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And I do. Fully. While pleasure sends me floating away before bringing me back to the now-cold water of the bathtub and the depth of the moment. All the while, he keeps moving, rocking our hips for as long as it takes for him to feel exactly what I do.

Then Ford shatters, and I watch every single piece of him. The slight way his blue eyes roll back. The way his jaw locks then goes slack. The jagged breaths followed by a period of no breath at all. The coarse way he shudders, the softness of how he chants my name. The whole-body tension followed by full-blown come apart.

The air is cold, water is everywhere except in the tub. We’re a tangled mass of wet legs and cuffed wrists, but I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to live in this bathtub with goose bumps on my skin attached to Ford Callahan for the rest of my life. “You did good,” he says, rubbing his nose against mine. “You okay?”

I look at him, open my mouth to say something clever, but instead, I cry. Tears stream down my face and mix with bathwater as I look at him, and he wraps his free arm, still slick with water and dappled with bubbles, right around me, tucking the cuffed one between us, our fingers intertwined.

I shift off him and curl into the space between his legs sideways, angling my head so I’m looking at him. “I’m sorry,” I say with a laugh. “I don’t know why I’m crying. That was good. You were—” I sniff, trying to find the right word, feeling lame when all I can say is, “Beautiful.”

He smiles in that true way he does. “So were you.” He kisses my thumb. “Can I tell you I love you?”

I look at him, biting my lip. “Will you know I feel the same way even if I don’t say it?”

He presses his lips to mine, saying against my mouth, “I’m in love with you, Scotty Armstrong.”

Sitting in a bathtub naked and handcuffed, those seven words forever change the rhythm my heart beats in my chest. Swift as a starling shifts direction midair.

“Hm.” I pull back, biting my bottom lip. “I’ll need more evidence, Officer.”

He growls—it’s sexy—and pulls me to stand at our cuffed connection. He scoops me up, naked and slippery, and I shriek through a giggle as he carries me to the bedroom. Ford drops us onto the new mattress and touches me like I’ve never been touched before. He makes love to me. And when soft swears and whimpers of his name come from my lips, he doesn’t look away.

Neither do I.

Scotty

I might be in love with Ford.

June

Are you still moving to the desert?

I hate you.

I know you don’t.

Forty-One

“Areyousurethisis right?” Wren looks skeptically from the bright-green backsplash tile of the kitchen to me.

I purse my lips and tilt my head, trying to find an angle that makes them look straight. All signs point to drunk kindergarteners doing the install. “No.”

“So what do we do? Pull it off and redo it?” She’s annoyed.

I shake my head and drag a sponge across the tile to wipe the last remnants of excess grout, wishing and failing for it to make the tile less crooked. I frown when it doesn’t. “We’ll just leave it. If you kind of close your eyes”—I take a step back and squint—“maybe no one will notice.”

She looks at the botched tile job, peeling her gloves off with a disbelieving snort. “They’ll notice.”

When she turns away, I flip her off.

“Now what?”

With the backsplash done, there are no more projects. It dawns on me that maybe Wren might stop visiting. Of course, if I sell it in a few weeks, I guess I wouldn’t be here for her to visit anyway. Even I can't deny that I'll miss her.

“Well, I guess our work’s done,” I say as I mentally try to make up projects we could do. “We could do outside stuff? Landscape?”

“Now?” she asks, skeptical. “It’s almost winter.”

Right.