by Brianna Cash
“You can; you’re one of the bravest people I’ve ever met. Seven words, SD. Open your eyes for seven words. If you still want me to leave after that, close those gorgeous green eyes again and you’ll never hear another word from me.”
“Promise?”
My heart stutters in my chest. Leaving her will be the hardest thing I’ll ever do, but if it’s what she wants, I’ll do it. Instead of brushing away the new tears with my thumb, I press my lips against each of her cheeks, knowing I’m the reason for her pain and I might never get to kiss her again. Then I rub my nose against hers, wishing, praying—again—that she’ll smile at me once my confession is out there. “Promise.”
Those enchanting eyes lock on mine. She blinks away fresh moisture, and I take a heavy breath, wanting to hold onto this moment. This will all work out, right? I didn’t ruin my chance with her, did I?
“Seven words,” she demands quietly, her jaw tight.
My lips twitch at her impatience. She’s not holding onto this moment quite as tightly as I am. I need to tell her now, while she’s meeting my gaze head on. While I have her undivided attention. When it’s just the two of us, and I know she believes in magic and I want so badly to eat cake with her every day and get fat and happy.
Sweeping my thumbs across her cheeks, I lick my lips, wetting them, needing this to come out perfectly, so she doesn’t ever question it.
“I’m in love with you, Sadie Dietrich… And I’m sorry I screwed this up before we ever got to fully enjoy our magic.”
Her eyes close.
My heart pounds against my ribcage.
She wants me to leave?
But she loves me, and I love her!
Why would she want me to leave?
I swallow, closing my own eyes and dropping my forehead onto hers as I try to steady my erratic breathing.
I can’t lose her. She’s under my skin, inside my head, the only thing my heart has ever truly wanted.
I already lost her, though. I didn’t tell her about Chris when I should’ve. I didn’t want to rehash the embarrassing parts of my life. But if I’m not willing to share the hard parts, we’ll never get through anything. And I wasn’t willing to share the hard parts when it would’ve made a difference.
Our first major disagreement will also be our last.
“I’m so sorry, SD.”
My apology is punctuated by my lips gently brushing her forehead. If she doesn’t want me here, she certainly won’t want me kissing her the way I want to. I suck in another heavy breath, readying myself to let her go forever. I promised I would; she trusted me enough to ask for that promise, I can’t go back on that now.
My hands drop to my sides.
Her fingers are still around mine.
Is she intentionally holding on?
Does she not want me to leave?
My eyes blink open. I fully expect to see her closed eyelids. Instead, I stare into the most beautiful color green I’ve ever seen.
She gives me a small shrug, with an equally small smile. “That was more than seven words.”
My lungs stop working. She’s smiling at me. Smiling! “Should I…” I clear my throat so I can talk above a hoarse whisper and try again. “Should I take the rest back?”
That smile grows. Her hands leave mine to twist my shirt in her fists and pull my body against hers. “Absolutely not. I want them all. Although you really should’ve started with them.”
“Which ones?”
“All of them. The apology first. Then the ones about love. You should’ve gotten that out before you stepped into my apartment.”
My hands gravitate to her hips, holding her close as I relax into this—into her—when she giggles. That green is still staring me down, so I glance toward her closed door, then back at her. “What would’ve happened if I’d given you those words before coming in here?”
Her hands release my shirt and slip into my hair, tugging my lips that much closer to hers. “We’d be eating cake right now, 736.”
“For real or code?”
“Code. We would’ve saved real for after.”
She grins again, then closes her mouth over mine, kissing me the way I wanted to kiss her earlier, when I thought I’d lost my chance and I’d never get to kiss her again. I break it briefly, needing to explain myself. “I’m still young and stupid.”
“Jesus!” Her hands slide under my shirt, pushing it over my head and tossing it across the room. “Am I going to have to start all over with your lessons?”
“Definitely.” I pull her shirt off, too, loving where this is going. “I won’t be done with my lessons until you’re at least ninety-three.”
A laugh escapes before she locks it down to narrow those eyes at me, doing her best to look stern. “You’re going to need more than a year of lessons. You need to gain a lot of experience from me.”
“Sadie.” I cup her cheeks in my hands and lock my eyes on hers, wanting to drown in their endless depths until my last breath leaves my body. “You can teach me whatever the hell you want for the rest of our lives.”
A bigger smile tugs at the corners of her mouth. “Let’s start with something really important, then. Possibly the most important lesson there will ever be. We’ll call it lesson number one. Are you paying attention, young and innocent Owen Conrad?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
After tipping her head back in a very sexy laugh, she brings us back together, letting her lips move against mine. Her breath fills my mouth as she whispers her instructions. “Tell me you love me. Start and end your day with those exact words and say it as often as you feel it in between.”
I nip at her lips, needing to feel them against mine again. “I love you, Sadie.”
She rubs our noses together, like I did earlier, but she’s smiling and more hopeful than I’ve ever seen her. “I love you, too, Owen.”
A new idea comes to me. A crazy, insane, perfect idea.
