What I felt for him was always there, but he felt so…new in my life.
It was almost impossible to put into words, and perhaps the experience was too great to sum up in mere sentences. It would be disrespectful to even try. However, all I could attest to was that the one word,mine,seemed to be the only word close enough to how it felt. Rarely did anything belong to us on this earth.
All was temporary.
A fleeting moment in history.
Not him and I.
We wereit.
Even after death, I felt in my soul we would be together.
An eternal flame.
The same one existing inside of me—our direct link to always.
Our baby.
Perhaps we came into this world alone, but there was something inside each of us that had a prescheduled time, was meant to be, and once we found it, it was ours until after our dying breath.
“Annie.”
My eyes flew up. I had been staring at myself in the mirror, my hands running along the cool stone, but I was not seeing myself or what I was doing in that moment. I had been lost to…whatever this was between us.
My husband lifted a suitcase. “Your things.” He cleared his throat. “I’ve never in my life rushed for anyone. Yeah, I raced. I raced toward the unknown, because an instinctual part of me knew who was waiting for me. You. But I’ve never run to grab a fucking suitcase before. Fuck me sideways.” He stood straighter, and for him, it almost seemed as if he was fidgeting—standing straighter, then leaning against the doorframe, then crossing his arms, then standing straighter again.
I had to hide my grin.
“I couldn’t fucking stand to be apart from you,” he finished with. “In the same house.”
I nodded. “Same.”
Our eyes connected, and in a breath, we were going for each other. I wrapped my arms around him, and he lifted me up.
“I fucking missed you so much,” he said.
“Me too.” I kissed his lips over and over.
“Fucking insanity,” he said around more kisses.
“Totally nuts,” I said, but I did not even care that he was moving us toward the bed again. I would have beat his ass if he would not have taken this path.
We had not done it in the light here. I wanted to explore his body in it. Not only in the mysterious lines the dark gave him for me to follow. I wanted to memorize every inch of his skin in the sunlight, as he always did to me, as well.
He chuckled against my lips. “The light, ah?”
“I said that out loud?”
He set me down on the bed, and I bounced. All humor was gone from his face. “Let’s see what else I can get my wild woman to say before the day’s over, ah?” He came for me.
I did not fight.
I surrendered to him—again and again and again.
We had been in Fiji for a month.
Rain.
