He looked at her, but he didn’t say anything, and she didn’t feel quite brave enough to keep going.
She wanted to go to Europe with him. That was the thing. All of these years that she had left to do things…they would be even better if she could do them with him.
“Happy birthday,” he said.
She hadn’t realized he’d known, and for some reason it sounded more like goodbye than a celebration.
“Thank you.”
She was forty-one. She knew more what she wanted now than she had at the beginning of the summer. But it wasn’t certain.
Dinner came, and then dessert, and she was still sitting with the weight of that revelation. She had thought she needed to be by herself for a while. That she couldn’t afford to be in a relationship. She couldn’t even think about marriage or anything like that. Because she needed to be… Open-minded or something. But the truth was, with Logan she was every bit herself as she was without him. But with him, she was happy. He gave so much to her. Then he took nothing at all. He was special. They might even be everything.
A partner in a way she’d never had before. But there was something sort of hard in his eyes and difficult to read, and it kept her from bringing that up. Kept her from saying it.
It made her feel like a coward.
Maybe she was one. But she loved him.
Now she knew she wanted more. Wanted all these years left to live to be with him. It felt so glorious and wonderful to know. It was like all the pieces of herself that hadn’t quite matched up for all of these years suddenly did. There was no tension. She wanted him. There was no reservation.
She would disappoint people. They wouldn’t understand. People would believe the worst of them. They wouldn’t know that Will had asked for an open marriage. They’d think that she and Logan had an affair in secret, because God knew they would’ve had the opportunity at any point over the years. Maybe even Will would believe that. She could understand why he might since there had been attraction between her and Logan even then.
Her moral high ground would be shot. The truth of it didn’t matter.
She didn’t need the moral high ground. She just needed him.
In the disappointment, the complications, all seemed like a fair price to pay.
For this level of happiness. Once upon a time, she had loved Will. She had chosen him forever because she was afraid. Because it put her life back together. Because it made difficult things neat again. Because it allowed them to have a perfect nuclear family without custody arrangements for half siblings, or any of those difficult things. Because she cared for him, and she was attracted to him, and she had loved him the most that she had ever loved another person.
But this was different.
She was choosing Logan not because it would make life easier. But because it would make it better. Because he made her better. They didn’t have kids together. They didn’t have a mortgage. Nobody would think that by being together they were doing the right thing.
This wasn’t for anyone else. This was a love that was between just the two of them, and she could honestly say that was not something she’d experienced before. She had let the weight of other people’s expectations inform her decision-making back when she had been younger.
She wasn’t doing that now.
Right now, she wanted this revelation to be hers. Only hers. They stayed in a beautiful hotel downtown, up on the top floor that overlooked the water and the city lights.
She took her time undressing, watching his face as he looked at her.
She still sensed a hardness there. Like a barricade. Like he was trying to hold something back, or keep her from saying something.
He probably was.
But he didn’t need to worry about her talking. Tonight, she just wanted to show him.
She moved across the room and wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing her naked body to his fully clothed one. He was a revelation every time.
They were.
He moved his hand down to cup her ass, and she knew she would never get tired of that feeling. Him, rough and big and hot. He made her feel beautiful. He made her feel sexy in a way that lingered long after he had stopped touching her.
He had transformed the way she felt about herself from the inside out. No part of her was left untouched.
It was her body and her soul. And her heart.
