For the first time, it was standing beside hope.
“Kiss me,” she whispered, fingers digging into my shirt and pulling me closer. “Please, Shane. Kiss me. I can’t think about anything else. I just… want you. Your touch. Your warmth. Your voice. Everything about you. Let me be with you, even if just for tonight. We can live in reality tomorrow. We can fight and…God, I don’t know, put everything on the line to try to find our way out of this. But tonight, please, just… hold me. Kiss me.” She wet her lips, the next words even softer. “Touch me.”
My hands were in her hair without hesitation, threading through silk and skin as I pulled her into me and covered her mouth with mine. The kiss was slow for exactly half a second before it wasn’t, before weeks of restraint and years of history collapsed between us. She made a soft, wrecked sound against my lips, and it went straight to my spine.
I shifted, guiding her onto my lap, her knees bracketing my thighs as she melted into me like she’d been built to fit there. Her hands slid up my chest, her body pressing closer as I kissed her again, deeper this time, slower and more deliberate.
“It’s not just tonight,” I breathed against her mouth, her forehead resting against mine as our breaths tangled. “It’s me and you again, Ari. It’s always been us.”
Her eyes shone as she nodded, her hands fisting in my shirt like she was anchoring herself to the truth of it. “It’s always been us,” she echoed.
The music still played softly behind us, The Fray humming through the room, but the world had narrowed to the space between our bodies and the choice we were making.
It was reckless.
It was forbidden.
It was everything I’d spent years convincing myself I could live without, only to have the brittleness of that lie break the moment I saw her again.
Years, I’d yearned to touch her. Decades, I’d longed for one more night, one more chance.
And here it was.
I kissed her again, slow and unhurried this time, like I had all the time in the world, like I wouldn’t have to somehow sneak her back home tonight and stomach the fact that she had to stay put in that house with that piece of shit man — at least for now, until our plan played out.
For a moment of blissful ignorance, I pretended like everything was already okay, that we didn’t have anything to lose.
And I knew, without a shred of doubt, that neither of us was turning back now.
Same. Same. New.
Ariana
Present
I didn’t know if it was hope or desperation, but whatever it was encompassed us like a storm.
Shane’s hands on my hips were a crack of lightning. His moans against my throat were a pained roll of thunder. His mouth on mine was a frantic whip of wind. I felt his heart pounding through his chest and right into mine like the steady pelting of rain. I held fast to him like a shoreline bracing for landfall.
It was wrong. It was so, so wrong. I was married to another man. That man was Shane’s boss.
But no amount of common sense or logic could stop me now.
Because in the end, it wasright— me and him, he and I, this,us. We were starlight and space, water and air, ink and paper.
Strong on our own, unstoppable together.
Drawn into each other’s gravity.
Unable to exist the same way apart.
We weren’t whole without the other.
And some things, no matter how forbidden, are simply inevitable.
It was a symphony of sounds as Shane hauled me into his arms and carried me through his house to his bedroom. It waskisses and sighs, moans and pants, whimpers and whispered promises. The balance was somewhere between frenzied and tranquil, like we weren’t sure if we should rush and seize this very moment before it slipped away, or if we had the time to savor every touch.
It was a wild love, and we held fast to the reins, determined to hold on.
