I’m moving on, she’d told herself, but it hadn’t really been possible. There were too many tiny pieces of her scattered all over the ground. Too many mirrored slivers of her heart that he’d taken with him.
The part that matters is who you are when you’re with him, Judah had said. How he makes you feel.
How could she run from this?
So she stayed in his arms, and she kissed his neck, and then she found his chin with her fingers and turned his head and kissed his mouth, too, kissed him until she couldn’t think of a single good reason why she’d ever stopped.
When she finally broke away, it was only because she remembered she had something to say. “Sean?”
He shook his head and took her mouth again, kissed her as if he were drowning, dying, going to war. Something distressing happened to her knees, and she slumped against him, broken by pleasure and relief. When he finally stopped kissing her, she’d entirely lost track of the conversation.
“You were ssaying?”
“I have no idea.”
His chest hitched like he was laughing, and his lips curved into a smile. “You were going to ssay you love me, I think.”
“Oh, I love you. It’s stupid, but it’s the truth.”
“You p-promised me you wouldn’t call yourself sstupid anymore.”
“I’m making an exception for loving you. The last time I saw you, you screwed me on the floor, made the worst proposal of marriage in the history of mankind, and then left the state. You have to admit that from my perspective, loving you is probably unwise.”
He kissed her forehead and the tip of her nose, his hands stroking up and down her back. “Probably. But I wuh-won’t let you regret it.”
“See that you don’t,” she said, and she kissed him again.
Chapter Forty-six
Later, they wandered down the beach until the surf became louder than the music and the breeze off the ocean encouraged her to move closer to him. Then they stopped and kissed some more, and Sean’s hands got pretty liberal, and she forgot herself and pressed against him, needing to feel him everywhere, under her dress, inside her skin.
But he backed off after a few heated minutes, and she was glad of it. They hadn’t actually fixed anything, and that left a lot to sort out. It wouldn’t be a good idea to complicate matters with a round of such-a-bad-idea sex.
Sean took her hand and pulled her down to sit in the sand between his legs, facing out toward the ocean. He didn’t say anything, so she listened to the shushing of the waves and breathed and tried not to think. She had a hunch that thinking wouldn’t help them any.
“Have you ever been here before?” she asked.
“No. You?”
“I’ve hardly been anywhere.”
“Where would yuh-you like to go?”
“Paris,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to go to Paris.”
“You had a p-picture of P-paris in your locker in high school.”
She craned her head around, surprised. “You remember that?”
“I remember everything.”
“Right.”
His eyes crinkled up at the corners, and she wanted to kiss them.
“I’ll t-take you to Paris, K-katie.”
“I’d like that.”