I kissed her head and squeezed her tight. “I wouldn’t want to be with anyone else.”
“Says the playboy.”
I laughed and kissed her again. “Yes, I do,” I said.
“Do what?”
“Believe you can pull it off. It just needs a little work and planning, but you’ve got the heart, and that’s all that really matters.”
She looked at me and smiled, kissing me softly on the lips. “You know all the right things to say, Sabbatical. Such a charmer.”
“It’s the truth,” I replied.
“We’ll see,” she smiled, pushing herself closer against me. “And what about this?”
“Us?”
She nodded.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just know I want to be with you, as much as possible, for as long as possible.”
“You really mean that, don’t you?” she asked, looking at me again.
I met her gaze, losing myself in the way her eyes seemed to shine in the moonlight coming in through the windows.
“I really do,” I said. “I’ve been going crazy these past months just thinking about it. Right now, I just want to enjoy it as much as I can.”
“You know you can’t pick up and leave Austin, right?” she asked. “And now that you actually bought me a store, I can’t leave Ludwig.”
“Yeah, didn’t really think that through properly.”
She laughed and playfully slapped my chest. “So what do we do, Sabbatical?”
“We go to sleep, wake up, have some more sex, make breakfast, then more sex,” I replied. “Then we think about it.”
She laughed and lay back against me. “I can get on board with that.”
“I’m glad.”
We spent a few more minutes in silence before I felt my eyes grow heavy and lids fall.
“Chance?”
“Yeah?” I mumbled.
She hesitated, then said, “Martha was talking to me a few weeks back, and she said something I never thought would register with me. Do you believe in fate?”
I smiled. “I believe my Chevy picked a really good place to break down in,” I said.
“So just coincidence?”
“Fate or coincidence, I don’t think it matters,” I said. “What matters is that we’re here. How it happened is a story we’ll tell our friends and family over dinner.”
She sighed and shifted to a more comfortable position. “You really fell for me, didn’t you, playboy.”
I didn’t reply, only squeezed her tighter and kissed the top of her head. But she was right. I did fall for her, and at that moment, I couldn’t imagine anything in the world that would have felt any better.
Epilog: Chance