No.
Daphne would wait and wait and wait until April responded with her fuckingheart. And April’s heart already knew what it wanted. It wasn’t easy. Wasn’t logical at all. But it was the safest April had felt in a long time. A real, bone-deep kind of security she knew only came from choosing herself.
Choosing her own strange heart.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay?” Daphne asked, but a smile started to curve her mouth.
“You and me, Love,” April said, her heart beating rapidly behind her ribs. “Whatever that means.”
Daphne grinned, then grabbed April’s arms and hauled her ontop of her, April’s naked hips straddling her thighs. Daphne trailed her fingers over April’s shoulders, across her collarbones to her neck until she was cradling April’s face.
“That’sMs.Love,” Daphne said, then pulled her down for a kiss that soon turned heated again.
And April let it.
She let herself fall, let herself want, let herself feel. And two hours later, when she and Daphne lay tangled together in the sheets, sated and sleepy, she never even considered sneaking away to her own bed.
She was safe and happy right where she was.
“By the way,” April said, her eyelids growing heavier by the second, “my favorite color isn’t actually black.”
“No?” Daphne replied, her voice muzzy. She pressed her nose to April’s neck. “What is it, then?”
“It’s this,” April said, tugging on the ends of Daphne’s lavender hair.
She felt Daphne smile against her skin, her breath warm and her arms tightening around April’s waist as they both drifted off to sleep.
Chapter
Twenty-Two
The next severalweeks for Daphne passed in a blur of painting, teaching, and April Evans.
When they weren’t working on their individual pieces for the Devon, she and April had spent every other moment together. They had slow and sleepy sex almost every morning, followed by wild and mind-altering sex nearly every night, and everything in between. April and Sasha had taken Daphne cliff diving (she’d screamed the entire way down), to a drag show in Concord (and she now needed to watch every single season ofRuPaul’s Drag Race), and they’d watched a dozen raunchy nineties movies Daphne had never been allowed to see growing up, likeDazed and Confused,Empire Records, andDon’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead.
They’d also talked late into the night.
Lying naked in one of their beds, sheets tangled around their waists, facing each other with their foreheads nearly touching. It was quiet and soft and intimate, and each night Daphne fell asleep absolutely positive she’d wake up in the morning to find it had all been a dream. But every day, she woke up with April by her side, her sleepy sounds as she stretched and yawned, her gorgeous, inked body under Daphne’s fingertips.
Real.
And getting realer by the second.
Now, their Devon deadline was two days away—Nicola had requested a showing on the very morning of Ramona and Dylan’s wedding, and with that showing came a decision, and with that decision came…
What?
Daphne sat on a stool in the art studio in the early evening of her twenty-sixth birthday, alone, blinking into space as she pictured it.
Pictured herself.
A whole life spreading out in London. She saw herself on the rain-soaked streets, soft clouds above. She could see herself rushing to a gallery opening, working on new pieces in some loft she rented, going to parties where Nicola treated her likesomeone, introducing her to other artists and critics.
It was all right there, a life she wanted. A life she could see. But then she thought of April, tried to seewhereandhowandwhenbeyond Nicola’s decision in two days, and—
Her throat went thick, her mind a muddled wash of color, like looking at a painting that had been left in the rain.
