Page 94 of Center of Gravity
He laughed, squeezing my hand as I pulled the door open. “Actually, I hated it. It took them forever to get together.”
Heat rushed at us from the crowd inside, and I pressed one more kiss to his temple before shoving him inside. “Indeed.”
* * *
After we’d had morechampagne, after we’d left the show and returned to Nook Island, sharing another bottle of wine in the kitchen with my sister; after Alex did in fact have me begging, loudly, we nestled against each other in bed. I kissed his collarbones, then the fingers he drifted down the slope of my nose, thinking of something I’d noticed earlier at the show.
“What happened to the double-helix piece, the self-portrait you were stuck on?”
Alex wriggled beneath the sheet, turning onto his back. I spread my hand over his chest, feeling the steady rhythm of his heart beneath. “I decided not to show it. It just never felt finished. You know what I mean?”
His hand covered mine, his fingers weaving between as he angled a look at me, a little smile playing over his lips that I matched with my own when I said, “I do. And I hope you never finish it.”
Epilogue
Alex
April, three months later
Iwoke to Winslow licking the side of my face, which definitely wasn’t as good as Rob licking the side of my face, but I’d gotten used to him acting as my very own doggy alarm clock.
“Stop that, you crazy mutt,” I muttered, batting his affection gently away and giving him a few pets as collateral. He nosed my hand, then jumped up as a familiar sizzling crackled through the air. Bacon and eggs. Winslow abandoned me, shotgunning off the bed and scrambling out of the bedroom door into the kitchen.
I lolled around in the sheets for a few more minutes before I dragged myself upright.
A year ago on this day—well, technically, this night—I’d answered Rob’s message on an app and gone down on him in the bathroom stall of Liberation. Not a very romantic beginning, considering all the rocky terrain that had followed, but still, thinking about it made me smile now. We’d talked about it while lying in bed last night.
“So what would you consider our anniversary?”
Briefly, his face ghosted white, like he was afraid he’d forgotten something important, and that’s when I reminded him that the next day was when we’d met for the first time.
“Kind of an inauspicious beginning, don’t you think?” His brow wrinkled. “I’m not sure I want to mark the occasion when I gave you a fake name and then bailed on you.”
I laughed. “I do.”
“That’s just cruel.”
“No, ditching me while I was still sporting a raging boner was cruel.”
“Point,” he’d said, then reached under the covers, brushing his hand over my hip, moving lower. “But that’s a debt I’m happy to pay off over and over.”
So it was stillon my mind as I crawled from the bed and pulled on some pajama pants, half hard just thinking about how he’d worked his “debt” off to me last night.
Rob glanced at me when I wandered in, then returned for a longer look, a smile quirking his lips. “Your hair looks like it’s trying to take flight.”
I glanced up, as if I could witness this event and then raked a hand through the tousled strands. “Yours looks like it could resist hurricane force winds.” I skirted around him, reaching blindly for the coffee pot and he caught me by the elbow, whipping me around to pull me close and envelop me in the warm, morning scent of him. The spice of his aftershave, toothpaste, his skin. My favorite cologne was him, and I rubbed shamelessly against his shirt.
“So sassy,” he growled, and punctuated it by nipping at my lip ring.
I twined my arms around his neck, the brush of his shirt against my bare chest forming goosebumps and tightening my nipples as I kissed him.
“You want bacon, I assume?” he spoke against the corner of my mouth.
“Yes, please.”
He cooked me breakfast every morning. I was so damn spoiled and I knew it, but he said he liked doing it, and the longer I was with him, the more I learned that these mundane, but thoughtful, acts were his way of telling me he loved me. I’d find a shirt ironed if I needed it, or a towel next to the shower when I’d forgotten to grab it off the hook. He anticipated me constantly and there was something about that that made me feel so fucking loved. And I was never hungry.
I split time between his apartment in Savannah and Nook Island. I was still working for Buffs and my art studio was still in the family garage, but I’d been job hunting for the past couple of months and Sam had finally gotten a good lead and helped me get an interview with a swanky gallery near the riverfront.