“You should move in with me, so I don’t have to start and end my day by calling or texting you…”
Her hands move to my belt buckle, her patience gone. “That’s moving kind of fast, isn’t it? Maybe we should go on our first date before we move in together. You haven’t even asked me out yet, Owen.”
I grab her hands so she’ll meet my eyes again. “Yes, I did. In the Caribbean. You weren’t interested in anything with me that involved clothes, remember? And I thought you wanted to love me, not date me.”
“That’s true… On both accounts.”
My lips fall against her neck, my hands to her hips, as she goes back to unfastening my belt. “I love you, Sadie.”
“That does have a nice ring to it. Waking up in your arms and hearing that would be nice, instead of waking up alone and having to get my phone first.”
I have no issues resorting to bribery. “I’ll be your big spoon every night.”
Her eyes light up. “Promise?”
“Promise, Sadie, love of my life.”
“Ok, maybe don’t say it every time you feel it. I like actual conversations, too.”
“You know what I like?” She glances at me as she finally gets my pants undone and I give her a smirk. “Cake. Lots and lots of cake. Only with you, though. Are you hungry right now?”
“Famished,” she purrs, reaching inside my boxer briefs. “You make a damn good cake, Owen, whether we’re talking in code or not.”
I groan as she takes me in her hands. “Can you be twenty-eight today, instead of ninety-two?”
She arches a brow. “Why does it matter?”
“The things I want to do with you require a certain level of endurance and flexibility a ninety-two-year-old can’t possibly possess.”
She laughs, and my heart nearly explodes. This girl… I don’t care how old she is. I don’t care how experienced she is. I don’t care how often she curses, or how messy she is, or how often she goes out, or what she tells people she does in her spare time. I love this girl. I love her smile, her story, the way s
he lies to her friends but tells me the truth, the way she’s more forgiving than I am, but also more stubborn, the way she’ll tell me she loves me, but won’t tell me what to say that’ll make her happy, even when it’s simply telling her I love her back.
“You know your mission?” I ask. She sobers immediately, swallowing hard as she pulls back to meet my eyes. “You were looking for your perfect guy... I thought you were crazy. No one’s perfect.”
“You told me a person’s flaws make them more attractive.” She pull back to giggle as she bites her bottom lip. “You must have a lot of flaws.”
I nod, smiling, amazed at how far we’ve both come since that texted conversation. “You’ve got more… But even when I thought you were crazy, I was doing my best to be the perfect son, the perfect employee, the perfect person. We were both obsessed with perfection. In the end, we’re both—”
“Totally fucked up?”
Laughing, I press my lips to hers, walking her backwards into the hallway. Her bedroom has to be behind one of these doors. “I was going to say perfect for each other, but totally fucked up probably works better.”
“Owen.” Her voice drops. She locks those eyes on mine again, but her brows are pulled together. “I didn’t rate you because I didn’t need to. My equation means nothing. The categories are bullshit. My entire little black book is worthless. A number might mean something to my head, but it means absolutely nothing to my heart, and my heart tells me you’re my perfect ten.”
Just like my heart tells me she’s my perfect ten.
Her quirky imperfections make her the perfect match for me.
“Your mission is one of the things that brought us together. In an entirely different way than you intended, but it still worked. You’re my perfect ten, too, Sadie. Even without the proof of a quantitative equation.” She swallows hard, cupping my cheek in my hand, and I pull her hips to mine. “Now, take me to your room.”
Her eyes light up again. “Are you going to make me beg?”
“Later,” I promise. “Right now, I need to show you I love you, since my mouth will be too busy to actually say the words.”
Epilogue
FINAL ASSIGNMENT:
Write a story describing what you learned throughout this course.
DUE IN TWO WEEKS
Sadie
“Hey, Sadie? Have you checked your school email lately?”
Rolling my head back on the couch, I pause Owen’s TV, where I was watching a regular old comedy. I’m living my very own romance story right now. The parts they normally skip over because they can’t show it on public TV? The parts where the characters get naked and drive each other wild? They’re not something you want to miss.
Owen and I burned my little black book last week in his kitchen sink, letting the fire alarm shriek above us as the flames licked away my sordid past. He soothed my guilty conscience with a million kisses, each one deeper and more insistent than the last, while whispering that when it really mattered, I forgot all about my categories and rating system and instead, felt with my heart.
I was the robot, not Owen.
Thank God that’s all in the past. I really enjoy not being a robot with Owen.
“No, why? Did the prof post grades again? Am I failing so badly that even I should be ashamed?”
Laughing, Owen steps into the living room to bend over the couch and press an upside-down kiss to my lips. He tastes like cinnamon and happiness. Christmas cookie recipes are my new favorite. “No, he gave us our final assignment. I think we should write it together.”
“Ugh. I told you, I’m done with that class. I don’t want to write whatever stupid shit he assigned us. I want to write about me. Everything else is boring.”
“Even me?”
I pull him closer, very willing to show him how wrong my last statement was. “Not anymore. I’ve fully corrupted you now.”
His brow arches. “There’s nothing new for me to learn?”
“I didn’t say that. I still have many lessons to teach you.”
