“It’s okay. Um, I’m on the pill,” she informs me.
“I know this.” I tear open the foil packet and sheath myself, growing even harder because she is watching so closely. The streetlights peeking in from the half-open blinds light her up like she is made of something other than skin. Something shiny and beautiful. And mine. “I’m still going to be careful with you. Always. Until . . . until you don’t want to be careful anymore.”
A slow smile spreads across her lips. “You’re always looking out for me,” she whispers as I lower myself back inside her, bracing myself above her by lacing our fingers together as I did before.
“Always.”
Tangled together, telling truths and swearing never again to keep secrets, we bond in a way I never knew was possible.
Dixie Lark is as much a part of me as my past. Because she is my future.
I don’t know why it took me so long to see, why I got caught up in the short term and failed to see how powerful what we had was, or the kind of future our love is capable of providing.
Something about her song, about the way she trusts me so implicitly, to hold her, to kiss her, to be inside her—I finally understand what an honor and privilege that is now. She bared her soul and I decided to finally bare mine right back.
“There’s nothing I wouldn’t trade to make your dreams come true,” I tell her in bed the morning of the Phi Kap show. “You know that, right?”
“This is my dream come true,” she tells me, looking up at me with those endless blue pools. “This and the band finally making it.”
“Working on that last one,” I say as I take her hand in mine and kiss the back of it softly.
“And . . . I want Liam to be safe. I can’t stop thinking about him.” Her voice lowers. “He’s so much like you, Gav. And I learned so much more about you by getting to know him.”
“You do have a thing for us troubled black sheep, don’t you?”
“What if they give him back to his dad? What if—”
“Don’t think like that. Sheila is working on it and Ashley might own us for the rest of our lives but she’s going to do what she can, too.”
“She will never own you,” Dixie growls like an angry kitten. “I mean it, Gavin.”
I chuckle lightly. “I know, Bluebird. The only one that owns me is you.”
“You’d do well to remember that, Garrison.” She pins me with a glare before pouncing on my chest and covering me with kisses.
“Yes, ma’am.”
She collapses on my chest, both of us still too tired for more lovemaking. I think we’ve set some records in the past twenty-four hours. “So you never told me about your mom or what happened with the charges filed against you. I was going to ask yesterday after rehearsal, but . . .”
But we didn’t exactly use words to communicate yesterday.
“Ashley was able to get Carl to drop the charges by threatening him with Mrs. Lawson’s eyewitness testimony that he assaulted Liam first. I let the trailer get hauled away since my mom had stopped coming home anyway.”
“About time,” Dixie huffs.
“I know. I guess I felt I owed her since she bailed me out the night of the accident.”
Dixie stiffens in my arms.
“I would never hurt you or Dallas intentionally. You know that, don’t you? Believe me, I would rather break every bone in my own body with a crowbar than cause either one of you an ounce of pain.”
She nods against my skin. “I know.” Her voice is so soft I can barely hear her.
I tilt her chin to face me. “Bluebird, you are now and will always be the most important thing to me. I won’t let anything jeopardize what we have, even my own stupid self.”
“Promise?” She is so open, her expressive eyes pleading with me to give her everything that I am. Beautiful and perfect even though they say no one is perfect. My girl is, though. Perfect for me anyway.
“I promise. From here on out, it’s you and me against the world.”