Page 144 of Just One More Thing

Hank.

This dock.

The restaurant.

This town that knows every dumb thing I’ve ever done and somehow kept loving me through all of it.

Her iced coffee sweating rings on my kitchen counter. Her flip flops kicked crooked beside the door. The sound of her laughing from inside the boathouse before I even step through it.

Her.

Movement catches at the far end of the dock.

And there she is.

Like the universe heard my train of thought and decided subtlety was overrated.

Mo. She’s walking toward me.

Hank lifts his head, spots her, then hauls himself up with a dramatic grunt, deciding this is an event worth participating in, and waddles toward her.

I slide my phone into my pocket and start walking up the dock. “Hi,” I say once I’m close enough.

Her mouth curves instantly. A little shy. A little breathless. Enough to wreck a man in under a second. “Hi.”

She bends to scratch Hank’s head. “Hi, baby boy.” Hank leans against her legs as if he’s been abandoned for years instead of approximately ten minutes during a phone call. She laughs softly and scratches behind his ears while he groans in approval.

Then she straightens. And it’s just us standing there with the afternoon sun pouring across the water and a whole conversation sitting inside my head she knows nothing about.

“This is a nice surprise,” I say.

She looks up at me, fingers tightening slightly around her bkr. “I wanted to see you.”

Simple as that.

She says it like there’s no reason in the world she shouldn’t.

I step closer before I can think too hard about it. Her eyes flick down to my mouth and back up again. There’s color high in her cheeks, and I can’t tell if it’s from the heat or from me.

I hope it’s from me.

“Good,” I say.

Her brows lift slightly. “Good?”

I slide my hand around the back of her neck and pull her the rest of the way in. “I wanted to see you too.”

She exhales softly the second she hits my chest.

I kiss the top of her head and stay there for a moment, mouth against her hair.

Man. I know this shampoo. This skin. This exact shape of her against me.

Hank flops heavily across both our feet with a satisfied sigh, fully convinced he personally orchestrated this reunion.

Mo tips her head back to look at me. “Everything okay?”

I meet her eyes. Eyes that still don’t seem to understand what they do to me. “Yeah,” I say. “Everything’s okay.”