Page 213 of Wild Card 13

I stayed still.

I let her have the whole space.

Her breath shook once on the way in.

Then she moved.

Not much. Just enough.

She leaned across the narrow distance between us and kissed me.

The first touch of her mouth was careful, almost questioning, and it still hit me harder than any check I had ever taken. My whole body went quiet at once. Not calm. Never calm. But quiet in the deepest place, the place that had been loud for eight years and suddenly recognized something it had almost forgotten it was allowed to want.

Home.

That was the word.

Not house. Not memory. Not wanting. Not even love, though that was there too, brutal and obvious and everywhere.

Home.

Lucy’s mouth opened softly under mine, and the last careful part of me nearly came apart.

I lifted one hand to her cheek, slow enough that she could stop me. She did not. Her skin was warm beneath my palm. Her curls brushed my knuckles. Her glasses shifted slightly between us, and she made a small frustrated sound against my mouth before pulling back just enough to take them off.

I stopped breathing.

She set them on the table beside our glasses.

Then she came back to me.

Her hand found my chest, fingers curling in the front of myhoodie, and the kiss changed. Deepened. Grew teeth. Grew history. Eight years of restraint collapsed into the space between one heartbeat and the next, but not cleanly. Never cleanly. There was too much grief in it. Too much relief. Too much of the life we had not lived pressing against the life we had somehow reached.

I kissed her like I remembered and like I did not.

Because she was not a girl in my truck anymore. She was a woman on my couch with firelight on her face and winter in her hair and walls I had helped teach her to build. Her mouth was familiar, but the shape of her now was not. Softer in some places. Sharper in others. Stronger everywhere.

My hand slid from her cheek into her hair. Hers moved up my chest, over my shoulder, into the back of my neck, and I almost lost the last of my sense right there.

I made a sound I could not stop.

Lucy answered it by moving closer.

The couch shifted under us. Her knee pressed into my thigh. My arm went around her waist, pulling her toward me because every instinct in me trusted touch more than words and my body had been starving for the truth of her. She came willingly, one hand still in my hair, the other braced against my shoulder.

Dottie snored loudly.

Lucy laughed breathlessly against my mouth.

I laughed too, low and wrecked, my forehead tipping against hers for half a second. “She has timing.”

“Terrible timing,” Lucy whispered.

I smiled because she was smiling, and then she kissed me again, and the smile disappeared under something deeper.

I forgot the cold outside. Forgot the flight from Denver. Forgot the ache in my legs and the stiffness in my back and the hour and the season and the team and every version of myself that had ever been easier to be than this one.

Lucy shifted closer, and I went with her.