I complete my walkthrough of the house in record time—bumping up the thermostat to ensure the pipes won’t freeze as the nights grow colder, and checking that Jamison took out the trash after his friend from Atlanta used the house last week—and am back outside in five minutes.
But Naomi is…nowhere to be seen.
I turn in a slow circle, surveying the backyard, but there’s no sign of her. I’m about to call her name when she shouts from overhead, “Hey! I’m up here. In the tree house. It looks exactly the same!”
I tilt my head back to see Naomi hanging out the window we installed together during the summer we spent transforming the tree house into our own private hideaway. We added a second room, ran electric from the house, and made a bed out of foam and an old feather mattress that we covered with plastic sheeting when it wasn’t in use.
The mattress had eventually gotten moldy and had to be thrown out, but not before we made some amazing memories.
As I climb the wooden ladder, those memories flash on my mental screen.
Images of Naomi in a bikini top and cut off shorts, swaying back and forth in the hammock while she reads our summer literature assignment aloud and I whittle a piece for the chess set I’m making for her birthday. Memories of picnics and ghost stories and nights spent in the bed we’d made, making love until eleven minutes to midnight, leaving ourselves two minutes to get dressed, one minute to get down to my truck, and seven to race across town to the Whitehouses’ before her curfew.
They’re some of my best memories.
Some of the most wonderful moments of my life.
For the first time in years, it feels okay to admit that. And when I reach the top of the ladder—meeting Naomi’s gaze across the refuge from the world we created when we were kids—I can tell she feels the same way.
Years have passed. We’ve both suffered and celebrated and changed, but she’s still so special to me. And she always will be.
We cross the room, meeting in the middle and coming together without a word, our lips colliding with enough heat to melt the last of my resistance. I stroke my tongue into her mouth, smoothing my hands down her back to squeeze her ass as we kiss like starving people desperate for their first meal in weeks.
I feel like I’m starving, like I’ll die if I don’t get closer to her.
“Need you,” I murmur against her lips, my throat tight.
“Yes. Please, yes.” She sighs, clinging to my shoulders as I ease her down to lie on the leaf-strewn floorboards.
It would probably be smarter to wait a few more weeks, a few days at least—or at least long enough to get out of this tree and into a bed—but right now I don’t care about smart.
I only care that the woman I’m falling in love with all over again, so much harder than the first time, is in my arms, wrapping her leg around my waist as I fist her skirt in my hand and draw the silky fabric up her even softer thigh.
Chapter Sixteen
Naomi
This is so right. So damned right.
The inner voice doesn’t offer a whisper of protest as I pull Jake closer, shivering as his calloused hand skims higher on my thigh.
And thank God for that.
Because this is right. Jake’s lips on mine, his taste flooding my mouth, his heat all around me as his fingers slip beneath the waistband of my cotton panties…
Nothing has ever felt this right.
For the first time in so long, I feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. Jake is the answer to every question, the balm to every hurt. Being with him—by his side, in his life, able to share every innocent and not-so-innocent pleasure and to love him every moment of every day—is all that matters.
The rest is just background noise.
He strips my panties down my legs and tosses them onto the tree house floor, then stretches back on top of me. His lips claim mine as he cups my breast through the thin fabric of my dress and the certainty that this is it, everything we’ll ever need, settles inside me like an oak tree putting down roots.
This new love growing between us is something to be treasured and protected, not poked and prodded until it’s full of holes.
Telling Jake about what happened with Jamison fifteen years ago might ease my guilty feelings, but it will serve no other purpose. It will only hurt him and me and put our budding relationship in jeopardy.
And for what?
It’s eons in the past. It was a weird night made possible by two dumb, drunk kids and has no bearing on the present.
What really matters is the beautiful, hope-filled now, and the future Jake and I are going to build. Together.