Page 94 of Left In The Dark

“I thought . . . I thought that was normal. I stopped hoping for it, and then you showed me that wasn’t true. It’s why I didn’t stop you the first time you gave me a bath. I wanted to see if it could happen again and it did. Every time.”

“I’ll make sure it always does too. No matter how long it takes. I’ll make you feel good before I allow myself to from here on out.”

His eyes latch onto mine and he brushes his thumb over my cheek. “So you really meant it when you said you weren’t going to let me go?”

“I did. I do.” I kiss the inside of his palm.

“You really want me?”

“More than anything,” I say.

“I want you too.”

“Who do you want?” I need to hear him say that and my name in the same sentence.

“I want you, Logan. And . . . and . . . I was willing to do whatever it took to stay and that still scares me. Something has to be wrong with me, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe a little, but so many people I know who think they’re right have it way worse than you, and what good has that done them?”

He threads his fingers between mine. “You mean people like Hayden?”

“Yes. He was the one shacking up with my dad all this time. I . . . I had a plan for him. I was going to finally ruin him so bad that he wouldn’t be able to get his way out of it.”

“And what happened?” He studies my expression.

“I chose you first.”

His lips tilt and he pulls me in for a kiss. We don’t pull away for a long time, and when we do, I make us dinner, sitting him in the chair in the living room so we can talk about more music and whatever else comes to mind. We watch movies on the couch, and I lay him in a comfortable position, placing his head in my lap. And just like that we’re closer to having what we once almost got to. What I thought we’d both ruined.

You know what they say? If it feels too good to be true, then it probably is.

He laughs at something on TV, humming sweetly when I stroke my fingers through his hair, and I no longer care what it took to get back here. I only care that we reached this point again and that we’ll never going backward.

It’s going to be hard, but I don’t care what it takes as long as there’s always me and him. There’s a chance it could all still be true and Blake held onto it for so long as he waited for me to return to that barn every day, so I can hold onto it for him now.

My mom comes by every other week to grab more of her stuff and to cook me some of her famous meals. I enjoy her visits but I hate having to hide Blake every time we have one. I haven’t put him back in the barn, and he’s finally getting used to not having a cuff on his ankle. I eventually have to find a way to tell her about him. We’ve talked about me taking him to his car after he’s mostly healed and him pretending to have left town for work.

We went over different things he could say. That he had a bad fall while on set or that he was in a bad wreck. We’ve run through so many different scenarios, finally landing on one. Blake is excited to get out of the house again and won’t stop talking about going to the bowling alley with me. He has so many plans for us and all the places he wants me to take him.

“I miss dancing,” he says, setting his hot cocoa down.

“I hate dancing.” I lean back in my chair, looking at the bare trees in the backyard.

“Really?”

“Yeah, but I’m also terrible at it,” I say between chuckles.

He smiles, wiggling his back against the metal patio chair. We’ve been hanging out in the back yard on my days off and sometimes after I get home from work before dinner. “I can teach you,” he says.

“Not sure that will change much.”

“I don’t know. I believe anything is possible at this point.” He grins, laying his hand over mine. “If this thing between us is, then anything is.”

“There’s still time for there not to be.”

His posture stiffens. “Because you might change your mind?”

“No.” I lightly squeeze his hand. “Because you might change yours.”