Page 54 of Not a Strong Enough Word

“You’re taking me so well, Scarlett.” I tell her as I thrust inside her. “You are so beautiful like this.” Another thrust. “So perfect.” Another. With each movement, she writhes beneath me, and her walls start to clench around my cock.

“I need more,” she says. “Harder.”

Before she knows what’s happening, I pull out, stand at the edge of the bed, and grab her ankles to drag her toward me. In one movement, I’m back inside her, deeper this time, using the added leverage to go harder like she asked.

“You can give me one more, Scarlett,” I encourage her as I put more pressure on her clit. “I know you can.”

“Mm-hmm,” she moans again, biting her lip. “Almost.”

“Come apart for me,” I demand as I pump myself in and out of her. After a few more thrusts, she does, her powerful orgasm pulling me right over the edge with her.

We hold each other, sweaty and intertwined, until our breathing returns to normal. I pull out of her and go to dispose of the condom. When I get back to the bedroom, her lips stretch into a brilliant smile.

“Should we see if my oven works?” she teases. “I’m starving.”

“We worked up quite an appetite,” I agree.

She giggles as she scrambles off the bed to put on her underwear and an oversized shirt. She rummages around in a drawer and tosses me a rumpled T-shirt. When I unroll it, I realize it’s one of mine.

“You kept this?” I ask, my voice strangled with sudden emotion.

Scarlett bites her lip. “You got a tattoo. I kept a shirt.” She shrugs, but I can tell from the jerkiness of the movement that her emotion matches mine underneath her words.

“Mine’s more permanent, I guess.” I mimic her lighthearted tone as best I can.

Laughing softly, she nods. “You win.”

She passes by me and into the kitchen to rummage through cabinets for baking sheets and plates. We warm the food and spread out a blanket on the ground, enjoying a tapas picnic in her living room in our underwear.

In between kisses and shared bites of food, I can’t help but think she’s right. I’ve been able to work on a book that has woken me all the way up, and Scarlett is back in my life in the way I’ve always wanted her to be.

I have won.

Chapter 25

Scarlett

For two people for whom words are our lives, we don’t share many over the next few days. Instead, we spend our time exploring each other’s bodies, savoring all the ways we still fit together.

During the day, Ryan goes to work. Every morning, he tells me he wishes he could stay with me, but he wouldn’t get anything done. There are a few projects in addition to mine that need his attention, and he’s been distracted.

When he’s gone, I write. And while I still have trouble letting go of the work each night, Ryan interrupts, and the pull of his touch is enough to make me close the computer and focus on other things like eating, bathing, laughing, making love.

There’s a voice in the back of my mind that says Ryan used to be enough to keep me grounded before, too, and look how that went. But it’s still small enough that I can generally ignore it. Besides, last time it wasn’t the writing that did me in. It was all the extras—publicity tours, endless book signings, JMP’s constant need for more and more and more. And then the ultimate knowledge that my life could never look the way I truly wanted it to: slower moments, quiet mornings, maybe even a family…

That’s not going to happen this time. Trina made sure of it.

Different book. Different Scarlett. Different outcome.

Ryan has been very careful not to ask me about my breakdown. There have been a few times when he’s skirted around the issue but stopped himself short of asking. For some reason, he seems reluctant to talk about it. I’m not entirely sure if it’s because he’s worried that asking will remind me why I left in the first place or if it’s because he truly doesn’t want to know. There are so many things I want to tell him, but I decide to let him take the lead. If he keeps changing the subject before asking, he has his reasons. I’ll respect those boundaries. Anything he wants to know, I’ll disclose. But for now, at least, I want to give us a chance to look forward instead of back. It’s what he seems to need from me, and I want to make him happy.

One night as we’re lying face-to-face in his bed, sated but still unable to take our hands off each other, Ryan skates his fingers lightly over the curve of my hip. He’s taken to touching me in small ways like this, ways that are full of both tenderness and awe, as if he can’t believe I’m here with him.

“Five years.” He says it like a prayer, like he’s lifting his gratitude that we came back to each other up into the universe. It has been such a long time and also no time at all.

“Five years,” I whisper back, hoping that if I add my prayer to his, it’ll mean something more.

“What did you do all that time?”