I'm falling in love with Drake Moses.
No. That's not right. I've already fallen. I fell somewhere between the library kiss and the bathtub and tonight, somewhere in the thousand small moments Persia told me to look for. I fell, and I didn't even notice until I was already at the bottom.
But for the first time, falling doesn't feel like losing control.
It feels like coming home.
Eighteen
Drake
She falls asleep against me, her breath soft and even against my chest.
I hold her in the darkness and watch the city lights paint patterns across the ceiling. Chicago glitters beyond the windows, indifferent to the earthquake that just rocked my entire world. Millions of people are out there living their lives, making their choices, fighting their battles. None of them know that Drake Moses has just been brought to his knees by a woman with brown eyes and a stubborn heart.
I love her.
The realization doesn't crash over me. It settles, quiet and certain. I don’t mean to get poetic here, but fuck. It feels like snow falling on a winter night. I love her. I've loved her for longer than I'm willing to admit, even to myself. Three years of watching from a distance. Three years of wanting what I couldn't have. I should have stepped in the second my brother dumped her, but I didn’t.
That was my one mistake. I could have had her sooner. I should have never assumed she would never want to see another Moses in her life.
That is a mistake I won’t make again.
But now she's here. In my bed. In my arms. She gave me her body, her trust, the part of herself she'd protected from everyone else. I’m the luckiest man alive. Sappy as that shit sounds, I am.
I press a kiss to her hair and breathe in the scent of her skin. My chest aches with a tenderness I don't recognize in myself. My throat tightens around words I'm not ready to speak aloud.
To lose her now would be the end of me.
Not a dramatic end. Not a bullet or a blade or any of the violent conclusions I've imagined for myself over the years. Something quieter. Something worse. The slow hollowing out of a man who finally found what he was looking for, only to have it slip through his fingers.
Shit. I never thought a broken heart would be what ends me, but if something happened to her, I would die.
I can't let that happen. I won't.
But even as I hold her closer, guilt coils in my stomach like a snake waiting to strike. My world is poisonous to the soft sweetness of a woman like her.
She thinks I’ve only wanted her since the wish. I wonder what she would think if I ever told her I've wanted her for three years. That I watched her while she dated my brother. Ached for her in silence while Jonah paraded her at family dinners and treated her like shit. I claimed her wish not just because I needed anheir, but because I'd been waiting for any excuse to make her mine.
She deserves to know. She deserves the truth about who I am and how long I've wanted her.
But not tonight. Tonight she's peaceful. Tonight she's happy. Tonight she chose me without knowing the full weight of what that choice means.
Tomorrow. I'll tell her tomorrow.
The lie tastes bitter on my tongue, but I swallow it down and pull her closer.
We've crossed the line. There's no going back.
Now comes the hard part for me, and that is keeping her.
And somehow, eventually, finding the courage to tell her the truth before someone else does.
Nineteen
Drake
One week passes in a blur of her.
