Page 167 of IRL: In Real Life
I leaned back into him because there was no point pretending I wasn’t going to. Not after all the ways he had earned that softness in me.
The breeze moved through my curls. His chin grazed my shoulder. The water stretched in front of us, sunset not yet fully gone, moonlight not yet fully arrived.
That in-between hour.
The one that made everybody prettier and a little more honest.
“You know,” I said lightly, “this looks a lot like showing off.”
Micah let out a low sound against my skin that might have been a laugh and might have been something dirtier.
“A little.”
I turned in his arms and looked up at him.
The terrace still hummed behind us. Music. Glasses. Bodies. Heat.
And there he was in the middle of all that, looking down at me with all that low, devastating attention that had first undone me in Pittsburgh and had somehow only gotten worse with tropical air and a white shirt involved.
My hands slid up his chest.
“I love you,” I told him.
I watched the pleasure of hearing me say it play out across his features.
“And I love you too, baby.”
Micah kissed me then.
It was a kiss that belonged to a man who knew exactly who I was to him and had stopped being interested in understatement where it mattered.
The first press of his mouth made my knees soften. The second made me clutch his shirt. By the time the kiss deepened, the breeze, the mixer, the water, the whole glowing resort had faded to a backdrop beneath the much more urgent fact of Micah’s mouth on mine and the way he held me there as if he had all the time in the world and all the reason.
When I pulled back, it was only because I had to breathe.
Micah’s forehead rested against mine, and for a second, neither of us said anything.
Then his hands slid from my waist to my hands, fingers threading through mine in a way so deliberate it made my pulse kick harder before I even knew why.
“What?” I whispered.
“You remember wanting to know what your father asked me at Labor Day?”
I had thought of it all the time. Neither he nor my father would budge, and my mother would not utter a peep, talking about the covenant of marriage like she had suddenly taken up legal counsel.
“Yes?”
“I told him I wasn’t gonna do anything but come correct before I asked you anything.”
The world went still around me.
Somewhere behind us, somebody laughed too loud over a glass.
His voice had gone that quiet, serious way it only did when he was carrying something too heavy to play with.
Micah held my eyes.
“Have I been coming correct?”
