“You weren’t there when I woke up,” I remind him.
“I didn’t leave … I mean, yes, I left, but I had a call from Annalise. A representative from one of my sponsors arrived early to talk about renewing my contract. He was in town for a short while. It was only supposed to be a fifteen-minute meeting. But by the time I got back to the room, you were gone.”
“Why didn’t you leave a note? Or wake me up to tell me where you were going?”
Travis’ frown deepens as he runs his hand over the back of his head. “I should’ve,” he answers. “The night we shared was …” He sighs. “Unbelievable. But back then, my head was still full of work. I took a picture of you right before I left the room.”
He snorts a laugh and pulls out his phone.
I lean over.
“Is that … is that me?” It’s a silly question, since I can see my face plain as day, sleeping away in the bed Travis and I shared that night. “Why do you have this?”
He doesn’t answer the question right away because he’s staring at the image in his phone.
“I didn’t even think about it when I took the picture. You just looked so …” He shrugs. “I pulled out my phone and snapped the photo. I never deleted it because I couldn’t. Even before I saw you again in New York, I wanted to hold on to your memory for as long as I could.”
I sniffle.
“Are you crying?”
I wipe away my tears and rise to my feet so quickly, I come close to toppling over.
“Alyssia, be caref—” he tries to say as he steadies me, but I crush my mouth to his.
“Take me home,” I demand against his lips.
“Baby,we’re still in the hallway,” Travis pants against my lips the moment my hand sinks into his tuxedo bottoms.
He struggles to insert the key into the door. After a few seconds of fumbling, we spill inside of the door, Travis slams and locks it behind as I begin stripping him out of his tux jacket.
My fingers shake with all of the sensations running through me, making me fumble at unbuttoning his shirt. Travis takes care of that by ripping his cummerbund and shirt completely off before spinning me around so that my back faces his front.
He finds the zipper of my dress and begins slowly unzipping it, following it with kisses down my spine. Gooseflesh rises allover my skin, and I throw my head back, releasing a heavy, shuddering breath.
The only things running through my mind are his words from earlier.
That picture of me in his phone that he’s carried around for the past eight months. Even when he thought he’d never see me again.
When my dress pools at my feet, I spin to face him again. I pull him by the shoulders into me to stare into his eyes, which now are almost forest green.
I love you.
Those three words penetrate my mind, spinning around and around.
Yet, I hold onto them.
“I know,” he says, cupping the back of my head. “I know, baby.”
Travis collapses his mouth over mine, kissing at the same time he walks me through our apartment to our bedroom.
Before my back hits the bed, Travis adjusts a couple of the pillows underneath me so that I’m able to comfortably lay back while he holds my legs in the tabletop position.
He kisses a pathway down the inside of my right leg before hooking his hands in the waistband of my pantyhose and panties. Travis doesn’t remove them all of the way, since my sandals are still on my feet.
“I wanted to see what these would look like over my shoulders,” he says, then looks over at the full-length mirror on the wall.
In this position we can see our whole bodies in the mirror.
