Page 85 of The Gravity of Us (Elements 4)

As I pulled away a bit, my hands stayed resting around her neck as my fingers slightly massaged her neck. “It’s you,” I whispered, our lips still slightly touching. “My greatest hope is, and always will be, you.”

And then, she kissed me back.

We didn’t know how to act with one another after our first kiss. Our situation wasn’t the norm when it came to building a relationship. We did everything backward. I fell in love with a boy before our first kiss, and he fell for a girl who he wasn’t allowed to have. Our connection, our heartbeats, matched one another in our fairytale world, but in reality, society deemed us as an awful accident.

Maybe we were an accident—a mistake.

Maybe we were never supposed to cross each other’s paths.

Maybe he was only meant to be a lesson in life and not a permanent mark.

But still, the way he kissed me…

Our kiss was as if heaven and hell collided together, and each choice was right and wrong at the same exact time. We kissed as if we were making a mistake and the best decision all at once. His lips made me float higher, yet somehow descend. His breaths somehow made my heart beat faster as it came to a complete halt.

Our love was everything good and bad wrapped in one kiss.

A part of me knew I should’ve regretted it, but the way his lips warmed up the cold shadows of my soul…the way he left his mark on me…

I’d never regret finding him, holding him, even if we only had those few seconds as one.

He’d always be worth those tiny seconds we shared.

He’d always be worth that soul-connecting feeling we created when our lips touched.

He’d always be the one I spent my nights dreaming of being near.

He’d always be worth it to me.

Sometimes when your heart wanted a full-length novel, the world only gave you a novella, and sometimes when you wanted forever you only had those few seconds of now.

And all I could do, all anyone could ever do, was make each moment count.

After we went home that night, we didn’t talk about it at all. Not the following week, either. I focused on Talon. Graham worked on his novel. I believed both of us were waiting for the right time to come up for us to speak about it, but that was the tricky thing about timing: it was never right.

Sometimes you just had to leap and hope you didn’t fall.

Luckily, on a warm Saturday afternoon, Graham jumped.

“It was good, right?” he asked, surprising me as I was changing Talon’s diaper in the nursery.

I turned slightly to see him standing in the doorway, looking my way. “What was good?” I asked, finishing up fastening the diaper.

“The kiss. Did you think it was good?”

My chest tightened as I lifted Talon into my arms. I cleared my throat. “Yeah, it was good. It was amazing.”

He nodded, walking in closer. Each step he took made my heart ache with anticipation. “What else? What else did you think?”

“Truth?” I whispered.

“Truth.”

“I thought I’d been in love before. I thought I knew what love was. I thought I understood its curves, its angles, its shape. But then, I kissed you.”

“And?”

I swallowed hard. “And I realized you were the first and only thing that ever made my heartbeats come to life.”