had found him. The world made sense. Content wasn’t the right word. Consumed wasn’t either. When it came to Turner, she was everything, every positive emotion all at once.
Nothing close to negativity could seep into their bubble. Not in that moment of that night. They were each other’s. As Turner gathered her against his side and she rested her head on his chest, Poppy wondered if it would always be the same way between them. To live with such completeness made her feel bad for all those who didn’t have it.
Love was real. It was hers. It was Turner’s. It belonged to them and they belonged to it.
Unwelcome reality began to trickle back in as the endorphins of satisfaction ebbed. They loved each other, but was it enough? Could love get them through what lay ahead?
NINETEEN
Shifting onto her side, Poppy laid her upper arm against the front of his shoulder, holding her head up with a hand in her hair. “We have to talk.”
“Okay,” Turner said, his fingers playing in the hair at her back.
His heavy eyes suggested either bliss or exhaustion, maybe a mixture of both, but she couldn’t pass up the opportunity.
“I love you.”
He frowned. “I love you too.”
“It’s not enough though, is it?”
“Enough for what?” he asked, angling his head on the pillow to get a better view of her.
“If love could wish all our problems away then they’d be gone already, wouldn’t they? I know I was cruel when you came here. Arriving like you did, fighting to see me, it was incredible. An amazing gesture that I flouted and I’m sorry I—”
“Hey,” he said, his fingers curling around the back of her head. “What’s going on here? You’re not a worrier. You don’t freak out like this for no reason.”
“But there is a reason,” she said, her hand leaping higher on his chest. “We have something to lose now. This isn’t like before when we were just all potential and possibility, now we’re real, tangible.” Her fingers curled, digging into his pec. “This is real.”
“And we’re not going to lose it. You don’t just fall out of love with someone overnight. We’re not going to wake up tomorrow and shrug our relationship off and go in search of something better.” Her head tilted, which put a smile on his face. “Because there is nothing better for us.”
“But we haven’t talked. We haven’t told each other what we want. We haven’t discussed what comes next. Our future.”
“Because it’s been a crazy few days. Baby, we don’t have to decide everything up front. Sometimes decisions will be made as we go along.”
“Okay,” she said, wondering why her mind was choosing that moment to freak out. “Okay.”
The adrenaline surging through her veins wasn’t subsiding. Amped to the point of agitated, Poppy flipped over to climb out of the bed.
“Where are you going?” Turner asked.
She strode over to the closet to go inside and retrieve pillows. “I don’t know the first thing about what you want,” Poppy said when she came out of the closet, hugging the pillows to her body. “You say all the time that I can have what I want, but I don’t know what you want.”
Going to the bed, she rested a knee on the edge, still holding the pillows.
Turner sat up to lunge over and snagged the corner of one of her pillows. “You,” he said, pulling her further onto the bed. “I don’t care about anything else.”
“But you do,” she said, letting go of the pillows to back away from the bed again. “You care about your mom and your sisters. You care about your friends. About the Venture. You care about a lot of things and I don’t want to be the reason you think you have to hide that. Why can’t you be honest with me about your feelings for something other than me? Do you think I’ll be angry if you have wishes of your own?”
“No,” he said, propping his weight on his elbows. “And you’re right, I do care about those things, but I trust you. You know I care about those things, I don’t have to hammer the point home. And you care about those things too. You care about my mom and my sisters and the guys… And after your reaction to the offer we got on the Venture—”
“Don’t,” she said, holding up a hand. “I don’t want to talk about any offer, much less where it came from.”