My mouth crashes onto hers, and as our bodies sway in time to the music, our tongues dance to a rhythm that’s all their own. Spencer tastes of liquor and spearmint gum. She smells like heaven.

through the screen door I find all three of my boys throwing a ball around the yard with Cooper. My heart bursts in my chest. Just explodes. It physically hurts to feel so much all at once. It’s like I’m staring at a movie of what my life—our life—could have been.

Tear filled eyes glisten in the firelight. She’s so fucking beautiful that it hurts to look at her, but it’s an ache I hope to feel for as long as I live, because the pain of losing her again...that I don’t think I’d survive.

She’s not ready and maybe she never will be, but I won’t stop trying. I’ll be patient if it kills me. I can just see it now. Cooper Hebert died of blue balls and a broken heart.

I want the strings. I want the ball and fucking chain. I want to be so tied to you that you can’t ever slip away from me again.

Taking her tiny hand into both of mine, I lift it to my chest, placing it right over my racing heart. “You feel that?” I rasp, swallowing hard. Her head bobs. “That’s yours. It’s always been. So, the next time you try to convince yourself that you know what’s best for me, I want you to remember what you feel when we’re together.” I touch the pads of my first two fingers to her neck, feeling her pulse flutter against my skin. “I feel it, too.

I’ll take stolen kisses and trysts in the cane fields for as long as I live over a life without you in it.

I want to rip the rest of those buttons open and climb him like a monkey in a banana tree. Oh God, what I would do with his banana...

He’s so fucking unconventionally perfect. I don’t know whether I want to kick him in the balls or lick his face.