“Because I thought you might want to spend a month in Europe.”
“Seriously?” She stopped walking, and there they were, in a parking lot, bathed in a fluorescent glow.
A mirror of other times they’d been together. Fighting, kissing.
“Yes. Really. I don’t want to wait.” His voice dropped lower, and it made her giddy.
“I don’t either,” she said.
Because there was no next time around. There was just this time.
She and Logan were making the absolute best of this time.
It was so funny. She had come to this very restaurant a year and a summer ago, and she had felt like her life had fallen apart.
If she had only known…that she had needed everything to fall apart so she could put it all back together in this different shape.
She started to move to the car, and he caught her, dragged her back to him and kissed her. Hard. Like the first time. Like in Tahoe.
But more. With everything.
With all of him.
He held nothing back. Not with her, not anymore.
They got into the car, and she remembered, viscerally, that first time. That first trip.
She’d been driving into the unknown.
They still were.
But it didn’t scare her. Not anymore.
That day, she hadn’t known who she was. Apart from her marriage, apart from how people in town saw her. Now she did.
She looked down at her tattoo, which had become a reminder of so many things. But most of all, it was a reminder to be herself. It was a change she’d made that she didn’t hide, and didn’t want to.
“Just so you know,” she said. “You’re the love of my life. My real life. I remember once I told you that you, wanting you, wasn’t my real life. That it was just me in a crisis, but it was me not able to hide. It was me without my walls. Without denial.”
He turned to look at her, and he gave her that smile. She could feel it, all the way to her toes, with no reservations at all.
“And I love you. With all of my heart. It’s a hell of a thing. You should look in the back seat.”
“Is this a pickup line?”
“It’s not. Look in the back seat.”
“Our romance is dead,” she said, turning and seeing two pieces of luggage sitting on the back seat. “We’re not going to Europe now, are we?”
“No. But I thought since Chloe and the boys were leaving, we might as well go on another road trip.”
“Where to?”
“You’ll see.”
They drove for half the night and slept in a cheesy roadside motel—Samantha did use the coin-operated bed, just for fun. There were also mirrors on the ceiling, which she tried to be horrified by. But she liked the view. So she couldn’t be too mad about it.
They got up early, and she was cranky and sleep-deprived while they continued on into Arizona. It was amazing, how she felt nostalgia for that time already. There was something she loved about that.
