“I’m sorry about your neck.”
“No, you’re not,” he laughs. “And neither am I.”
It’s quiet, aside from our heavy pants, for a long moment. I run my fingers over his skin in a soothing motion, and his pillows become stained red.
Finally, after a considerable amount of time, he tilts his head back to look up at me.
“I think I’d like to see that corkboard again,”he says softly.
I study his face—his big hazel eyes and the set of his jaw. The hot ache in my chest grows further at the sight of him, and I’m almost grateful to Bennett, who forced him on that ride. For being such an idiot, he sure did help me out.
“Of course," I promise.
Deep inside of myself, I can feel that we are moving rapidly toward a conclusion. And that conclusion will be Elijah accepting our past together, and I will finally have him. I know it with everything in me.
All that’s left now is to teach him what it is that I already know.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Rowan
Elijah steps through the front threshold as if he’s anticipating an ambush. Not that I can blame him—the last time he walked into this house, his life was turned upside down.
He follows me silently to my bedroom, and upon entering, his eyes immediately seek out the corkboard still hanging ominously on the wall. Only now it is completely empty.
“What?” he whispers, taking a step toward it as if he intends to run his fingertips over it just to double-check.
I should be comforting him. I should be explaining and maybe even panicking a bit. But instead, I’m watching his every move with my brain turned completely to mush.
We may have gotten up, showered, and driven the thirty minutes to my house, but my brain is still right there in Elijah’s bedroom. In my mind’s eye, he’s still sprawled beneath me while he begs me to dig my teeth even further beneath his skin.
“Where did it all go?” he asks directly this time, turning to face me where I stand in the doorway.
“Oh,” I start, shaking my head to rid the horny memories of their place in my brain. “I may have gotten upset and torn it all down. But I still have it all.” I point past him to where the stack of photos and notebook paper sits on my dresser.
Some of the photos are wrinkled, and a few of the papers are ripped at the edges, but other than that, they are in good shape.
Elijah grabs the stack and sits on the foot of my bed. His hands shake slightly as he stares at the top photo—one of him walking across the grass in the middle of the town square.
He eyes it for a moment before he looks back at me.“So… you followed me around and took photos? All because you missed me?”
I sigh, searching for the right words. I want to be honest with him; I’m tired of the lies and the misguidance.
“Yeah, I missed you. But the photos were more of a sense of… ownership, maybe? I’m not quite sure. I wanted to see what you were doing, I wanted to capture different versions of you, and I needed to be near you. And it didn’t feel wrong because in my mind, knowing what I know and what we used to be, you’re already mine. I believed—still believe—that if I had asked you, you would have said yes anyway.”
“So why didn’t you?” he deadpans. “Ask, I mean.”
“Well, that takes away half the fun,” I murmur. And surprisingly, Elijah laughs.
“Such a weirdo.”
He continues to look through the top few photos, most likely trying to catalog when they were taken, before he comes acrossthe first paper. It’s covered in writing front to back and retells the memory of Benjamin drunk and night swimming.
He was just in his briefs and two seconds from ripping my own underwear from my body. I don’t recall much from the dream, other than his eyes and his insistent hands—the way he looked at me as if I was saving him and condemning him in the same breath.
Elijah reads the paper twice before moving to the next. I move to stand over him, reading a few lines and finding it to be one he had read the first time he found the corkboard:
“Button, tell me. Tell me you’re in love with me too; that all this time we’ve been coming back to each other over and over wasn’t just because I can’t live without you, but you can’t live withoutme.”
