Page 58 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

That's always how it works with me. I can stand in front of her and hold a plumb line, level and useful and behaved, and then the door of my old room closes at my Mom’s house that night and the whole held ocean of it comes down on my head at once.

I sit on the twin bed I slept in as a kid, in the dark, with my forty-one glasses still boxed in the corner because unpacking them means staying. The window's cracked to the harbor. And her scent is still on me somehow, a ghost of apricot caught in the collar of a jacket that stood too close to her on the steps, and that's all it takes.

Don't.

I lie back anyway.

The memory doesn't ask permission.

It's an August night five summers before we ruined everything — the back deck of a wedding I'd worked, everyone gone home, just the two of us and a bottle of something good I'd built the bar around. She's still in her work dress, shoes kicked off, feet in my lap, and she's laughing at something I said, head thrown back, throat bare in the string lights.

Our Sweet Apricot.

My whole nervous system in one woman.

"You're staring," she says.

"You're worth staring at. It's just good sense."

Then she's climbing into my lap, that easy, that certain, the laugh gone low in her throat and turning into something else. Apricot blooming warm and ripe as she settles her weight against me. My hands find the backs of her thighs under the dress like they were built for the exact measurement of her.

In the dark of my childhood room, my hand goes to my belt.

Coward,I think, and I do it anyway.

The memory floods in vivid and cruel.

Her mouth on mine, coffee and wine and want, her hips already rolling. The dress rucked up around her waist. My fingers finding her through soaked lace and her breath breaking apart against my jaw, that gasp, that specific gasp, the one I have not heard in five years and could pick out of a stadium.

"Cade—" she breathes in the memory, and I'm gone.

I free myself and wrap a fist around the ache of it, and the salt-and-caramel of my own scent floods the little room, my Alpha half answering a woman who isn't here and hasn't been for years.

She sinks onto me right there, raw and unhurried, our bodies rocking together in a series of lazy, perfect waves.

It’s not frantic, not even a little bit. It’s the kind of sex people write songs about, deep and slow and so good it’s almost embarrassing to admit you ever fucked anyone else. Her hands are in my hair, then scraping down my back, then planting on my chest as she rides me with the confidence of someone who knows exactly what she does to me, what she’s always done.

The shift of her hips, the flex of her thighs, the tiny, involuntary shake in her knee when she’s close—every piece of it is scored into my bones. She leans in, mouth hot against myear, and says, “Don’t you dare come until I tell you,” and I nearly lose it then and there.

She’s a little mean when she wants to be, my Apricot.

Even in memory, she grins at me with that wicked, dimpled smirk and rolls her hips slow enough to be torture, drawing out the moment like we had all the time in the world—because that night, we really thought we did.

The string lights overhead blink and sway with the movement, and her scent—apricot, citrus, that faint hint of rum—spikes hard and sweet every time she rocks forward, taking me deeper.

She’s panting, flushed, a sheen of sweat at her collarbone, and when I palm her ass to pull her in closer, she laughs low and breathes,

“Greedy.”

I am. Always have been.

When she tips her head back, nails biting into my shoulder, I see the whole shape of her face in the warm lamplight—the high color in her cheeks, her mouth swollen and parted, the way her eyes flutter half-shut when she’s about to fall apart.

I remember thinking, This is it.

This is what forever feels like.

I grab the back of her head and kiss her as she tilts over the edge, her body clenching so tight and exquisite around me I have to grit my teeth not to come before she’s done.