Page 48 of Something Like Sunflowers

Can I really control myself around him?

But yeah. I know I can. And I love a good smack talk before a competition, so I take it up a notch, making sure to wiggle my ass down over his crotch very, extremely, undoubtedly purposefully.

“Two can tease, Isaac.” I lean my head into the crook of his neck, arching my back as my lips brush his skin, pleased with myself when I see his throat constrict. On and off, I wonder if I can, very well, control myself around him for a month.

In his house. In his bed.

“You daydreaming again?” Hunter moves my legs to the side so he can hold me and look at me at the same time. My eyes bore into his, searching for answers I could just ask him to reveal to me with words, but for some reason, I can’t bring myself to ask the questions that would spark them. Even after all these years.

The way our breath mixes, until I’m not sure whose air I’m breathing anymore, takes hold of me, and then I’m kissing him again. Not carefully this time, but wildly. My teeth clank against his, hands roaming over his shoulders, squeezing his biceps and loving how tight they feel when he flexes beneath my hands, craving more when he grabs my throat and pulls me deeper into the kiss, like he’s demanding he have total control of every part of it, my mouth becoming thoroughly fucked by his lashing tongue.

“Shiiiiiit. I ain’t even got goats that horny, y’all,” Robbie observes, slamming his beer mug down on the table and breaking me out of my love spell. “Hundred bucks says they don’t just do the deed. These two’re fixin’ to get hitched by the enda this.”

“Deal,” I hear Lemon shout, smacking her hand on the table. And I’m not sure if I’m happy or upset she doesn’t think we’ll get married. I frown, thinking that over. Does she not have faith in our relationship?

But what the fuck am I thinking? We don’t have a relationship. I don’t want a relationship with Hunter.

We break away from the kiss, both of us noticing we’re halfway to losing the challenge and we haven’t even gotten to his house yet. And, well, it’s kind of true.

“I’m not worried,” I lie, twisting around and facing the table again. “I know I can do it, even if I were married to him. I could resist going all the way with him. Hunter, on the other hand, wouldn’t last a single night married to me without begging for it.”

“Pro’lly wouldn’t be able to put up with her bullshit,” Robbie chimes in, and he’s quickly smacked in the head by Lemon. “Ow.”

“What do you mean, I couldn’t stay married to you?” Hunter asks. “That’d be just about the easiest fuckin’ thing I’ve ever done.” His deep blue eyes roam my body possessively, and the way he makes my nipples hard with the promise in his stare is not just dangerous, it’s addictive.

“It’s what I’ve always wanted,” he tells me. Straight, honest, and outright.

My breath leaves my lungs with that admission; at how freely and publicly he offers it. Does he mean that?

“Even if there were no sex involved?”

“Yes,” he says simply.

“You’d want me for…just me?” I grind my teeth, slipping my finger beneath my hair tie and stretching it tightly, forcing the words from my lips. Words I speak to him alone, “Even though you know I’ll never have—”

He nods, cutting me off, and my breath hitches again.

“Why?”

“I’ve always wanted you for you, Dev. No matter what.”

I stall. Tears well in my eyes. And even though the sting is real, I will not… I will not cry. I’m not ready to let him see what this means to me. It’s the one wall I can’t lower so freely.

“Do you mean that, or are you just tipsy?” I ask, searching his blue eyes and needing desperately for the former to be so. Wanting to believe the things I’ve feared for so long might not be true. That I’m not too broken. That maybe there is a future for Hunter Isaac and me, despite the scars that will forever outline our love.

Even though I’ll never be a whole me.

And I don’t care that the whole table is watching us right now. This is monumental.

I need to know.

“Devyn Lynn Campbell,” he says, his blue eyes pinning me in place, brimming with an unyielding truth I can’t ignore, “I swear to all the stars in the sky and the mountains that kiss their light that I would marry you for a thousand reasons, and not one of them would be to change you.”

“I dare you,” I breathe.

Chapter 18

Devyn

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