Daph moves her red Solo cup further from her body.
She turns to me, takes my cup, and sets it aside too.
And then she cradles my face in her hands while she shifts her legs to cradle my hips, and she presses the softest kiss to my lips.
It’s athank youkiss.
Ayou see mekiss.
Aneverything has changedkiss.
Even when she deepens the kiss, when slow strokes of her hand under my shirt become frantic movements with both of us rushing through stripping each other’s clothes off—it’s different.
Deeper.
More.
Everything.
She’s my old world and my new world clashing together into therightworld.
Chaos and fun with conviction and drive.
She pushes me back onto the blanket, hovers over me, and then takes me into her hot, slick heat, and I know.
I have to change my plans.
I have to find a way to keep her.
Not because I want to make love to a woman in the moonlight.
Because I want to make love toDaphnein the moonlight.
Not because I know all the answers of who I want to be and how to get there.
Because I want her with me while I sort it out.
I want her laugh. I want her smiles. I want to pick her brain and I want her to tell me when I’m wrong and I want to bask in the exquisite joy of her enthusiasm for finding and doing what’s right.
She rides me like we’re in the final, desperate stretches headed for home, kissing me as if I’m her oxygen, and when her inner walls squeeze me and I let myself go inside of her, I feel her heartbeat as if it’s my own, feel the breath in her lungs as if it’s my own, and I know.
I am head over heels in love with Daphne Merriweather-Brown.
This is the last thing I ever expected at any point in my life, but the peace—the peace that comes as she sags against me, the last of her orgasm leaving her, mine still pulsing out of me—the peace and the happiness and the freedom—this is it.
She’s the one.
The one who’s been there my whole life without me ever knowing she was exactly what I would need.
Exactly what I’d want.
Everything.
She pants against my chest and presses a kiss to my neck. “Thank you for being you,” she whispers.
My eyes sting while I wrap my arms around her and hold her tight. “Thankyoufor being you.”
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