Page 52 of All the Beautiful Things
* * *
Hudsonand I stepped off the elevator in our apartment building. After more dancing, mostly fast songs, I ended up laughing so much my cheeks and stomach would still hurt in the morning. Hudson allowed me to pretend there wasn’t a cavern between us I wasn’t sure how to breach.
We’d been mostly silent on the way back to the condo building, talking of the wedding. Pleasantries shared like strangers with a tangible pulse of electricity constantly sparking between us.
He walked me to my door where my thoughts were jumbled. To the woman in the restroom who mentioned him to me, mentioned on their date that he was interested in someone else.
That was before everything… before I’d agreed to anything and I already consumed him to that degree. So why in the hell was I hesitating?
“Thank you, for bringing me home,” I said, unlocking my door and looking up at him.
“Anytime.”
His smile was sad.
He’d made himself so clear.
More tears burned my eyes. God, I hated them. Despised them. This was not the first time we’d had an awkward encounter at my door or ending to a night.
This time, it was my breach to heal. I could do this.
I could take a step toward trusting him again. I could give him a piece of me. What had Ellen said all those weeks ago? One day at a time.
After all Hudson had shown me, after all he’d given me, I could give him one day at a time.
I spun on my heels and lifted my chin. “Hudson—”
And he stole the breath from my lungs and every hesitation in my blood with a sentence.
“I fell in love with a woman in a photograph before I ever met her.”
My jaw dropped and before I could gather my wits to bring him inside, to tell him I understood, he continued.
“I fell in love with a woman through stories of my dying sister. While the end of her life was coming much too soon, I was, for the very first time, looking forward to mine finally starting.”
“Hudson.” I pressed my hand to his cheek, and he closed his eyes.
He groaned at my touch and it was so heady to be needed this badly by a man who would flay himself at my doorstep, showing me his need and vulnerability.This.This is what I’d been waiting for, to see beneath the shell. “Tell me—”
I didn’t need him to finish. It all came to me in the blink of an eye. The same words he’d said on the dance floor. “I think that was it.”
Tell me what I have to say. What I must do.
And he’d hit that out of the park with a grand slam.
His jaw snapped closed right before a wicked, heated expression twisted his lips and his eyes gleamed with victory.
I stepped away from him, opening my door and kicked off my shoes. “Do you want to come inside?”
* * *
The door closedbehind Hudson and sucked all the oxygen out of the room with the click.
“What made you change your mind?”
My gaze swept his frame. Still in his tuxedo from the wedding. The tie gone and last I saw, thrown into the back of his truck. The top button undone. He was rumpled but still the most handsome man I’d ever laid eyes on. The kindest man I’d ever met.
And he loved me.
