My eyes popped open, and Sheridan was gazing at me with warmth, understanding, comfort. She’d hit the bullseye, and the arrow pierced deep into my heart.
“I’m so sorry for judging you, Luke. For assuming the worst.” She leaned in, gathering me into her arms, taking my heart in the process. “You had a very good reason.”
Her heartbeat thrummed, or maybe it was my own. I buried my face in her hair, my feelings for her cresting. I placed my hands on her hips, and then linked them behind her waist. She was comfort, an ocean of catharsis.
And then, she pulled back and looked me in the eye for a long moment. Then, she kissed me. Gently. A healing touch, a brush of the lips with soft pressure, like she’d grazed a tender or bruised place and was testing its sensitivity.
Just like in my dream, she’d been the one to offer the kiss. I liquefied under its spell, all my bones becoming cartilage, all my systems focusing in on the singularity that was our connection. It was more than physical, it was as if the two worlds I’d been living in collided—the dream world and reality—creating the veritable Big Bang in my soul, the point of creation.
There is a point when a soul is stretched, and it can never go back to its original shape. Sheridan’s kiss was that point for me. I expanded to a new form, elasticity gone, never to return. I was now we. Every kiss forever now belonged to us.
I pulled her body up to mine, dipping my head and sending my lips across hers again. She exhaled with a soft moan, and our intensity changed, a swift gradation upward. I insisted, and she responded, and wild tremors raced along my every nerve. Sheridan’s kiss in reality eclipsed the kiss of my dream, and I couldn’t stop, never wanted to stop this feeling, this shaking anticipation of everything changing in my life from this moment on.