“I trapped you into being with me,” Cain stated. “It was all a plan.” His hands on the tabletop clenched into fists. “There. Now you know.”
“You…what?” I asked, so confused. “You mean you planned to sleep over at my apartment that night after the party at Aunt Harlene’s house? You planned for me to take off my dress and have my mom and aunt and uncle show up and find us in bed together? How did you do that?”
“No, none of that,” he answered.
“Then what are you talking about?”
“I didn’t plan for us to fall asleep after that party, but Jesus, Aria, how was I going to let you go? You held onto me and you looked up at me like you trusted me. You acted like you felt better to have me there,” he said.
“I did,” I answered softly, remembering how safe and comforted I had felt.
“I fell asleep with you in my arms, thinking that I was going to have to leave Tennessee. Immediately.”
“But why?” I asked him. “Why did you want to leave?”
“Because I didn’t.” He rubbed his eyes. “I didn’t ever want to leave you, and I knew it.”
“Oh.” I understood, now. “You knew that we were wrong for each other.”
“Exactly.”
“You knew that I’d never fit into your new life and that I’d shame you.”
His eyes widened and he reached across the table. “What? No! Nothing like that.”
“Here’s your appetizer,” our waitress announced, and put down a platter of nachos on the table. “Be careful, that plate’s hot.”
“Thank you,” I told her, then both Cain and I stared at the pile of steaming chips. I’d never wanted to eat less. “Please explain what you mean,” I said to him.
“Aria, what I said about you today at the memorial, that’s just a little of what I think about you. How I feel about you,” he answered. “I think you’re the best, most amazing woman I’ve ever known. That I’ll ever have the privilege to know. Your mother came in screaming and I saw my chance. I grabbed it.” He reached past the nachos to take my hand again. “I said we were getting married because I didn’t think you’d back out on me.”
“You trapped me into being with you,” I slowly echoed his words, and he nodded.
“Exactly.”
“You thought that the only way I would marry you was if you forced it,” I went on.
“It wasn’t like I was rubbing my hands together and twirling my moustache,” Cain answered. “My only thought when we woke up was that I wanted her to stop yelling at you and leave you alone, so I said the first thing that came into my head that might work. That we were getting married.”
I nodded, because it had made my mama be quiet. It had made her go right off into unconsciousness.
“But later, I realized what it meant. It meant that I’d trapped you. That you were going to stay with me, not because you wanted to, but because you had to. And I still didn’t let up. I still didn’t give you an out.”
“You think I couldn’t have stopped things?” I shook my head. “At any point, I could have stood up and said no! I could have told everyone that we absolutely were not getting married, no way. Or I could have held things up, giving us a long engagement so that we could have come to that decision together.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head, and opened his mouth to continue.
“Stop that,” I said sharply. “Stop blaming yourself for this mess we’re in. I’ve been feeling guilty too, sorry that my crazy family forced you into saddling yourself with me for life, sorry that I went along with it. Maybe you said we were getting married first, but we both stood there in front of my boss and said ‘I do.’ Both of us are responsible. Both of us have to fix it.”
“Do we?”
I nodded. “We do.” I steadied myself because there was more I had to say: “I don’t want you to leave me here in Tennessee when you go back to California.”
His mouth dropped open. “Is that what you thought? I thought you’d decided to stay. I decided to stay here with you.”
Now I was the one catching flies. “You’re staying here? In Tennessee?”
Cain nodded. “You packed up almost everything you own and gave the rest away. That made it pretty clear that you didn’t want to return to San Francisco.”
“But what about your company?”
“I’m going to work remotely,” he explained. “And I bought a plane to get back and forth if I need to.”
“Really?” I gaped. “A whole plane?”
“It doesn’t work very well to fly in just a part of one.” He grinned but lost it pretty fast. “I don’t want you to be miserable, living in a place you hate. And I thought that wherever you are, that’s where I need to be. I have to make a lot of changes in how I’m living my life because I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want to live without you.”
