Southern Chance (Southern 1)

He nods his head and then looks at me. “Can I keep this?” he asks me.

“Those are for you and this also.” I take out the last paper in the envelope. “It’s small, but it’s his footprint.”

“I’ve never in my life felt so much yet so empty at the same time,” he says to me, wiping his cheek with the back of his hand.

“I know the feeling,” I say. “It’s a bit better now that I get to share him with you. That you know him also.”

He puts the pictures down on the table in front of him and then turns to me and pulls me to him. I straddle him, just as I did so many years ago. Just as I’ve remembered all these years. Except he’s bigger, and his chest is wider. When he opened the door without a shirt, I thought for sure my chin would hit the floor. He was just perfect; he was always perfect in my eyes, though. He was always the best looking, always the funniest, always the sweetest. He was always my number one.

“Stay with me,” he asks, and I look at him while he pushes my hair over my shoulder. “Stay with me today, tonight, tomorrow.” He sits up now and kisses my bare shoulder. My arm wraps around his neck, and my fingers go into his hair. “I need you to come with me tomorrow.”

“Where?” I ask, and he just smiles. “It’s a surprise.”

“Okay.” It comes out breathlessly, and I hold his face in my hands now, his eyes red from the tears.

“I love you.” His hands come to hold my face. “I’ve loved you my whole life.”

“Jacob,” I whisper his name.

“Every single part of you is ingrained in my brain. It’s a part of my soul. Everything that you are is in me. Every single piece of my heart belongs to you,” he says.

“You’re my everything,” I say as he leans down and kisses my lips once. I smile. “You’ve always been my everything.” I kiss him now, slipping my tongue into his mouth just a touch. “For eight years, I’ve dreamed of kissing you.” His thumb comes out, and he traces my jaw. “Eight years of you in my dreams. This almost feels surreal,” I say, looking down at his chest. My finger traces the outline of the cross that he now has on there. “It’s always you.” I look back up at him, and he grabs the back of my head now. My hair fisted in his hand, he crushes his lips on mine.

My mouth’s already open for him as he slides his tongue into my mouth, and we both swallow each other’s moans. My hand moves up his chest to his hair, and I crush my chest against his, wanting to get closer and closer to him. “I want to take you to my bed,” he tells me when he lets go of my lips and slips his mouth over to my jaw and then roams toward my ear.

“Yes,” I say while my heart beats frantically against my chest. He gets up in one swift movement, and with one hand around my waist, I lock my legs around his waist.

“You’re really here?” he asks as he carries me past the kitchen toward the garage where we came in two days ago. He turns, and I want to look around at his house. I want him to take me room by room and tell me everything I’ve missed. “I’ll give you a tour of the house after,” he whispers as if he can read my mind. I look around his room, which is filled with just a big king-size bed and two side tables. He puts his knee down on the bed and slowly lays me down. He moves my hair away from my face. “I can watch you all day long and not get tired of it.”

My hand comes up, and I palm his cheek in my hand. “For eight years, I chased you in my dreams only to wake up before I could get to you,” I say softly, my thumb rubbing his face. “I didn’t know why, and no matter how much I forced myself to dream again, I just couldn’t get to you.”

“I’m right here, baby,” he says softly. “I’m always right here.”

“We lost eight years because of me.” I say something that I finally realized when he poured out his heart to me. “If only I had stopped and listened to you. If only I had even for a minute thought there is no way.” A tear escapes from my eye.

“Shh,” he says. “For eight years, I blocked out the love I had for you because it was too painful. My chest would feel like it was being crushed. But the minute I saw you again, it’s like it was yesterday. Everything was in front of me. Everything was right there. You were right there.”