He gazes into my eyes the whole time, but at this part, he takes a slow, hesitant step closer, as though he’s afraid to touch me, yet unable to resist moving closer to doing it. “I just needed you to know, Harper, that I took you seriously. I still take you seriously. And even if you never see me again after tonight . . . I always will.” He takes a deep breath. “Because I love you.”
That sentence seems to throw him off balance. He closes his eyes. “I love you, and I want to be with you, and I have never felt like this before in my life and it is fucking terrifying. But I needed you to know that.”
He opens his eyes again, a determined expression in his eye. “Okay. You can now continue to hate me if you want.”
I can’t help it. I burst out with a surprised laugh, which makes him cringe. As soon as I see that, I wince too, and take a step closer, reaching for him. He lets me rest my hands on his shoulders, our bodies inches apart now. “I don’t hate you, you idiot.” I crack a small, fragile smile. “I love you, Jack Kingston.”
He rests his forehead against mine, his relieved sigh soft against my lips. “I’m not dreaming this again, am I?” he murmurs.
My smile widens. “Not this time.”
“Good.” He presses his lips to mine, and I sink into the kiss. His hands circle my waist, lifting me a few inches from the floor as he pulls me so close, I could melt right through him. The kiss sears all the way down to my toes, to the tips of my fingers. I can feel it pulsing in the back of my throat and throbbing in my chest.
When we finally break apart, he swings me around in a circle, grinning like an idiot, and I dive right back in for another long, slow kiss.
We miss the first half of the show.
Well, not miss, exactly. We hear it. But from the moment we stumble through the curtain into the private box he reserved for us, we’re too lost in each other to actually watch. We ignore the four chairs provided and I curl up in his lap, kissing his lips, his neck, his jaw, every inch of his skin I can reach.
The music swells, the bass vibrating in my chest, and we move with it, his lips closing and parting over mine, his tongue slipping in to twine around my own. His hand slides down the length of the gown, down and down and down toward the hem just past my knees, then up and up and up until his fingers slide into me, and I gasp, and someone from the box beside us hisses at us to “be quiet,” and we both dissolve into silent laughter, until finally we give up and slip out of the show at intermission.
“You really should give them another chance though,” he murmurs in the cab home, between kissing his way down my neck. “They’re really very talented.”
“Hmmm, I’ll take your word for it tonight.” I grin and pull him into another long, breathless kiss.
The taxi driver lets us off in front of his hotel with a muttered Happy Valentine’s Day, and we stumble up to his room, punch drunk on finding each other again. We don’t even make it halfway through the door before I’m tearing at his suit coat and he’s pulling the silky dress he bought me over my head, letting it fall in a puddle on the bathroom floor as we stagger to the bed and practically fall into each other.
Jack
I never in a million years would’ve seen this coming.
I’d planned this day down to the minute we saw one another in the lobby of the Kimmel Center. After that . . . Well, I never allowed myself to think beyond that moment. Because I was sure, I was so sure, that I already knew what was coming.
I am incapable of love. Real love, I mean, the kind with the potential for marriage and babies and happily-ever-afters. I always have been. My whole family knows it; they remind me every chance they get. I had one last chance for love with Hannah, and I threw it down the toilet, so I’d already decided on my future. Just me, myself, and I (and maybe an occasional fling, because hey, I’m human).
I never saw her coming.
Even while she was here, I didn’t understand, because I’d never felt like this before. I wrote it off as sparks. Passion. A flame that burned as bright as this one could never last, I told myself.
But as the days passed and I continued to fail to resist her, I should’ve noticed that something was different this time.
Sadly, it wasn’t until the funeral—the day we marked the passing of the man who constantly told me I was a failure, not good enough, not manly or living my life right—that I finally realized why things were so different with Harper, why I was so different every time I was with her.
She makes me a better man. My love for her makes me better.
Of course, that same day, I also fucked up so colossally, I figured I was doomed. I’d finally met a woman I could see myself spending the rest of my life with, and I went and pushed her away in the most definitive, dickish move possible.