Keeping Secrets in Seattle - By Brooke Moss Page 0,93

the exit, he promptly whistled for a cab, never once letting go of my hand, his fingers tracing circle after circle on the overheated skin of my wrist.

“What about your car?” I noticed my lipstick had left a small smudge on his collar, and I reached to wipe it.

“I had a drink. Better safe than sorry.” He pulled me against him as we stood underneath the restaurant awning. Gabe buried his face in my neck while we waited, and some people who were lingering near the entrance turned and stared.

I giggled. “Good Lord, where is that cab?”

He cupped my face and beamed at me. “I’m never going to let you go again, Vi.”

“You couldn’t get rid of me if you tried.” I closed my eyes, savoring the moment.

When his mouth brushed against mine, my spine melted into butter. A cab rolled up in front of us, tooted its horn, and when we were in the backseat, we picked up where we’d left off in the hallway. We kissed and kissed and kissed, occasionally stopping to ask the cab driver how much further we had to go, but immediately getting right back to it. The way his lips felt on my mouth, my face, my neck, made my head spin like a top as the cab wove through the thick Seattle traffic. It was like a whirling ride at the fair, and I was completely drunk with anticipation.

As the cab sped along West Galer street, the cabbie turned around and scowled at us. “You better not mess up my cab!”

Laughing breathlessly, we pulled apart, and I curled myself around Gabe’s side with my legs draped over his lap. “Sorry, sir,” I mumbled.

Gabe ran a hand through my hair, bringing it to his nose and drawing in a deep breath. “I’ve dreamt about this since I was sixteen years old,” he whispered.

“I have, too.” I traced every edge on his face, memorizing every detail. It was like a dream to be lying with him, our limbs entwined. “It’s like a dream, and at any second, I’m going to wake up, and it will all be gone.”

He brought my hand to his mouth, kissing my knuckles one by one. “It’s not a dream.”

My skin heated under his lips. “Gabe…”

“Vi, this is forever.” He leaned forward and pressed a kiss to my forehead. “If you’ll have me.”

I answered him by sliding onto his lap and grasping his face in my hands. When my lips opened against his, he growled, and his fingers gripped my hips. I heard the cabbie grunt his disapproval from the front seat, and Gabe released one of my hips to dig in his pocket.

“I’ll give you fifty bucks extra if you speed it up,” he called to the driver, grinning at me. “I need to take the woman I love home.”

Epilogue

Gabe

Violet kept her job working at The Funky Fox after Lizzy made her the salon floor manager, and she moved her things into my apartment on Queen Anne Hill two weeks after her birthday. During our first year together, we spent our nights watching movies while lying in bed eating kimchi and bulgogi, making love until we were dizzy, and talking until the sun filled my bedroom in the morning.

It was everything I’d ever envisioned our life together to be. Maybe even more.

One year later, on Vi’s twenty-seventh birthday, I asked for her hand in marriage. We were at a Mariners game, and I proposed to her on the JumboTron during the seventh inning stretch. She cried, and we were joined shortly thereafter by both of our families, who’d been sitting several rows behind us. It was tacky, and exactly what Violet had always wanted.

We were married in a tent in our parents’ backyard on Halloween night. Five months after my proposal. Seventeen months after moving in together. Ten years and five months after breaking up in the hallway of Wallingford High. Twenty-one years and two months after laying eyes on each other on the playground of our grade school.

I quit working at the ad firm and opened my own graphic design company a few years after we were married. It didn’t pay as much, but my priorities changed once Vi came back into my life. Love, family, home…those are the things that really mattered. I make enough to provide for my own, and not much extra. I’m okay with that, because I get to lie next to Violet every night. It doesn’t feel like a sacrifice when her pulse