Her words were filled with the same childish laughter. “No, you silly, butterflies don’t have noses. They smell with their antennas and taste with their feet.” She said it as if it were of the utmost importance, my sweet child thinking it her duty to enlighten him on every single detail she knew about butterflies.
And for the last two weeks, she’d been doing it every chance she got.
Hands stuffed in his pockets, a grin slid across that handsome, handsome face, and my heart beat erratically, a wild crash of foolishness as I watched him interact with my daughter so effortlessly.
“Now that just sounds gross, Kallie. Tasting with your feet?” he said, sparring with her more. He shot me a little wink when I smiled up at him. I loved how he humored my chattering child. Loved how his eyes crinkled at the corners when he did. Loved how he looked with the last of the sun’s rays slanting across his face, twilight glinting in those dark grey eyes, and shadows playing along his strong jaw.
Most of all, I loved him here, at my side, as fleeting as I knew it would be, as terrified as I was of having to let him go.
Kallie huffed, my precious child skipping along beside me. “It’s not gross!”
“Are you crazy? What if you tasted food with your feet?” he teased.
Kallie’s little nose scrunched up at the thought. “No way!” She laughed, grinning widely. “I don’t wanna taste nothin’ with my feet.”
“But I thought you said you were a butterfly?”
Those giggles just kept flowing, and her shoulders lifted up toward her ears, her body twisting up in a little girl’s pleasure. Joy radiated from every inch of her.
A breeze rustled through the heavy canopy of trees hugging us from above, the cool evening brushing at our skin. We slowly wove through the crowds and browsed through the seemingly endless rows of vendor tents set up for the craft fair at the park in the center of town. A jazz band played at the end of the park on an elevated stage, and the smell of open barbecue pits and deep fried churros floated on the easy air.
Sebastian hooked his arm casually around my neck.
“Good idea, yeah?” he asked as he leaned down and pressed a kiss to my temple.
I beamed up at him as if I were a little girl, too. One who’d just discovered that knights in shining armor really did exist and this one had come to rescue me from my loneliness.
It had been two weeks since Sebastian had spent that first night irrevocably altering something inside me. Two weeks since he’d shattered me in the best ways possible…then walked out my door and proved he held the power to shatter my heart. But it’d been just as long since he’d turned around and come back to me.
Since he’d stayed.
In moments like these, it was easy to pretend that he always would.
We’d spent so much time together, it was becoming hard to remember what it was like before he’d been there, the man making up ideal days full of laughter and ease, perfect nights spent beneath him and above him, our bodies alive, and my heart forming a million memories to sustain me when he was gone.
Because below it all, there always remained the current of the charade we both knew we were playing, that as truthful as our touches and time were, there was a false security in them, a danger that was lurking just beneath the surface. He was still a man I knew so little about, his words always vague but the meaning so transparent. In the cover of darkness, I’d whisper questions to him, desperate to know him more. But he held back, only admitting that he needed me, needed someone who didn’t look at him through the past, but instead, lived with him here in the present.
Still, I felt closer to him than I had with anyone else in a very, very long time.
Well, in ever.
He nuzzled his nose behind my ear, and a shiver rolled down my spine, settling in my belly where this bundle of energy thrived, a constant chaos of excitement, a kind of happiness I’d never experienced—as dangerous as I knew it was.
“Tonight’s perfect,” I whispered, and he pulled me a little closer, the tension that continuously roiled between us mellowed and tempered in the relaxed mood.
“Who’s hungry?” he asked, the question directed at Kallie.