Page 18 of Spark
He leads me back to my room on the back side of the house where he patiently, competently strips me of my clothes. Spreading me out before him, he crouches between my legs like a man at a feast. My fingers fist in the comforter as his mouth explores the delicate flesh. My thighs begin to shake at his careful ministrations. When I attempt to vise his head with my legs, his strong fingers clamp down on the trembling muscles and hold me wide for his attention.
“Please,” I beg.
But if he hears me, he pays no mind. Clearly he also wants to torture us both a little…or a lot.
I toss and turn as he brings me to the edge and back again several times. It’s the most exquisite kind of torture. When I’m coated in a fine sheen of sweat, he finally pulls away to yank off his shirt and tug off his pants. Gloriously naked and hard, he climbs on top of me, fitting between my legs like he was made to be there.
When he slides inside me, it feels like coming home, like I’d been waiting for this moment since the morning when I’d left him asleep in that bed.
His fingers comb through my hair to grip my scalp and he says, “Look at me. I want you to look at me for this.” I think he means to look at him when I come, becauseGodI’m close, but then he says, “I love you, Avery. I think I have since the night I met you.”
My heart stumbles and I grip him closer to me. “You what?”
“You want to hear it again?” he says, his mouth teasing my ear. “Greedy.”
“It wouldn’t hurt,” I admit.
His smile strikes me in all the soft, tender places inside me. “You tell me first and I will.”
“You’ve already said it!” He slides deep and I groan. “Okay. You’re right. I love you, too. I think that’s why I ran the first time. You scared the shit out of me.” Then he kisses me hard and when I have a moment to breathe, I gasp. “We’ll talk later.”
And then he smiles and it’s blinding, and I realize we’ll have forever now for I love yous. For our family. For us.
Forever with him sounds like the best sort of beginning I could imagine.
Like a rainbow after a hurricane.
Epilogue
Walker
Gracie toddles along the beach, dark hair flying behind her. Avery had tried to tame it into pigtails, but the girl wasn’t having any of it. She gets her stubbornness from her mother and her fire from me.
The salty sea air carries Gracie’s pleased shouts to me several lengths behind them. When she glances back to look for me, then dashes off—content to find that I’m still there, I know I made the right decision, staying. I never would have forgiven myself for leaving her.
Or Avery.
“Are you gonna help?” Avery asks with an amused glance back at me. Like our daughter, she checks to see that I’m still there. She’s always pleased to find that I haven’t gone anywhere. I don’t mind. Avery hasn’t had a lot of people she can depend on. I get it now, having gotten to know her for more than a night together. She’s always had to rely on herself and she may not have made the best decision, but she did what she thought was right. I can’t fault her for that. I can’t say what I would have done in her situation. Scared. Pregnant. Alone. The weight of the world on her shoulders.
“You seem to have it under control,” I say. And she does, but she knows I’m always there, if not by her side then right behind her. She’s never had anyone else to depend on, but she can depend on me. And I’ll spend every last breath making sure she knows it.
“Fine, but you get naps today,” come her sassy response, then she’s off chasing after the little girl in a highlighter pink bathing suit.
Mexico Beach isn’t what it used to be. The coast had been wiped clean after Hurricane Michael. Homes, business, places the 850 made memories completely erased. The El Governor Motel, where I’d stayed a thousand times, was a husk of it’s former self. There aren’t many tourists now because there simply isn’t much to see. Swaths of beach bordered by wreckage. Maybe that’s why I like to take my girls here. Because it may not be pretty, but it’s home. Like Battleboro has always been home.
Our little town may have been hit hard, but it’s still standing, it’s people rebuilding stronger than ever. Sure, it’s not the 24/7 action I’m used to seeing as a Wildland Firefighter, but it suits me now, strangely. One of the guys at work, a real pain in the ass named Remington “Remy” Davis says it’s because I’m getting old and need to settle down. Hell, maybe he’s not wrong. Though his ass isn’t anywhere near settling down and he’s got a couple years on me.
Hell, maybe he’s right.
Of the small team at Battleboro Fire & Rescue, I was somewhat of an outsider. Remy and the other guys on my shift, Jackson “Jax” Grady, and our Captain, Ezekiel “Zeke” Ross, are lifers. They’ve been on a team for going on a decade. Even though I was the outsider, they didn’t really treat me like one. When I signed on to replace Tom Barry, who’d been killed during the storm, they welcomed me with open arms and a cold one.
Life couldn’t get any better.
Avery finally manages to catch up to Gracie and I smile as they tumble into the surf, giggling until they can barely breath. Their heads dip close together and they come up with identical mischievous grins. I think to myself the same thing I thought when I first saw Avery.I’m in trouble.
They break into a run and tackle me. I let them take me down into the white sand, not caring that water soaks into my collar and my shorts fill with damp sand.
“Gotcha, Daddy!” Gracie says through wild laughter. “We gotchu.”