Wes looked at her a long moment before slowly exhaling. “There’s never been anyone like you.” The words came out quieter than he intended, rougher. “Not once. Not even close. I tried. I want you to know that. I didn’t spend ten years waiting around. I genuinely tried to move on.”
“I know.”
“But you were always—” He stopped and looked at the initials again. “You were always just there. In the back of everything.”
Rowan’s eyes were bright now. She blinked once and looked away briefly before coming back.
“I don’t know what this looks like,” she said, pointing between herself and him. “Practically speaking. You’re in Baltimore. I’m—I don’t even know where I am right now.” A breath of a laugh. “My life in LA is a disaster.”
“We don’t have to figure that out tonight.”
“No.” She looked up at him. “We don’t.”
He reached out and tucked a strand of hair back from her face, his hand resting against her cheek. “Tonight, we’re just here.”
She leaned into his hand the smallest amount. “Wes?”
“Yeah.”
“Stop talking.”
He smiled.
Then he kissed her.
Rowan had forgotten what kissing Wes felt like.
Not the fact of it—she’d carried the memory of kissing Wes Bennett for ten years. She’d thought about it more than she’d ever admitted to anyone, including herself.
But the actual feeling of it.
Thatshe’d forgotten.
The kiss was gentle at first—unhurried, the way Wes did everything, giving her time to change her mind if she wanted to.
She didn’t want to.
She leaned into it instead, her hand finding the front of his jacket.
As the kiss deepened, something that had been wound tight inside her chest for longer than she could honestly account for finally, finally released.
When they separated, neither of them moved very far.
Wes’s forehead came to rest against hers, and they stood like that beneath the old oak with the evening going dark around them and the initials carved into the bark just above their heads.
W.B. + R.K.
A seventeen-year-old boy with a pocketknife and sweating palms, apparently.
She smiled at the thought.
“What?” Wes murmured.
“You were nervous.” She pulled back just enough to look at him. “This whole time I thought that first kiss was effortless for you.”
“Nothing about you has ever been effortless.”
She tilted her head. “Is that a complaint?”
