“What is it with you and biting me?” I asked, smiling right back.
“You’re the sweetest thing in the whole world,” Ryder said. “How could I not want a taste?”
I watched wide-eyed as he swiped his thumb through the mess on my stomach and then licked it clean. If I hadn’t just come I would’ve been dizzyingly hard in an instant.
There was no way I could resist the urge to kiss him after that, chasing the taste on his tongue. Committing the two of us, together, to memory.
I love you, I thought as Ryder broke off.
“I love you,” Ryder murmured, as though he’d licked the words out of my mouth.
And then he stiffened, eyes widening like a startled deer’s.
I got it. He was leaving tomorrow, hehadto leave tomorrow. I’d hesitated to say anything because I didn’t want to hurt him, and it wasn’t hard to guess that he was thinking the same thing.
“Shh,” I murmured as he took a breath to say something else. To apologize, I thought.
I didn’t want to hear him apologize for that. I didn’t want Ryder to ever think he had anything to apologize to me for.
“It’s okay,” I said, kissing him to keep his mouth occupied. “No regrets. No regrets.”
Ryder let me coax him into kiss after kiss until the tension eased out of him again, until he was pliant and loose and just verging on a little demanding. I could never have gotten enough of him like this, sated and happy, but I wanted to store up as much of it as I could.
I love you, I thought again.I love you, I love you, I love you.
But I’d promised him I’d let go after this one last day, and I would. He had his life to live. We’d had this perfect little slice of time together.
It’d have to be enough.
23
Ryder
I almost askedWard to come with me.
I almost asked him to hop on a plane right now and move to LA. We’d get an apartment and I’d help him find work making beautiful cabinets for rich people, or he didn’t have to work if he didn’t want to. And I’d come back to him every night.
And sometimes I’d come back at three in the morning and wake him without meaning to.
Sometimes I’d be out of town, shooting on location, maybe for weeks or months at a time.
He’d be a fifteen-hour drive away from his dad, and his cabin, and Liz and Maisie and Sandy and Charlie. Away from Seth and all the rest of Otter Bay.
Miles and miles away from home.
I’d be the only person he knew and I’d be gone most of the time.
And I knew that if I asked, if I told him I wanted him to come with me, that he’d do it. Because it was me asking. Because there was nothing he wouldn’t do for me, even all of that.
So I didn’t ask.
Ward had done enough a hundred times over for me. I couldn’t ask him for more.
“One more kiss?” I asked instead. “For luck, or whatever.”
There were tears shining in Ward’s eyes as he reached out to me, and I wanted to whispercome with meinto his mouth when our lips touched, but I didn’t.
He deserved better than the life I had to offer him. He deserved for me to be a little selfless, just once, like he always was.
