And really, who am I to deny her what we both want?
Moving over her, I press hot kisses to her collarbone, her cheeks, her mouth. “I love you,” I tell her as I slip inside her. “I love you so much.”
“I’ve loved you for a long time,” she says, her hands moving up to cup my cheeks as she looks deep into my eyes. “Longer than I even knew. And I’m going to love you forever.”
Embarrassing as it is, those words are all it takes to send me over the edge. I bury my head against the flushed and heated skin of her neck and groan, saying “Fuck,” as I come and come and come.
And then she’s coming too, her arms and legs and pussy wrapped so tightly around me that I can’t tell where she leaves off and I begin.
It’s perfect. She’s perfect. Somehow, miraculously, we’re perfect.
And it’s enough. It’s more than enough, actually. It’s everything.
Epilogue
“Come on, come on, come on…” I’m chanting the words like a mantra as Cam drops into the half-pipe for her last run in this year’s X Games Women’s SuperPipe.
“She’s got this,” Z says from his spot next to me. But he sounds as tense as I feel.
It’s her first big competition since Hannah was born and I know how much it means to Cam to put up a good showing. To let the snowboarding world know that she’s still relevant. That a baby—and a season off—haven’t changed her focus or her talent.
Which they haven’t. I’ve been out on the powder with her for the last two months and she’s absolutely incredible—stronger and more fit than she’s ever been in her life. Yes, her first run was a little rocky, but shit happens. Maybe the pipe wasn’t smooth enough, maybe she was nervous, hell, maybe she just had an off run. It happens. But she can’t afford to have another bad run now. Not if she wants to medal.
Cam nails her first trick, a really clean, really pretty frontside 1260, has the crowd screaming. She gets really good speed coming out of it and rides the pipe up and into a double back alley-oop with really sick air.
“Holy shit!” Z breathes in what sounds like awe. “She’s stomping it.”
I know exactly what he means. Cam is getting revolutions on the pipe that are really rare for women—and really fucking awesome. All that running and weight-training we’ve been doing for the past six months is totally paying off.
“Go, Cam, go!” Ash shouts from my other side where he’s clutching Tansy’s hand like a lifeline.
“You’ve got this!” screams Ophelia.
And Cam does. She really does. Her earlier nervousness is obviously a thing of the past.
She comes out of the trick switch,
pushes it hard up the other side of the pipe where she lets fly with a backside 900 that she gets such wicked air on that she looks like she’s flying. My stomach jolts a little as she comes down—she’s really fucking high up there—but she’s moving so fast that I can barely register the clean landing before she’s slamming into another frontside 1260 with what might be the most perfect form I’ve ever seen.
“One more,” Ash says, his voice tense and exhilarated at the same time.
I know exactly how he feels.
My whole body tightens as Cam moves into her last trick. We’ve practiced and practiced it at home, but she only lands it about half the time. Of course, that’s because it’s a hard fucking trick that no other woman on the circuit can come close to doing, but that’s Cam, refusing to dial it back. Go big or go home, she told me right before the competition started. Right after she planted a big kiss on me in front of the crowd and the cameras.
She nails the upswing into the trick perfectly, hits off the lip of the pipe like the pro she is. She gets fucking sick air as she twists and twists and twists and lands the first ever YOLO flip executed in competition by a woman.
Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy shit. That was not the trick I thought she was going to do.
“Did she just—a YOLO flip? She just—holy—oh my—” Z is nearly incoherent, but then so am I, while Ash is just staring open-mouthed at my girl, totally stunned.
The crowd doesn’t have the same problem. They are going wild, screaming and yelling and chanting her name as she cruises into the end of the pipe with a snow-spraying flourish that has me grinning like a maniac.
She did it! She fucking did it!
Ash is whooping and hollering now—we all are, really. Except for Mitch, who is just standing there with the biggest shit-eating grin on his face that I’ve ever seen.
“She did great!” I tell him.