“I’m not going to tell anyone, baby, you should know that.”
“I do, I do,” I sigh. “I just… I wanted to tell you. So you’d trust me.”
“I do,” she says. “So long as you trust yourself, and you trust me enough to tell me things, I trust you too. It goes both ways, baby.”
“I’ve always trusted you, Lana.”
“Good.” She smiles. “Then take me home so we can watch a movie.”
Lana removes herself off my lap and plops herself into her seat. “Oh shit, wait!”
Lana gets out of the car and kneels out by the hood for a moment. When she stands up again, she’s holding the plastic cup of the milkshake and large shards of glass, and drops them in the trash bin.
She gets back in, wipes her hands on her jeans, then buckles her seat belt. “Okay, now we go.”
“Environmentally conscious as ever,” I tease.
Lana stretches over and kisses my jaw. “Take me home, Christian.”
Lana lets us into the house, giggling and kicking off her sandals at the door. I take off my shoes and set them beside hers, and it’s an image I wish I could save. Just a picture of her shoes and my shoes next to each other at the front door of a house we live in together. Something to say that, when I come home, I know she’ll be here. Or when she comes home, I’ll be here.
And at night, it’s the two of us. Our shoes at the door.
Lana skips toward the kitchen barefoot, and I follow behind with a silly grin on my face. She spins on her toes, arms flailing out at her sides until she tosses her arms around my neck.
“So now that this is the end of the date,” she says, “does that mean I get a goodbye kiss?”
“A goodbye kiss?”
“Yeah,” Lana bites her lip with a smile. “You didn’t give me one on our first date.”
I smile at the memory. “I wasn’t sure if you liked me yet.”
Her eyes narrow and her lips tip with amusement. “You knew. I liked you before we met that night.”
“You did?”
“I knew Luca because of Isabelle. And Isabelle knew you because of Luca. So maybe we can thank the twins for this,” she says.
I chuckle. “So you liked me, huh?”
She shrugs. “More like a crush. Didn’t think you’d like a girl like me.”
“The only kind of girl I love is you,” I whisper.
“Hmm.” She reaches up on her toes, brushing her nose against mine, then her lips brush mine. “You’re such a romantic sometimes.”
My hands holding her hips move up her curves and stop at her ribs. I love the way my fingers fit slightly into the spaces between them, the way I can sometimes feel her heart thudding against my hands.
“I really love you, Lana,” I whisper against her lips.
“I know,” she whispers. “And I really appreciate the way you’ve been showing it. I love my garden. I loved our date tonight. All the flowers and the sufficient communication. Cooking breakfast and dinner. Maybe to you, it doesn’t seem like a lot or maybe you feel you aren’t doing enough?—”
“Am I?—”
“Yes,” she says quickly. “You are. So thank you.”
“Thank you for saying that.”
