Page 78 of Love You Truly

And I love resting my face on his chest after he kisses me beyond reason and makes me come with his long fingers and tongue.

I want to fall asleep right here with my arm over his stomach and his hands encircling me.

“I love you, Mallory.”

He says it so quietly, almost like a quiet breath of words, that I’m not sure I heard him right. He didn’t just tell me he loves me. No. If he really meant to say those words and have them mean what they mean, he’d have made a bigger deal of saying them.

He wouldn’t just…exhale them. Maybe I didn’t even hear what I think I did. Or maybe he tossed the phrase at me, offhand, like I’ve done with friends. “Love ya, babe.” Only, I don’t really have friends like that, friends who I really love.

And don’t say things like that to people unless I really love them. So far, those people only really include my parents and my dog. And it’s not the same, not the same at all.

Did he really just say he loves me?

Okay, great. Now I’m not going to sleep at all. I replay the last few seconds over in my mind and decide that either I misheard him or he said the words so casually that I shouldn’t read anything into them. If he meant to tell me he loves me—that he’s fallen in love with me—surely, he’d say it in a more direct way. He’d declare it like people do in the movies or in books.

He’d make a thing of it and I’d get weepy and tell him I love him too and he’d respond with how he’s been in love with me since he first saw me and worried I’d never feel the same way about him, so he waited. And I’d say I worried he just wanted to be my friend.

And now I’m in the middle of an unwritten Jane Austen novel of my own making and I most definitely won’t be falling asleep because I need to keep writing and see how it ends.

Next to me, Dash moves to wrap himself around me, curling me into his chest, which I can feel rising and falling against my back with each breath. In moments, my own breathing seems to synchronize with his, and now we’re like one being, lifted to life by the air in our lungs, inhaling to bring ourselves flush against each other. Exhaling to bring ourselves even closer.

I start to get restless in Dash’s arms, struggling to turn my head to see his face. I need to see his face to understand whether he meant anything by his words.

“Shh,” he breathes against my ear, pulling me closer and wrapping an arm around me. Cupping one breast possessively, he dares me to flinch. I don’t. It feels too good.

“Dash,” I whisper in one last-ditch attempt to have a conversation.

“Go to sleep.”

His voice sounds half sleepy, so I tell myself to stop thinking. That only semi-works, so I allow myself to get comfortable in Dash’s arms and lie in bed, listening to his soft snoring. Meanwhile, I let my brain wander.

The first place it goes is down Love Alley, a place I’ve been avoiding successfully since our wedding out of sheer protectiveness. I don’t want my heart to get any ideas.

And now, apparently, all protective layers have been stripped away, and my heart is beating out of my chest, chock-full of ideas. All of them revolve around how I feel about Dash, my husband, the man who seems to understand me better than anyone else I’ve ever known—I’ve been trying to resist wanting more, but my resistance is slipping.

The longer I lie here awake, the less I can deny that I am, in fact, in love with Dashiell Corbett.

Oh, for heaven’s sake, how did I allow this to happen?

And because I am writing the dialogue for both sides of my debating brain, I provide an answer. I fell in love with him because he’s everything I’d want in a real husband. And he’s kinder to me than I am to myself.

It’s then that the other side of my brain chimes in with a solution—I need to create some distance and let my feelings ratchet down. It’s the only way I’ll make it through a year of marriage without losing my damn mind or falling so hard in love that there will be no reeling myself back from the abyss.

And there is an abyss. Big and deep and a long way down to the bottom. I know because I experienced it when I told the one man I ever felt that strongly for that I loved him. As soon as I said it to Felix, he grew distant. Cold. Disinterested. The chase was over, he told me.

He still wanted to get married because he considered me some sort of prize, and I went along with it anyway because I hoped I’d be able to win him back somehow. It never happened. I never made him love me because he wasn’t capable of it.

So I stuck with him for a while because I’m not a quitter. I stayed in a loveless marriage that felt more like a business transaction than any millisecond of the deal Dash and I struck. It makes me all the more determined to keep Felix out of my life now, but it also makes me scared to death to feel what I do for Dash.

I need to talk myself out of it. I should be able to do that, no problem. Mind over matter.

Dash’s leg falls over mine and he tucks me against him a little tighter. I feel my whole body give in to the feeling of being an extension of his. Like we belong together.

It’s enough to make my muscles relax and my heart unclench. I feel myself calm and begin to drift off to sleep.

Mind over matter can happen in the morning.

CHAPTER 28

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