I closed my eyes and shoved my face in his throat.
“It’s also over,” he went on.
“It’s over,” I agreed, holding him close.
“And bottom line, it meant you weren’t in Kentucky livin’ a good life without me but open for an approach. It might have sucked for a while but now we got the future we both didn’t think we would ever have, so it was worth every f**kin’ minute.”
I didn’t experience what he did, watching me, following me but I suspected he was right about that too.
“Yeah,” I replied quietly.
“Yeah,” he repeated, gathering me even closer.
I lay in his arms and knew I’d been giving. I knew I’d let him in. I knew he understood this and it was making him happy.
But I didn’t know if he understood it all.
So I gave it to him.
“Creed?” I called.
“Right here, baby,” he whispered.
Yeah he was. Right there. Now and forever.
Now and forever.
I tipped my head so the bridge of my nose rested along his jaw and whispered back, “No matter what’s in our future, no matter if our luck stays good or turns back to shit, from this moment to your last on this earth, know down to your f**king soul I love you. I trust you. You make me happy. There’s been no one but you and there never will be. Okay?”
I felt him lift his head then I felt him move so he could bury his face in my neck and his voice was gruff when he murmured into my skin, “Okay, my Sylvie.”
I drew in breath then reached with my lips to brush them against the skin of his neck.
He settled back, kept me close and ordered gently, “Sleep, baby.”
“Right, Creed.”
In Creed’s arms, sated by his lovemaking, knowing I’d wake up to him tomorrow, my mind cleared and as I’d been doing all night, I did as ordered and slept.
Chapter Twenty
A Few More Months
A cool spring evening in Kentucky, seventeen years earlier, Creed is twenty-three, Sylvie is seventeen…
“I hate him.”
Creed’s hand slid soothingly up my spine. “I know you do.”
It was late at night and we were lying in the dark in Creed’s twin bed.
I had not had a good day.
It started with my Mom calling for the first time in ages to tell me she was divorcing her husband and asking me if I wanted to come out to California after I graduated.
To this I told her that I’d lived without her in my life for years, she’d left me to Daddy and the stepmonster and now that she was again facing being alone and lonely and needed me, because she abandoned me when I needed her, I wasn’t available to plug that hole. I used different words but she got my drift and informed me that she wasn’t surprised, seeing as he’d raised me, that I’d turned out just like my father.
Then she hung up.