“All I know,” I say, “is I’ve never felt what I feel for you. Not once. Not with anyone.”
She doesn’t move. Doesn’t breathe, I don’t think.
I tip my head back toward the sky. “Before you, I had never spent a single damn moment just looking at the stars.”
Her gaze follows mine automatically. Above us, the sky stretches, black and endless, needled with light.
I huff a laugh. “I know. Horrifying. Very unlike me.”
Her fingers tighten around mine.
“I’d never wondered,” I say slowly, “what making love felt like from another person’s point of view. Never wondered if I was making her feel good, what my body felt like inside of hers, what it did for her if I moved just like that.” My voice roughens despite myself. “Never woken up in the morning with my first thought beingI need to say good morning to Revaand find out if she slept all right.”
Reva makes the smallest sound. A broken little inhale.
I look back at her. Moonlight lays itself across her face so softly it almost undoes me.
“So,” I say, “if your name being the first thing on my lips when I wake up, and the last thing on my mind before I go to sleep means I’m in love…”
I squeeze her hand.
“…then yeah. I guess I fucking love you, Reva Leigh.”
The silence afterward feels enormous. Not an empty, echoing kind of vastness, though.
Full.
Full enough that I can hear the blood moving in my ears.
Her eyes go glassy. God help me, she looks like she might cry but she’s trying to restrain herself, and that alone is enough to make me want to find whoever taught her tears were a thing to be hidden and break both his hands.
“You can’t,” she whispers, and smiles shakily like she’s making fun of herself even now. “You can’t just say things like that all…all casually.”
“I thought I was being devastatingly intense.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“Inconceivable.”
A tear slips free anyway. She wipes at it with the heel of her hand like she’s offended by its existence.
Then she laughs once, breath hitching, and says, “I’m pretty sure I love you too, andI’m so fucking mad about it!”
Everything inside me stops. I have nothing…no cleverness. No quip. No polished seduction.
Nothing. Just a clean, lethal stillness as the words hit and keep hitting.
“You what?”
She leans toward me then, one hand braced on the blanket, her hair falling forward as she bends over me with that look in her eyes—the one that always feels like an attack and a prayer at once.
“I love you too,” she says again, quieter now, like it’s forme alone, like we’re keeping this a secret from the heavens above us.
Then she kisses me. I go willingly, because this is Reva, and I’d follow her to Hell.
Her mouth is warm from the wine, a little salty from the tears she pretends she didn’t shed. I slide a hand into her hair and taste her slowly, greedily, with all the care I don’t usually bother with because suddenly I want to savor this exact second. Bottle it. Put it somewhere no one can touch.
She shifts closer on the blanket, one knee sliding against my thigh.
