“Shut up. You’re worth more than a Yelp review. You’re more like Zagat’s.” I hold his waist in my hands and squeeze. “Seriously, look how lean you’re getting.” Then, I put my palms on his chest. “And these pecs!” I throw my arms around his neck and tightly hold him. “God, my best friend is gorgeous.”
“Blythe…stop…” Sabin starts. It’s unlike him to look embarrassed, but he does now.
“Mmm?”
“Blythe, don’t…” He sets his hands under my arms and eases me back. “It’s just…you can’t…”
I look up and see that his face has a more serious expression now. “What? What is it?”
He half-smiles and tucks a stray hair behind my ear, but he doesn’t say anything.
“Sabe, what is it?”
Suddenly, he twirls me around and then yells, “You can’t stop me from doing a cannonball!” Then, he lets me go and leaps from the end of the dock, tucking his knees into his chest, before pounding into the water.
Just because he’s dropped some pounds doesn’t mean that he’s a small guy by any means, and the splash he makes when he crashes through the water’s surface soaks me again.
My dog, Jonah, barks sharply, and I turn to see him running, soon passing me, before flying off the dock to reach Sabin.
Even though I’m not a fan of the freezing water, I still do laps every few days. Jonah though has logged more hours swimming than I have. That’s mostly because Sabin spends at least an hour a day playing with him, throwing a tennis ball into the water over and over for Jonah to retrieve. There’s nothing my German shepherd loves more than swimming with Sabin, and it tires Jonah out almost as much as going with me on my runs.
I hold a hand up to my eyes and watch as Jonah paddles to reach Sabin, who is now floating on his back while lazily kicking his feet and sweeping his hands through the water, letting the gentle current determine his drift.
A voice carries my way. “With a little imagination, that white bathing suit is practically see-through.”
I laugh. “It is not.” I pivot on my feet and try not to look as stupidly in love as I feel. I’m sure I’m failing, but I’m all right with that.
Chris walks slowly down the steps from the house to the beach area. Part of me wants to rush to meet him, and the other part wants to just watch him. It doesn’t matter that we live together, that I’m with him every single day. I have the same strong reaction, the same unyielding surge of love that rips through me, every time I see him.
I don’t feel the cold on my skin that should be amplified by the breeze. All I can feel now is that Christopher Shepherd is my home and my heart.
The late-afternoon sun hits his face, and even the sound of Jonah’s barking and Sabin’s whooping can’t distract me. Chris is even tanner than Sabin, and the loose white button-down he’s wearing with jeans is damn hot. His hands are tucked into his pockets as he looks at me almost shyly.
Most of the time, he exudes nothing but confidence. Chris is entitled to any self-assuredness and sense of capability he has. I adore that about him, and I rely on it. Still, even after all our time together, Chris has moments where his stance when he’s around me is almost nervous, hesitant. There’s a questioning air in his approach, as if he needs to check that I’m still completely engulfed in him.
The answer is always yes.
The few seconds of insecurity he can’t control are not really about me. They’re flashes of his history, which did nothing to breed trust. In Chris’s blip of tentativeness, I see a little boy who is alone, who has made himself responsible for shielding his siblings from a sickly abusive father, and who is desperately frightened that he might fail. A boy who fears he might not be accepted and loved because he is not worthy of anything but savage outrage and psychotic delusions.
I am still trying to glue together the broken pieces of this person I love. He manages his tortured side with remarkable skill, but even Chris, with his endless supply of strength and clarity, could not survive all that he did without scars.
And the scars are many, and they are deep.
Together though, we are overcoming both his past and mine.
When he is a few yards away from me, I cannot stop myself from walking quickly into his arms. I put my hands on his face, run a finger over his lips, and study him as though we’d been apart for months, not hours.
He smiles at me with curiosity. “You okay?”
I nod slowly and don’t take my eyes from his. I am flooded again with the rush of what the entirety ofusfeels like, what it means for us to be together. “We’re doing it, aren’t we?”
Because he understands me more intuitively than anyone else could, he nods back. “Yes, Blythe, we’re kicking heartbreak’s ass.”
The power in this truth brings my lips to his, and I kiss the love of my life with more meaning and connectedness than I was ready for. My eyes sting a bit, and my chest tightens with emotion. The taste of his mouth and the feel of his hold as he keeps me close will, without fail, shut down the rest of the world, so I let myself disappear into him.
Then, Chris slows our kiss, dipping me in his arms until my head is hanging upside down.
He strokes a hand down my front and smiles. “Like I said, practically see-through…”
