“There’s glitter on this,” Raphael commented, rubbing the surface as gold snowflakes fell like real ones onto our cherrywood table.
“Get a garbage bag.”
“You know,” Raphael said, testing the weight of the envelope that had been sent inside the heavy-duty cardboard outer one, “I bet you I could wing this at somebody, and with the right momentum, take an eye out.”