“Oh, my word. Cain.” I pressed his hand to my cheek.
“My elbow just went into the cheese and sour cream. Are you still hungry?”
I shook my head. “Let’s go back to the hotel.”
We practically ran down the sidewalk (making me glad for my exercise routine in San Francisco) but I stopped when we got to the lobby. “Give me five minutes,” I told him, and put my hand on his chest to stop his movement. I felt his heart pounding. “Five minutes,” I repeated, and he nodded.
“Five.” He took out his phone. “I’m timing.”
I ran into the elevator and down the carpeted hall to our room, and then I dug through my bag until I found what I wanted. I looked at myself in the mirror after I’d changed, and nodded. “Not perfect,” I said out loud, but it didn’t hurt to realize it. It didn’t even make me cringe to look at myself—I just held my jade heart and nodded again. Then I heard the card slide into the lock and jumped between the sheets, pulling them up to my chin.
Cain advanced quickly and yanked off the sweater with the cheese on the sleeve. “Hold on,” I said. “Sit down there, please.” He did, on the edge of the bed, but leaned forward toward me. “I have some things to say to you, too.”
But then I had a really hard time making myself say them. I picked at the sheet instead.
“Yes?” he prompted. “What things?”
“Lots of things.” Oh, my word. Let’s go, Aria! “For example, I’m sorry that I packed up my bags and didn’t say anything to you about why. You were thinking that I was leaving you but I was really thinking that you wanted me to go.”
“What?”
“I thought I’d messed everything up for you. And…” Say it, darn you! “Everyone kept telling me that I was marrying you just because I wanted to get married, and I was an idiot,” I blurted out.
Cain sat back and turned to ice. Just ice, his whole face. “Oh.”
“But no, that’s not true!” I explained. “I wanted to get married, yes, but I had other chances. There were other people I could have dated, but I didn’t. And I never told anyone, but my last boyfriend proposed. I turned him down.” I picked at the sheet more, and if I wasn’t careful, I was going to make a hole. “I think—I know why I went along with what you said to my mama when she was screaming. I went along with it because I wanted to marry someone, yes, but only one, particular person. You.” I breathed in. “And then, I couldn’t tell you that. You didn’t even want to sleep in the same bed with me.”
“I did,” he said quickly. “I did, more than you’ll ever know. But I didn’t want to trap you even more. When I thought you might be pregnant, that I’d forced you to have my baby—”
“You didn’t force anything,” I told him. “We don’t have to have children…no.” I stopped. “That’s something I want a lot, something I can’t give up. I want a family.”
Cain nodded, but looked unconvinced. “The thing I used to be most afraid of was turning out like my dad. That I’d act like him, if I had a son of my own. I can hear him sometimes when I get angry. What if I hurt you or our kids?”
“No, you wouldn’t,” I said, abs
olutely sure. “No, you wouldn’t be anything like him.”
He nodded again. “You want to have children.” He breathed in and out. “Then, we should have them.”
“We don’t have to right away,” I said. “Not until you’re comfortable with it. More comfortable,” I corrected. “About everything else, Cain, you don’t have to change around your whole life for me. I’d like to live here, in Tennessee. But what I want more is you. If we need to go back to San Francisco, if that makes your life easier and better, then we should.”
“What makes my life better is you, Aria. I’d live on Mars if you were there with me.”
Now I used the sheet to dab at tears. “I was feeling so much like the dog.”
“What?”
“I felt like the stray in front of your house, the one that bit me.” I held up my arm, where the cut was healing very nicely. “I was so alone and sad, but I put myself there. And then I just rolled around in self-pity. It was because I wasn’t being honest with myself or you. I wasn’t admitting something, something I should have said weeks ago. It’s something I think we’ll both need to hear a lot of times to make sure that we believe it.”
He waited. I took another breath. Ok. Here you go, Aria!
