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I wind my arms around him and hug him even tighter, tears stinging behind my eyes and burning at my nose. I inhale a deep breath from where my face is pressed into his shirt, willing them away.
“Hey, Little D,” he says, lifting my face with it framed between his palms.
“Hey, Brooklyn,” I smile.
And it’s like no one else exists, the world silencing and pinpointing in on this moment.
It squeezes at my heart painfully, and yet beautifully, too. Because I’ve never felt it aching for the sake of something this good, for the sake of something this real, until Jude came along.
A crackling voice darts through the speakers in the airport, but the words go in one ear and out of the other.
Jude’s scent—spice, and warmth, and thunderstorms—invades my senses as he drags me impossibly deeper into his pull. And then he’s tipping my chin upward, bringing his lips down to meet mine.
A rough groan slips over my tongue, and I’m not sure which one of us it belongs to as it dips down my throat, but when his grasp on me tightens, pulling me flush against him and deepening our kiss, I leave the curiosity behind.
The warmth of him winds through me, around me, cocoons me in its hold.
“Goodbye, Jude,” I say softly against his mouth.
His low growl slips over my tongue. “This isn’t goodbye, and you know it.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Declan
“Daclan, baby!” Jude’s out of breath voice hums through the phone and into my ear.
I smile.
God, I’ve missed him.
Once again, I haven’t seen him since last summer.
We could make a million excuses as for why, but in the end, things just didn’t work out. We tried—more than a few times—but flights got cancelled or delayed, and work emergencies came up, and coursework became increasingly more overwhelming for both of us, and our holiday schedules never matched up, and after one disappointment after the other, we eventually mutually decided to let the idea go.
It’s become almost a tradition at this point that we only see each other in the summers, anyway.
So that’s what we had planned on doing for a while now, even though this summer wasn’t a guarantee, either.
As it is, most of it has already flown by.
I’ve been busy with work and saving money and dragging myself through yet another accelerated summer course, and Jude has been swamped with OTAs—Organized Team Activities, he explained over the phone a few weeks ago—and minicamps, and with finding a place to live in Denver—where he was drafted despite his family’s hopes, and my own, that he would end up closer to home, though that’s not to say we aren’t all through-the-roof ecstatic for him—and then he was plenty occupied with moving into his new place and getting situated,and now,he’s only a few days away from starting training camp.
Basically, Jude has been even busier than either one of us could have ever anticipated. Busier than he’salreadybeenthis last year, and that’s saying a lot. It’s also the reason why—technically—we aren’t dating now.
We were together last summer, and for months after that. But when school got started and Jude fell deep into his world of football—games, and practices, and the many, many hours required at the gym—as well as keeping on top of his own grades and studies, our schedules constantly contradicting and our lives slowly wedging apart, we agreed not to put any labels on what it is we share.
Labels create expectations.
And expectations breed disappointment.
Two things neither of us had the capacity for this year.
Though, essentially, we still ended up doing the long-distance thing withoutcallingit a long-distance thing. All because I was scared—or terrified,really—to call us what we were andhave beento each other. To let him keep my heart fourteen-hundred miles away, and trust that it would be taken care of. That it wouldn’t be accidentally forgotten—or worse, splintered into a million pieces.
I know he was feeling the same way.
It was his final year of college before going pro, and after that, everything would be uncertain, unexplored territory. What life would look like, how busy he’d be, what city he’d be in—the many ways his life would undoubtedly change.