Page 102 of Near Miss

“I love you,” I whisper, and it’s so quiet I’m not even sure he’ll be able to hear me, but I think my heart might hold my blood hostage if I don’t say it.

He stills, the ridges of muscle that make up him pull taut. I can see them, the cords straining from his neck, down across his shoulders, to the curve of his arms. Beckett pulls his head back slowly, lips leaving my neck, and he hovers over me, eyes impossibly dark and cheekbones sharp enough to carve another piece of me away.

But that doesn’t bother me. It’s all his anyway.

“Say that again,” he breathes.

“I love you.”

“Again,” he asks, voice rough.

“I—” He rolls his hips upwards before my lips are done moving.

I moan the next word, head tipping back as I arch into him. “Love—”

Again, hips flex. His hand releases the pillow, finding my chin and bringing my eyes back down to meet his.

“You.”

He swallows the last word as he moves, and I think the whole idea of it—my love for him—finds its way to his heart.

His lips leave mine, trailing across my jaw, over the curve of my neck, until he presses his mouth to my ear.

I can hardly hear anything over my own heart, but I do hear the words he whispers to me.

“I love you, too.”

Beckett

The street leading up to her house looks the same—trees with branches starting to shed their leaves as the air turns colder, grass crisp with frost, and the sky milky in the early morning.

Her porch looks the same, too. Quiet. Unassuming.

Just the red brick of the house, two chairs with grey cushions angled towards one another, hidden by the white wooden arches that keep the whole thing invisible from the street.

It all looks like it did when we left it Monday morning to get away—no expectations, no pressure, just us.

But nothing’s the same at all, and I don’t think it ever will be again.

How could it be when she loves me and I love her?

Certainly not when I know what it’s like to have her—really have her. To be inside her when she says she loves me and I get to say I love her back. To watch her sleep, gilded by that stupid moon peeking in through the window that was lucky to look at her. To wake up with her and watch her scrunch her face when she takes her first sip of coffee. To have her beat me at everyboard game imaginable, to fall asleep in her lap while she reads, her fingers trailing along my scalp.

I’m pretty confident nothing ever mattered before this—not a single kick, not a single record. I thought I was real before—that she had taken those hands that save lives and decided to save mine, too.

But if someone was going to etch a date of birth on my tombstone, I’d ask them to get it right down to the very millisecond she whispered those words out into the world.

I love you.

I wince when I see the fallen leaves on the street crunch under my truck tires in the rearview mirror, as I pull up against the sidewalk and put it in park.

My grand plan of spending a couple days with no expectations had a fatal flaw—it didn’t include talking about what any of it meant.

I should have made that my one condition.

I might have even gotten something like that in writing, had I known how it was going to turn out.

Scrubbing my jaw, I turn towards her. “It was nice. To clear my head with you.”

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