“I love you.” The words came out very fast, and very softly.
Cain crawled across the bed and put his hands on my shoulders. “I do need to hear that. It’s hard to believe.”
“I love you, I love you so much. I love every single part of you with every single part of me.” The words flowed easier now. “I love you, Cain.”
He brushed back my hair and leaned his forehead against mine. “I love you, Aria. It used to be that the thing that scared me the most was turning into my father, but now it’s that I’ll lose you.”
“You won’t lose me.” But he’d need to hear that a lot too, and I also wanted to show him how I felt. A lot. I let the sheet slide and he spotted a little of the black lace.
“Is this…” He tugged the sheet the rest of the way down.
“Remember when we talked about me wearing this?”
“I remember very well.” He put his palm on my shoulder and ran it over my arm, his eyes moving over my body and back up to my face. “The first time—”
“I thought it was fine. You were the one who was upset about it.”
“I want to make it better than fine.” Cain leaned over and kissed me gently. It deepened a lot, his tongue moving with mine. He slid the straps of the bodysuit off my shoulders and kissed down my neck to where his hands cupped my breasts.
“It’s better than fine,” I breathed, and then he used his thumbs to caress my nipples. “Much, much better.”
“I’m glad, honey.” He kept kissing and sliding the lace. He nuzzled over my ribs and stomach and stopped to untie the pink bow. “Like a present,” he murmured, and tugged the bodysuit all the way off my legs. He whipped off the rest of his own clothes and there we were, naked and together.
It felt like this was the way it should have been all along. I wasn’t embarrassed or ashamed as his blue eyes drank in every bit of me, and I stared back at him, a little amazed. Before, it had been too dark for me to see and everything had moved so fast, I hadn’t focused on the details. But was that a normal…magnitude, what he had down there?
I didn’t get to look as long as I wanted to because Cain knelt and picked up my foot. He kissed my instep, the part that my “chase me…you know the drill” shoes had made ache so terribly, and he nosed at my ankle, which I had never considered as a sexy part of myself. But that place behind my knee—oh! And then up my thighs, back and forth, with warm breath and a trailing tongue. He lay and slid his hands underneath me to massage an area that I hadn’t cared about very much before, except when I was sorry about its size when I saw it behind me in the mirror. But he massaged and rubbed and, oh!
“Better,” I repeated, closing my eyes, and when his tongue touched between my legs, I moaned it again. “Better!” He licked me there, and kissed me too, I thought, but I wasn’t paying much attention to the technique.
I yanked at the sheets, rolling my hips from side to side as I was overwhelmed by the bliss of it all. It built and built, his tongue and fingers driving me higher and higher, tears streaming down my face and my fists twisting the sheets and me moaning—until it broke over me, a bubble of pleasure that made my body shake and jerk. I heard myself panting and Cain, too. He kept kissing and rubbing me, all over, parts that had never been touched by other human hands, like my hipbones and the curve of my waist and the undersides of my breasts which were aching, now, needing more of him.
“Aria. Do you want me to use a condom?”
I looked up at him and held his face in my hands as I nodded. We didn’t need to rush. There was all the time in the world.
But when he slid inside me again, without any pain or anything weird or uncomfortable this time, just pure magic—then I wanted the rush. “More,” I begged him. “Cain, go more.” He seemed to get that and pumped into me deeper, tilting my hips and reaching farther and harder, and everything started again. It finished with us together, gasping, me crying and him kissing me and calling my name and that he loved me.
“I love you,” I told him, and I planned to say it a lot more. Because he was my home, wherever we were, and I was his. We weren’t going anywhere, except together.
Epilogue
“This is the best party I’ve ever been to. Really!” my cousin Kayleigh yelled to me, and threw her arms around my neck. “I’m so happy for you, Ari!”
