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He laughs, shaking his head. “Of course it is, babe. Of course it is,” he relents. “Forgive me.”

I try not to smile while pretending to think about it. “Hmm…Okay. You’re forgiven. I guess.” I shrug and roll my eyes.

He laughs again, and we slip into his backyard, settling into the two oversized chairs at the side of his pool that face his view of our shared city.

“You think we could find my house from here?” I ask, even though I know it’s probably impossible to find my own little speck in the cluster of at least a thousand others.

But he points out in front of him somewhere, in the general vicinity of where I live. “Approximately…there,” he says. “Seventeen minutes’ drive time, thirty-two with traffic.” He says it as if he’s dead serious, and I snort with laughter.

“Should I be impressed, or slightly afraid for my life?” I ask, taking a bite of my dessert.

He shrugs a shoulder with a tilt of his lips. His smile is devastating. “These are important, need to know things, Jess.”

“Really.”

“Absolutely.”

I can’t keep my laughter from spilling forward. But Greyson quickly draws my attention back to him, his eyes on mine as he slides his spoon out from between his lips.

“Okay,” I follow the movement, taking a breath of clarity, “So…did you follow me to Seattle, then?” I ask with a subtle smirk.

He relaxes back into his chair, kicking his legs out in front of him. “I think so. Intentionally, or unintentionally,” he pauses for a moment, eating another spoonful of ice cream before continuing, “Life sort of worked out in my favor that way, but I think I would’ve ended up here either way…in the hopes of finding you again.”

I nod, swallowing back a sudden swell of emotions, before saying, “I don’t think it was a possibility—in any version of our reality—that I wouldn’t have found my way back to you, Greyson.”

The air around us grows thick with emotion, too, squeezing at my airways. Because…

I love him.So fucking much.

I can see the sentiment mirrored right back at me through his eyes, can feel it in the graze of his thumb against my cheek. It slips in, slinking through my awareness and into every cell of my body, warming me from the inside out.

He picks my hand up in his and presses a kiss to the center of my palm, before caging it against his chest as he digs back into his dessert.

I look out at the view, soaking in this moment. The quiet surety of it all. It’s what startles me most, I think. What throws me a little off-kilter—how I seem to know without a doubt that this is exactly where I’m meant to be. In the right place, with the right person, but finally at the right time.Finallyat the right time.

“I still don’t know how you ever leave this place,” I cut through my own thoughts, and the handful of others I see playing behind his eyes, too.

The right side of his mouth pulls up into a smirk. “A wise andvery beautifulwoman once told me, in so many words, that I should try to bring my world here, so I won’t have to leave half as much.”

“Mmhmm,” I hum on a half-smirk of my own.

He sets his bowl down onto the small table beside him and turns to face me dead-on. I watch as his Adam’s apple slides up and down his throat, his eyes intent on holding me in place, right where I am.

For eternity, maybe.

His next words breathe life into those very thoughts. “Move in with me,” he says, and time stops. The world stops, the earth stops spinning on its axis, and my smile slowly but surely breaks free.

I could launch myself into his arms and kiss him into oblivion; I could scream,“Yes!”from the depths of my soul, and kiss him some more, and never come up for air; I could somehow find my words, drag them up past my thundering heart, and give him the answer I know we both want to hear.

But I can’t seem to do anything but smile.

Smile, and smile, and smile.

“I love you,” I say through the curve of my lips, and he says it back, and his returning smile is the soulmate to my own.

Seventy-seven After

“MOVE IN WITHme,” Greyson says again. It’s more of a statement than a question, really, and my heart is still racing. Pounding out of my chest.