The cold rain was no longer a match for the hot pain that came from hearing those words.
“And I thought it was going to be difficult, at the very least, less than ideal, to spend a life with someone I didn’t love. But now,” she said, throwing an angry hand into the air, “Now I know I’ll have to live with the guilt of never telling him how I really felt. Every time someone tells me they’re sorry, sorry for me, I feel like a fake.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, my heart begging me, pleading with me, to make her talk faster, to make her words come quicker.
“He would have given me that ring, Hayes. He would have slipped it on my finger and told me he was promising to marry me one day. And I would have let him.”
“And?” I begged.
“And it would have been a lie,” she yelled. Rainwater flew off her lips, dripped from her eyelashes. “I lied to him for two years, maybe longer, and I definitely lied to myself.” She dropped her face into her hands, crying, shoulders shaking, and I didn’t dare try to guess what it was she meant.
“What was a lie?” I asked as I gently rested my hands on her shoulders.
“Everything.”
“Kenzie,” I said, stepping as close as I could get. My hands moved up her shoulders, across her neck, and came to rest on each side of her face. The last time my hands were on her face was the one and only time I’d kissed her. “What are you saying?”
“I didn’t love him, Hayes. I never fell in love with him, even though, sometimes, I wanted to. It would have been so much easier to love him instead of….”
“Instead of what, Kenzie?” I urged.
“Instead of you.”
She was looking up at me, but I didn’t see sadness in her eyes, I saw fear. Her words sank into me, absorbed into my skin, and flowed through my veins.
“Me?” My thumbs moved just barely over her cheeks as my hands slid to the back of her neck.
“It’s always been you.” Her words were just whispers, but they sounded hopeful and shameful at the same time. I brought her shivering frame closer to me, my forehead resting against hers. And the most wonderful part of it was that she let me. She came, willingly, into my arms, wrapping her own around my waist. “Hayes,” she said, just a breath, before I felt her lips press against mine.
She was kissing me. She was kissing me. And I only let my brain ponder that magnificent fact for a nanosecond before I started kissing her back. I’d relived our kiss from two years ago daily in my mind, thought about it many times, always with mixed emotions. Some days I was glad I’d taken what I thought was my one and only shot at kissing McKenzie. Other days I was absolutely overflowing with guilt for kissing my brother’s girlfriend. Most days though, most days, I was absolutely broken that it would never happen again.
And here she was, putting me back together again with her lips.
She kissed me slowly, tentatively, as if she were afraid I was going to stop her.
My fingers threaded through her hair, now drenched from the rain, and I gripped it, making sure she had nowhere to go but to me. Her lips were soft but cold, moving over mine as if I were fragile. I stepped into her farther, even though we were clinging to each other with no room between us, but pushing her back made her unsteady and forced her to hold on to me tighter.
I passed my tongue over the seam of her lips, hoping she’d give me the permission I sought. When her lips parted and a tiny sigh escaped her, I was done handling her gently.
My tongue swept over hers, licking her, tasting her, and a growl rumbled through my chest with the feeling of finally getting that part of her back. As I kissed her, my lips moving over hers, her lips responding with so much heat and need, I was aware of her body. Aware of the way she slowly softened against me, losing all the stiffness she’d held on to just moments before. Her hands gripped my shirt at my back, and when her fingers twisted in the material, she pressed herself against me even more. She was holding on to me because she had to; I had her at a disadvantage. But she was also clinging to me because she wanted to, I could tell. She told me in the way her lips sought mine out. If I moved left, she went with me, followed me. When I took her bottom lip between my teeth, sucking on it, she let me and her shuddering breaths told me she never wanted me to stop.
When our lips finally separated, it was only because we needed air, both of us panting to pull in as much as we could.
“Kenzie,” I said between dragging breaths, “I won’t let you go. I can’t walk away and pretend this didn’t happen. It’ll kill me if I do it again.”
“I wish you’d never walked away the first time.” Her eyes were so clear, her expression, for the first time in weeks, relaxed and sincere.
“What is this?” I asked on a breath, unsure if I wasn’t having some sort of hallucination, my hands back at the sides of her face, examining everything about her in that moment because I never wanted to forget what she looked like the instant I felt my life click into place.
“This is us.”
Chapter Ten
McKenzie