“Good.” He chuckles, sinking onto the couch next to me and dragging me onto his lap. His hands on my bare legs are making me forget all about the movie, his cookies, and whatever else we were talking about. “But…”
Groaning, I fall off him to land sideways on the couch, where I’ll lie until he finishes whatever he wants to tell me. Might as well let him get it all out. And after he does, maybe I should play out part of that fantasy of his. The one where I’m in control. We haven’t done that yet. The beginning will have to be a little different, since I wasted no time telling my landlord I’m out at the end of the month and I’ve been staying with Owen every chance I get.
I plan on changing the ending, too. I’m fully capable of voicing my feelings now. I tell him I love him all the time.
“The final assignment is to write a story explaining what we learned throughout the course. We should write our story. Together. We won’t be able to complete it in time, but it’ll still be fun.”
“What will we turn in?” I like doing things with Owen. And if I’m writing about me, and me with Owen, there’s no way it won’t be fun.
He rolls his eyes. “What do you always turn in? A partial story.”
I smile, knowing he’s still after a couple endings to my many stories. “How are we going to do it?”
“I’ll write from my point of view, you write from yours. You’ll have to start, though. I was really boring before you showed me the error of my ways. People won’t get past the first chapter if I start.” His hand slides farther and farther up my leg with an easy caress that shouldn’t be turning me on nearly this much. Especially considering how much time his hands have spent on my body in the past week. My nerve endings shouldn’t be this sensitive. They should be building up some sort of tolerance.
He’s really good at starting fires, though. And I’m really good at keeping things messy.
“Are we skipping the good parts? The ones where we’re naked?”
“Definitely not. Maybe we won’t turn them in, but we’ll write them.”
“Owen?” I grab his hands, needing to have them off me for a second, so I can have a fully functioning brain to ask him this last lingering question. I haven’t been able to figure it out. It’s a very important piece of our puzzle, so I need to fully comprehend it, and I need to remember it. Which means I need his eyes on mine, and his hands not doing sexy things to my sensitive skin. “Why did you take the course?”
He sighs but doesn’t let his eyes leave mine. “At one point, before the drugs made Chris who she is now, she wanted to write children’s books. I want to fulfill that dream for her. Well, for Lizzy, really. At least one, showing her who her mom was before she…before she turned into something else.”
My heart overflows. He’s the sweetest uncle, the kindest boyfriend, the best guy I’ve ever met. I can’t believe we found each other. I can’t believe each of us gave the other one a chance. I can’t believe we let fate push us together.
She was pushing pretty hard, making sure we got our happily ever after, having back up plans to her back up plans. Owen and I are not something we would’ve let happen without Fate’s relentless help.
We worked together for years. We were in a wedding together, and that caused us to get physical. But I still wouldn’t have let him in. I would’ve kept things completely casual between us. It wasn’t until I let him see who I was behind the disguise of anonymity in this writing course that I gave him a fair chance. We were partners for our assignments, but we became friends, and then so much more. Without that added layer, we never would’ve ended up where we are today.
We still almost fucked it up!
From my lazy position on his couch, my legs tangled with his, I whisper, “I love you, Owen.”
He leans over, letting his weight rest on me, knowing he won’t crush me. I’m too tough for that. I’m too stubborn to let any man ruin me, even him. Although he definitely made me lose focus for a while. He cat
ches my mouth with his, teasing me the way only he knows how.
“You know…” I breathlessly try to get this unnecessary comment out as his mouth moves lower, his hands teasing my sides as he slides my shirt up my body. “I don’t think our story is one Lizzy should read. Especially if we’re writing the naked parts.”
“We’ll have to write more than one. The naked one first, though. We should practice that right now, so we’re inspired when we sit down at the computer. And then, after one for Lizzy, maybe we’ll write more naked ones. For that, we’ll need lots of inspiration.”
I moan as his mouth finds my nipple, my hands threading through that soft, black hair of his. His hand sneaks between my legs and he smiles against my flesh when he finds me wet and needy.
Always, for him. Only him. My perfect ten without any kind of equation or category ratings.
He pushes two fingers inside as some part of his hand finds my clit. My back arches off the cushions as I gasp out, “Lesson number one!”
His mouth leaves me so he can find my eyes. “I love you, Sadie.”
I’m almost overcome with all the sensations whirling through me. What he’s doing to me, but also my love for him, my respect for him, my gratitude for him. Remembering that first time he kissed me, the first time he made me question who he was and if we could be more than a kiss in a closet for a stupid game. “Kiss me like I’m the person you’ve been waiting your entire life for.”
He smiles, lowering his mouth to mine. “You are the person I’ve been waiting my entire life for.”
I’ll have to play out his fantasy another time. There’s not a chance in hell I’m stopping where this is going. Fate knows better than I do how things should play out anyway. She brought me to Owen. She made me give him a chance. She made me fall in love with him.
And now, we get to write our love story together, without all the naked parts left out.
I’ll have to talk to Owen and see if we can dedicate it to her. We owe her everything. Without her and all her back up plans, we never would’ve wound up where we are right now...