High School Sweetheart

"You remember what we were voted in the yearbook?" I ask her.

She nods, slowly. "Of course I do."

"Most Likely to Get Married," I remind her anyway. I slide my hand over hers, lift it to my mouth. I can see that she is holding her breath. I know that she wants this, the same way I do.

"So?” she asks. Everyone is looking at us. I don’t care. They could be recording the whole thing for all I give a shit about it – I just want this to be between us. All I care about is her hearing those words come out of my mouth, once and for all.

"So, we could do it," I tell her. "Get married. Go have those adventures that we always said that we would."

I trail off, searching her eyes for a response. For a moment, she doesn’t say anything, and I have to squeeze her hand to remind her that I’m going to need her to say something to me right now.

And then, all at once, her face lights up, and she laughs. “You’re crazy,” she says.

Before she can say another word, I lean in and plant a kiss against her lips at last. I swear I can hear whispers from the room around us, but I don’t give a damn about it. The whole world could have vanished in the time that it took me to kiss her and as long as I got to feel her mouth against mine, I would be happy.

When I pull back, her eyes are shining with excitement, and I know that, like me, she can see the whole of our lives opening up in front of us once more. Everything that we had planned before we were pulled apart is finally coming to pass. It might have taken me way too long to get here, to work out that this was what I wanted, but now that I have, there is no way on earth that I am ever going to forget it.

She leans her forehead against mine, and she grasps tight to my hand. Everyone around us is staring, and she laughs.

"I bet you think I’m crazy, huh?” she murmurs to Liv, who is standing closest to us.

"Totally," Liv replies, and she brushes a tear away from her cheek and shakes her head. "But if getting back together makes you happy..."

"It does," Bailey tells her, and she looks to me again, as though she’s trying to work out if this can really be happening. I want to tell her that it can, that it is, that everything that we have done was always going to come down to this moment, but there is plenty of time to talk after we are done.

Right now, there are other things on my mind. Mostly to do with how much I want to get her alone again, how much I want to lose myself to her and remind myself just why I haven’t been able to get her out of my head all this time.

"Let’s get out of here," she whispers to me, and I circle an arm around her waist and lead her to the door. I can’t stop touching her. I don’t think that I am ever going to be able to get over the shock of having her close to me again.

I brush a strand of hair away from her dress, admiring the soft tan on her skin, her beautiful, lean body beneath her dress. She is mine. And I am going to make sure that she knows just how much I want her right now.

9

Bailey

We barely make it back to the car before he is kissing me properly. His body is hard and strong and eager against mine, and it takes everything I have not to rip his clothes off and let him take me right here in the parking lot of our old school. If it wasn’t February in Colorado, and freezing-cold to match, I might have gone ahead and done just that.

"You have no idea how long I’ve been thinking about having you like this," he murmurs to me, his voice dropping to a growl that sends a shiver down my spine.

This is the version of him that I remember best, the one that was sexy and serious and almost a little angry when the two of us were fooling around. As though not being able to have me was the hardest thing in the world for him, and it took every ounce of self-control not to give in to the want that spiraled through him whenever we were close to each other.

"Show, don’t tell," I tease him softly, and he pushes me into the car and climbs into the driver’s side. I swear this is the same one that he drove in high school – a little more pimped-out, but basically identical. I smile as I run my hands over the dashboard, snuggle into the leather seat. This is familiar to me, in the best way possible. Feels like home. He feels like home.