“Okay, Captain One-up.” His snarky comeback made me smile.
Dropping the clothes in a heap, I tugged the boxers free from his pants and handed them over. Once those were on, I handed him a shirt.
Seeing the fabric, he glanced up. “That’s yours.”
“Yours was on the floor.”
“So?”
“So you can wear mine.”
The dimple I fiercely loved indented his cheek, somehow making his blue eyes sparkle more. “You just want to be all over me.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “You got a problem with that?”
He swiped the shirt and tugged it over his head. “Does it look like I have a problem with it?”
“It looks like you can’t see,” I teased, grabbing my comb to tackle the damp, wild mane.
After smoothing out the front, I gently nudged him around to tame the rest. Comfortable silence blanketed the room, the only sound an occasional drip from the shower.
Finished, I set aside the comb and wrapped around him from behind, rubbing my cheek against the side of his face.
Forever a slave to this man’s scruff.
“You gonna tell me?” I asked.
An exhale moved through him, and he reached into his jeans to pull out his phone. After a few taps, he held it up so I could look at the illuminated photo.
The image was a punch to my midsection, momentarily robbing me of breath. A wave of love rolled through me, and I hugged Drew a little tighter.
Travis sat smiling behind the wheel of the Fastback, the morning sun streaming through the windshield igniting a flame of blue in his wind-whipped, coal-black hair. His eyes, just as dark as his hair, sparked with mischief. He looked weightless in that frozen moment. Free.
Trav was a lot of things. A good son and protective brother. He was smart, stubborn, fiercely loyal, and tended to be impulsive. There wasn’t a single second of any day that I wasn’t proud to be his dad.
But something he wasn’t—at least not often—was free. The first five years of his life marked him. An unerasable tattoo on part of his core personality. And yeah, maybe like ink, it would fade with time, but it would always be permanent.
Sometimes it made me angry, knowing it didn’t matter we’d had him for three times the amount of time his birth mother had, that we loved him infinitely more, but what she’d done would be ingrained in him forever.
It taught me that some scars can’t be loved away. That truly loving someone meant loving the dark parts of them and understanding that sometimes no amount of light would ever penetrate that darkness.
And that I didn’t need to erase that darkness but instead love it too.
“Mm,” I hummed, still looking at the photo. “He’s just like you. Happiest behind the wheel.”
Drew lifted his face in my direction. “Not true, frat boy. I’m happiest with you.”
“Sweet talker,” I accused, enjoying the way my teeth ached from the sweetness.
“It’s true.”
I closed my lips around his ear and tugged. “I know, baby.”
He fell quiet, gazing back at the photo.
“Just because he’s just like you doesn’t mean you are just like him.”
“You always know,” he whispered.
