Page 47 of A Night to Remember

“I’ll have you know,” he says, a little breathlessly, “thatCar and Driverpraised both the lengthandwidth of the 2016 Lincoln Navigator. It’s considered a luxurious ride.”

“Are we still talking about the car?” I ask, before beginning to ease him inside me. By now I ought to be used tohislength and width, but I’m not, not quite. The challenge of taking him in all the way turns me on, though, and now I go slow not only because I have to, but because I want to. I slide him in a little, then retreat, then a bit deeper, then retreat again, watching the sweat bead on his upper lip and forehead. I love the feeling of being in control and knowing that I have the power to please us both.

He almost ruins the moment, though, by trying to roar like a British lion just as I take him in up to the hilt. I laugh so hard that I collapse on top of him.

“What wasthat?”

“I was trying to be debonair. No good?”

“You sounded like a pretentious house cat being run over by a bicycle.”

He laughs his deep, rumbly laugh, but also starts thrusting his hips into mine, and suddenly I’m not laughing anymore. Instead I’m coming, hard, as he strokes my clit and spans both my breasts with one big hand. I clutch his chest and let myself scream, undoubtedly shocking our polite B&B hosts. Gabe flips me onto my back and keeps thrusting, setting fireworks off inside me again and again. After he comes, he looks down into my eyes and gives me his sweetest best-friend smile. I smile backup at him and brush his sweaty hair from his forehead. I feel incredibly lucky to have a friend like him: someone I can talk to, laugh with, and, now, have amazing sex with. I sure hope he’ll text me every once in a while after we both move away.

He rolls off of me and I snuggle into his side, breathing in the smell of soap and pine-forest cologne and sweat. We talk, drowsily, of this and that before falling asleep in each other’s arms.

The next day,we’re crammed into a booth at the café, with me, Molly, Daisy, and Hadyn, Gabe’s youngest nephew, on one side, and Gabe, Maddie, and Tyler on the other.

“So you’re telling me,” Maddie is saying, staring intently into my eyes with a hot chocolate mustache over her upper lip, “that there was totally room for Jack on that raft?”

“Totally,” I nod emphatically.

“So why didn’t Rose just scootch over?!” Molly, Meg and Jason’s oldest, demands.

We’d decided to join forces and take all of our babysitting charges sledding. Kentwood’s steepest hill has a smallish, okayish swimming pool at the top and metal Frisbee golf baskets scattered across the bottom. These jut about three and a half feet out of the ground and sport a shallow receptacle right at child-head height. Avoiding them is part of the fun of sledding in Kentwood—if you’re a kid. If you’re an adult, as Gabe and I quickly discovered, they scream CONCUSSION CONCUSSION CONCUSSION, and at one point we both had to fly down the hill to shove Maddie off her collision course. I’d reached her first and shouted “Watch out for the iceberg!” in as carefree a voice as I could muster. Then theyallwanted to play Avoid the Iceberguntil Gabe and I couldn’t take it anymore and bundled them off to the café, where we’d had to explain about RMS Titanic, the ship, and then, inevitably,Titanic, the movie.

Tyler and Daisy, Meg and Jason’s youngest, needed all the gory details about the shipwreck, so the two of them are hunched over Gabe’s phone, doomscrolling.

“They had nowhere near enough lifeboats and they didn’t even fill them all the way up!” Tyler exclaims.

“The water was so cold that you woulddie instantlyif you touched it!” Daisy practically shouts.

“So sure, Rose loved Jack, but if she had married him, or her despicable fiancé, she would probably have been a stay-at-home mom for the rest of her life, and she wouldn’t have been able to have cool adventures,” I explain to Molly and Maddie.

“Wait, what?” Molly objects. “She was engaged to two guys at the same time?”

“Wait, what?” Gabe objects. “You think she purposefully let Jack get hypothermia and die so she could, like, fly airplanes and ride horses on the beach?”

“I’m not saying shekilledhim,” I reply. “I’m just saying there wereadvantagesfor her to delay getting married for a decade or two.”

“Ouch!” Hadyn shouts, and for a second Gabe and I both think he’s responding to our debate, before we realize that he’s plunged his chubby fist into his hot chocolate to retrieve a marshmallow. Gabe grabs the cup before it spills onto our entire side of the booth and I dip a napkin in cold water to soothe his skin. I encourage him to fish out the rest of the marshmallows with a spoon—what a concept!—and Gabe orders a round of fries for everyone. As we munch, and the kids debate whether the wholewomen and children firstpolicy was fair and smear ketchup on their faces and chests and elbows, Gabe shoots me a look that says,We’re good at this. He is, that’s for sure. Thekids obviously adore him. And watching him wipe Maddie’s nose while simultaneously explaining to Hadyn that zipping up his coat will make himwarmer, notcolder, made my heart twist into knots that even Eagle Scout Gabe can’t untie.

Except for the close brush with a brain injury, my eyeballs shoot back.

Let’s pretend that never happened, his eyeballs reply.

I smile at him and he squeezes my knee under the table. But he seems contemplative as we herd the kids out of the café and into our respective cars.

“You okay?” I ask, touching his arm after he’s buckled Hadyn into his car seat. “Sure,” he says, unconvincingly.

“You know I would totally make room on the raft for you,” I tell him with a smile.

“Would you? Even if there were other people around? Even if you had someone else in your life?”

“What are you talking about?Yes,” I reply, feeling a little worried by his serious tone. “Wilson—” I begin again, but he interrupts me by pulling me to him with one hand and cupping my face with the other.

“I would encourage you to fly,” he says, looking straight into my eyes, “whether we were married or not.”

We’re just friends, I sternly tell my heart, which is racing toward the wordmarriedlike a 50,000-ton ship toward an iceberg. I know he doesn’t mean it. Surely he would tease me mercilessly if I acted like I took him seriously. I try to think of a joke to pull us back into comfortable fuckbuddy territory, but for some reason the words won’t come.

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