I just had to wait.
But then I needed something else.
Something that all but burst out of me on Sunday morning.
The Sunday morning that did not consist of yoga. Or tea with acquaintances. Or pedicures.
It consisted of Gage.
It was almost noon and I’d only just managed to get dressed in frayed denim cutoffs and a flowy halter, Gage wearing jeans, unbuttoned at the top, no underwear.
I was trying to make lunch.
But he was standing there, like that, in the kitchen. Shirtless. His muscles, his scars, his art.
In my kitchen.
Tearing through my routine. My life.
“Make sure you know him well enough that you know what he’s taking from you. So you know he’s not taking everything and going to run off when the storm’s over.”
The words bounced around in my head as they had all week. I’d been unable to banish them, even with Gage filling me up.
So I had to get them out.
“This doesn’t make sense,” I whispered, taking the bacon off the stove and staring at Gage. “This, us… what we have, after…”
“After what?” he demanded, his body iron, his face blank. I hated that I had torn that slightly easy look from his face.
I struggled to find words, usually having them stored and planned. But all plans went out the window with us. “After nothing. We haven’t been on a date, or met each other’s parents or… I don’t know, traveled together. You can tell a lot about a couple by the way they manage airports.”
My words sounded totally freaking lame to my own ears, but it was true. My parents didn’t know about him—nor did I plan on telling them anytime soon—and he never talked about his. Or anything about himself, for that matter.
He stared at me. And stared. “After nothing?” he repeated.
And then he wasn’t across the kitchen. Neither was I. I was in his arms, his body pressed against mine. “This isn’t nothing,” he growled, clutching my face. He pressed his lips to mine, and I opened to him without hesitation, letting him take whatever he wanted. Anything.
My breath was strangled in my throat by the time he separated from me.
Then again, he never really separated from me.
Not really.
“That isn’t nothing,” he rasped. “And we don’t make sense. Because we live in a fuckin’ world that doesn’t make sense. And I know you need it. Logic, sense. Because that’s what you’ve built around you. I’m here to knock it all down. Destroy that. Because we’re never gonna be logical. You know that. But it doesn’t matter. You know that too. Because you fuckin’ feel this too.” He gripped my hips. “And there’s not gonna be dates, or flowers or anniversaries. You know that too, because that’s not how I work. That’s not how we work. But you’re gonna be the fuckin’ air I breathe. My sun and my moon and my everything in between. So I don’t give a fuck about airplanes and sense. I give a fuck about you. And that’s all that matters. ’Cause you give a fuck about me too.”
I blinked as he brushed away Jen’s words. Obliterated them.
Because she was right. She didn’t know me well.
No one really did.
Because I hadn’t let them.
Until Gage.
And he wasn’t telling me much about himself—yet—but he was teaching me everything I didn’t know about myself.
“Yeah, Gage,” I whispered. “I give a fuck about you.”
His hands flexed around my arms.
“You want a date?” he asked, voice even and calm like it was when he had something wild on his mind—in other words, all the freaking time.
I nodded slowly, even though I knew I was agreeing to some kind of deal with the Devil. No, a date with the Devil.
He grinned, and I knew I was damned.
Because there was danger in that grin.
He grabbed my hand and yanked me toward his bike.
“If my woman wants a date, a date is what she’ll get. Gage style.”
“Dates usually take place at movie theaters. Restaurants,” I said after the roar of the bike had surrendered to the quiet surrounding us.
What I was looking at was not a restaurant. Or a movie theater. It was an abandoned warehouse in the middle of nowhere. Gage had ridden twenty minutes out of town, stopped at a locked gate, unlocked said gate, and then rode another ten minutes down a bumpy dirt road that he’d navigated without hurling me off the back of the bike.
And we were here.
“Is this where you’re taking me to kill me?” I asked when he didn’t answer.
Of course I was joking. Kind of.
Gage’s hands went to the clasps underneath my chin since I’d dismounted while still wearing my helmet. He brushed the sides of my face, taking off the prescription sunglasses I was wearing and deftly swapping them out for my regular glasses he’d had stuffed somewhere.
The gesture was small. Tiny. But it hit me square in the chest, the absolute smallness of it. He’d known I needed my glasses to see, remembered to bring ones for inside—when I hadn’t even thought about it, which was unheard of—and slipped them on my face.