“Say it again,” she demands, her words humming against my mouth.
“I love you,” I tell her. I show her again with another kiss, this one deep and fierce, and when we finally separate, short of breath, she looks up at me with an unfocused gaze and swollen lips.
“We skipped a lot of steps,” she says, her voice breathy.
Something in my core tightens, a sense of pride, that I did that. I made her struggle to speak. She pushes away, not a hard push, and I can’t stand the idea of space between us, so I lean down and kiss her again, running my tongue along the seam of her mouth, gently teasing it open, until she’s exploring me, tasting me, and it’s a damn near out-of-body experience.
No one has ever made me feel like this with a kiss.
“Levi,” she says after several minutes. She pushes against my chest. “I mean it. We’re jumping over some key steps here.”
“Are we? Or have we taken thousands more steps toward this than most people do before they get to this point? We know each other far better than couples who date for months. What do you need for us to know that we fit? That we’re supposed to be together?”
She steps away from me, and my hands slide from her body as she withdraws. “What would this mean for the future? Will you flutter in and out of Creekville a few times a year between assignments?”
“I don’t know.” I don’t point out that she hasn’t said how she feels, even if I can sense it in her kiss. But I’m a words guy, and I badly want them from her. I can wait, but I want them. “We can figure it out.”
“Can we?” she asks. “It’s more than a normal long-distance relationship. Even if you lived in DC full-time and we only saw each other on the weekend, that would be long-distance. But you’re in entire other countries most of the year. How would this even work?”
“I don’t know that either.” But I’m not discouraged. She kissed me back. She used the word “relationship.” It’s a good word to start with. Her gears are turning. That’s something. A good something.
“Creekville has never been enough for you, but it’s all I’ve ever wanted. How does that fit into everything?”
I put my hands on her shoulders and pull her against me, slowly, letting her know she can walk away the second she wants to. “Honestly, Tay, I didn’t know what I was here to do until I did it. I haven’t thought all of this through, but I’m not worried about it. I know what I want now. It’ll take creativity and compromise, but we can figure out the logistics. Are you up for figuring this out as we go, even if we aren’t sure yet what happens next?”
She leans into me, curling her body against mine. She stands that way for a long time. I can almost hear the whirs and clicks of her brain sorting through this.
Finally, she straightens enough to meet my eyes. “What if this changes everything?”
I smooth back a piece of her hair, tucking it behind her ear. I study her face. Her gorgeous, expressive, tempting face. That mouth. Those eyes that say so much of what she’s thinking even when she’s quiet.
“We’re past that point. It’s changed. It’s a question of how it plays out next, and that all comes down to how you feel.” I cup her jaw and brush my thumb over her lips. “You haven’t said.”
She rests her head on my collarbone. “You’re asking me to wrap my head around a future that has a big blank in it. I need to think.”
It’s not what I want to hear, but I’ve forced this discussion, and I have to accept it. “We’ve got time.” I hope this is true. I hope that she’s much closer to a tipping point than she looks right now, and that she tips my way. “So what do we do—”
A knock at the front door interrupts us. We give each other a startled glance, and I walk over to open it.
My neighbor is on my doorstep. “Hey, Jon.”
“Hey,” he says. “Have you tried your power?”
“Generator’s running. We’re good.”
“I mean the house power. Might be okay now.”
I wonder what he’s basing this on, since he never lost power. “Sure, I’ll do that.”
“I’ll go cut the generator for you and you can check.”
“Yeah, thanks,” I say, closing the door as he heads down the front porch steps.
A minute later, the generator quiets outside. Taylor looks at me, shrugs, and reaches for the nearest light switch. The hall light leading to the grandkid rooms comes on.
“It’s back,” I say.
“It is.” She opens the back door and leans around the frame. “You’re right, it works,” she calls. I hear Jon call something, then she calls back to him, “Thank you! We appreciate it!”
