let them roll closed, breathing in a million memories of Nicholas.
I’m asleep when it sinks into my consciousness that I’m not alone. I open my eyes to the darkness, fuzzy-brained and not quite out of my dream yet. It’s late, after midnight. There’s a man lying next to me, in exactly the place he’s supposed to be. This is where he belongs, and yet it’s a lightning strike straight to the heart to see him here.
“What are you doing home?” I blink several times, waiting for him to disappear. I’m still dreaming.
“You missed me.”
“You came home because I missed you?”
He’s got his elbow bent on the pillow, palm under the back of his head, watching me fathomlessly. His other hand drapes across his stomach. “Yes.”
My pulse speeds up, because I’m in his room and he’s caught me. He drove home all night in the snow and the dark and found someone sleeping in his bed. This is where he belongs, but he might not say the same about whoever it is he sees when he looks at me. Which Naomi? Can he tell a difference?
He sits up, leaning over me. My vision is adjusting to the dark enough to clear the shadows from his face, and now I can see that his gaze is liquid. His lips are a soft curve. “I missed you, too,” he says, and presses those lips gently to mine.
I loop my arms around his neck and tug him closer, in case he has any ideas of retreating after one kiss. He smiles against my mouth, closes his eyes, and I melt into the feel of him against me. The kiss is a hungry, powerful force, but he breaks it so he can travel down and kiss my neck. My body reacts, breaking out into an inferno of heat, sensitizing, knowing he’s the only one who can give me what I want. Into my skin, he murmurs, “I’ve missed you everywhere.”
“Mm?”
“Here,” he says as his lips brush where my heart beats, letting the pain and ache bleed into his voice. “I’ve missed you here.” He kisses my mouth. “And here.” My fingers tunnel into his hair, and his turn to fists that burrow into the mattress, lifting his body over mine. He stares deeply into my eyes. “Here.”
The word is a pale breath.
“I’ve missed you, too,” I reply, the edges of my vision going gray and blurry. Nothing else exists right now. The world begins and ends with this man.
I don’t know I’m crying until he wipes it away and his own eyes shimmer with tears.
We deepen the kiss, and it says what we don’t have to. I tug him closer, closer, until we align all over. When we part for breath, I ask, “Do you know you’re my best friend?”
“Am I?”
His eyes are sapphires held in front of a roaring flame, glinting as they’re turned. I know every microscopic detail of his face. I know the shape of his brows for every emotion. He is the most beautiful man who ever lived, and at one time I couldn’t have said with any certainty what color eyes he had. He was no more memorable than a picture hanging on the wall that I’d long gotten used to. How many times did my gaze pass right over him, not realizing he was looking back at me? Always watching. Listening. Waiting.
“You are.” My heartbeat is painfully strong and my torso is a twisted rag. My lungs claw for oxygen. Another tear slips over my cheek, which he kisses away.
I’m falling apart, and I think that Nicholas sees.
His hand is warm as it passes through my hair. His eyes are so tender that my muscles involuntarily relax, fingers uncurling. He buries his face in my throat and inhales. “God, I’ve missed you. Naomi.”
My name trembles in the air, and speech has never been so hard to find. But he needs it. He needs me to give voice to my feelings, because he’s not a mind reader and it’s not okay that I soak up what he gives without offering myself in return. I can’t let him think he’s alone, not for one moment.
“I like it right here,” I tell him, cradling either side of his face between my hands. “You make me happy. It makes me happy that you came home because I missed you; I’m appreciative of everything you do, for me and anybody else. I’m lucky to be with a thoughtful man like you and I’m sorry