Page 100 of Edged
I squeezed his fingers and let him lead me around the dance floor again.
“I meant what I said,” he went on. “I’ve meant everything I’ve ever said to you. I would bring you here, I’d give it all up, I’d split the time…whatever you want Owen, as long as part of what you want is me.”
“We can’t split the time,” I said.
Archie’s graceful footsteps faltered, but he recovered just as quick and without any mention of the stumble. I didn’t call it out because, if I did, I would have had to admit it was the first time I’d given him an inch since the last time we’d been in the same room together.
“We can do anything we want,” he corrected.
“It’s not practical.” I rested my cheek against his shoulder, my resolve slipping with every breath. Now that Archie was with me again, it was hard to remember why I hadn’t wanted to give into him. Why I’d fought him in the first place. Had it been the entitlement and the assumptions? Or had it been an inexplicable drive to continue to punish myself for a mistake I’d made at eighteen?
Not that Archie could ever be a mistake.
The rest of it, though…
“As you so often like to remind me, I have enough money that anything can be practical,” he said.
I laughed, relaxing into his arms. The song changed from one slow dance to another, and Archie righted his grip around me and kept us moving around the outskirts of the dance floor.
“Your friends will think I’m a whore,” I said.
“My friends will think you’re in love with me,” he said.
“I don’t want to be a kept man.”
Archie made a victorious sound in the back of this throat that I ignored.
“I would keep you so hard you wouldn’t even remember what it was like to not be kept, Owen.” He brushed his lips against my temple, and I tilted my head back to look up at him.
“You know what I mean,” I warned.
“And you know whatImean.”
I didn’t have a response to that, so I returned my cheek to his shoulder and let the silence blanket over us as he continued to steer us through the rest of the song and into a third one. I would have to have a conversation with my sister later because, while I’d never been married before, I knew this many waltzy romantic songs in a row was not a part of any wedding DJ’s repertoire.
“It all feels stupid now that you’re here,” I whispered. “The past six months, sending you away, ignoring the text messages.”
“All of the spray cheese and lack of shaving,” he added.
I scoffed, glancing up at him again and raising my fingers to trace over the dark circle that hinged one of his eyes. The wrinkles around the edge of his lash line fanned out as he smiled, leaning into my touch with the slightest incline of his cheek.
“Tell me more about that.”
“Grayson brought me a whole bag of it,” Archie explained. “I think he and Flynn meant it as a joke, but once I started to actually eat it, they got worried.”
“It’s not fit for consumption, Archie, you know that.”
“You used to eat it,” he said quickly. “All the time, and when I was first in California, it was the easiest way to make my mind think of you. On the porch at your parents’ house, on that swing with our feet up and you always had that spray cheese going.”
“It was a horrible habit,” I interjected, “Just like you.”
“Some habits are harder to break than others,” he murmured, head tilting a little more to the side and his lashes falling a little more closed.
“Some are impossible,” I whispered back, leaning my head to the other side so our mouths were very nearly in alignment.
“Maybe best to stop trying then,” he said.
“Probably,” I agreed, and then Archie pressed our lips together in the softest and most tentative kiss he’d ever given me.