I hugged her back. “It is a great party!” I agreed loudly over the music of the band. My old boss Gary was on the dance floor showing off his moves with Bevie, his wife, and my friend Eimear was being twirled around totally off the ground by her big husband Griffin. Cassie and Bo were off in one corner making out and Amory and her husband were in another. Even Aubree was having a good time—even my mama was! It was like something wonderful was in the air tonight, my one-year anniversary with Cain. He’d convinced me that a party was a good idea, but actually, I hadn’t needed much sweet talking. I was so, so happy to celebrate with everyone.
Kayleigh swigged the rest of her drink, which was just a Coke. We’d gone dry for this party, which my Aunt Jill had really appreciated. But Kayleigh was doing well with her sobriety. I was very proud of her!
“Show me where the barn is going to be,” she asked me.
“There, over by that stand of oak trees,” I said, pointing through the opening in the tent. I’d already rescued one miniature donkey and a very, very old palomino, and if I kept going, we were going to need a lot of space in that building. “And Cain will have a separate little office over there for when he needs to work at home, because I think our house will be noisy and busy.” We had enough property to build everything we needed and had just broken ground on the main structure.
“All your animals will make it crazy!” she said, laughing, and I nodded. We would have lots of indoor animals too, but we hadn’t decided to have six bedrooms for nothing. I planned to fill them—someday, when Cain was ready for it. I still didn’t feel a need to rush, but when I saw Eimear hugging her daughter next to the dance floor, I did wish it would happen sooner and not later.
“Um, do you want to dance?” a guy asked Kayleigh. He was one of the people that Cain had hired when he’d opened his big office in downtown Chattanooga, and I liked him. I gave my cousin a silent look of approval and she considered for a minute.
“No thanks. I’m going to hang out with Aria,” she said, and smiled at him. “I appreciate the offer, though.” But after a moment, her daddy came up and claimed her for a dance, and she wasn’t going to say no to him. I watched as they took their places next to my Uncle Jed and my mama as the band struck up a waltz.
“Want to join them?” Two arms came around to circle my waist and I leaned back against my husband.
“No, I’m good right here,” I told him. I snuggled against him, because this was exactly w
here I wanted to be almost all the time. I missed him like crazy when he went out to California but luckily that was happening less and less as he moved more of his business to Tennessee.
“Come outside of the tent for a minute,” Cain said. I put my arm through his and rested my cheek on his shirt as walked. We had heaters inside the cloth walls, but outside, the December air was brisk and I shivered in my dress. Not a white one, because that would have been weird, but it was as big and showy as a wedding gown, full of beading and crinoline and lace. And the bright pink really made my hair pop, I thought. It looked wonderful with my jade pendant, too.
“Are you cold, honey?” He hugged me and now I snuggled into his chest.
“No. I’m perfect.”
“Happy anniversary,” he told me and I looked up at him to smile.
“You’ve said that a lot today.”
“Have I told you that I love you?” Cain asked, and I nodded.
“You’ve also said that a lot. And I might have mentioned that I love you.” He didn’t need to hear it as much anymore, but I still liked to say it.
He liked it too. He bent and kissed me and came away with a lot of pink lipstick. “Oh, my word. It’s not your color!” I said, wiping at his mouth.
“If we kiss more, it will come off,” he advised, so we tried it, and we were both very happy with the results.
“I have something for you,” Cain told me as we pulled away, breathless.
“Another gift?”
He nodded and reached into his pocket for a little box. “You said a long time ago that you didn’t want one of these, but maybe you changed your mind.” He opened the lid to show me a ring, two gold bands encircling each other, twined together. “I drew a picture of what I wanted. That’s how I think of you and me.”
I held out my hand and he slipped it onto my finger. “I love it,” I said. “I love it, and I love you.”
He pulled me to him and I put my arms around his neck and held him as close as I could. “I’ve been thinking, Ari, about the future.”
“What have you been thinking about?” I felt his heart pounding beneath my cheek. “Cain, what’s wrong?”
Here I Go Page 26
