Looking Inside

This time when he went to kiss her, she was ready for him. His hand rose to the back of her head. He twisted his fingers in her hair. She felt his sexual hunger in that kiss, but she felt more. She felt his focused need.

Or at least she hoped she did.

“Do you have any idea what a turn-on that is? What a sweet gift?” he rasped against her lips a moment later.

“What?” she asked, taken aback by his intensity.

“You’re telling me that I had something to do with you finding your passion. That’s incredible. Because I’ve seen your passion. I’ve felt it. And if I had even a little bit to do with liberating it, then I must be the luckiest guy on earth.”

“Really?”

He rolled his eyes and raked his fingers through his hair. “Yeah. Really. Do you want to know what I’ve figured out in the past week?”

“What?” she mouthed.

“I’m not emotionally challenged or a commitment-phobe or permanently disabled somehow in the intimacy department.”

“You’re not?”

He shook his head. “No. That wasn’t my problem with women, Eleanor.”

Her voice box didn’t work for a second. “What was?” she finally whispered numbly.

“It was simple. I just hadn’t found the right one.”

His words echoed and swirled around her head. A strange, wonderful tingling sensation started up on every square inch of her skin as she looked into his blazing stare.

“I have now,” he said roughly, leaning into her. He nipped at her lips. “She’s really sweet, and she’s a little goofy.”

“Hey,” she protested, but he just plucked at her lips again and continued.

“She’s super smart and looks just as amazing in a miniskirt as she does in her librarian clothes. She’s fresh and beautiful and so sexy, sometimes I worry I can’t keep up with her in bed.”

“Trey,” she admonished thickly, nipping back at his lips with increasing fervor.

“You’re adorable,” he stated, leaning back and scoring her with his stare. “I’ve fallen in love with you. And do you want to know the weird thing about it?”

She froze, her mouth falling open. She couldn’t believe she was hearing this. And yet . . . at the same time, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world, like she’d been waiting for this moment her whole life.

“It wasn’t hard at all, Eleanor.” He breathed out, his gaze traveling over her face. “It seemed like the most natural thing in the world, once it hit me the other night, after we came back from the hospital. I think one of the reasons I didn’t recognize it more quickly was that we sort of started in the middle, you know? The chemistry between us was blistering, it wasn’t hard to imagine it was just about sex . . . to convince myself that was all it was, at first. But once my eyes were opened, it was so easy. So nice. At least, it was nice until you ran away from me at your parents’ house,” he added, his eyebrows slanting. “Then it kind of became a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from.”

“I’m sorry. I really am. When that happened, part of me worried my mother was right: that I was acting out some weird combination of a sibling rivalry and filling the void of Caddy’s loss at once. It was just so bizarre, thinking about you and Caddy, given everything else I was struggling with. It magnified my fears. My insecurities. I just needed to set things straight in my head before I was ready to tell you the truth.”

“What truth is that?” he asked her somberly.

“That I’ve fallen in love with you,” she whispered.

He smiled and kissed her lips softly. Eleanor felt like her heart swelled so big, it might squeeze past her rib cage.

“Are we on the same page now?” he asked her, his warm breath brushing against her mouth.

“I love you, and—”

“I love you back,” he growled.

He cupped her head with one large hand and brought her close, pressing his forehead against hers.

“Please hear me when I say this, Eleanor. Really listen. There’s no one else like you. No one else has ever made me feel like this. Thank God I found you, or else we might have kept going on in life, both of us having the most ridiculous misperceptions about who we really were,” he muttered fiercely before his mouth covered hers in a possessive, no-holds-barred kiss.