“I’ll just throw something together.”

We ate sandwiches, sitting naked on the bedspread, and talked for hours about the race, about the weekend with her family, and finally, about how it had felt when we thought things had ended between us.

We made love until the sunlight faded outside, and then slept, waking in the middle of the night starving for more. And then it was wild, and loud, and exactly how it had always been when things were best with us: honest.

For the moment, I was sated, and reached for my bedside table to find a pen. Curling around her, I put her tattoo back on her hip—All that is rare for the rare—hoping that I could be that rare thing, a recovered wildness, a reformed player, that Hanna deserved.

Epilogue

The flight attendant walked past, snapping the overhead bins shut with decisive clicks before bending to ask, “Orange juice or coffee?”

Will asked for coffee. I shook my head with a smile.

He patted my knee, palm up. “Give me your phone.”

I handed it over, but complained anyway: “Why do I need wireless? I’m going to be asleep the entire flight.” Never again would I let him book 6 a.m. flights from New York to the West Coast.

Will ignored me, entering some code into a tiny box on my phone’s Web browser.

“If you haven’t noticed, I’m sleepy. It’s someone’s fault that I was kept up all night,” I whispered, leaning into him.

He stopped what he was doing, turning to smolder at me. “Is that how it happened?”

A thrill ran from my chest, down my belly, and between my legs. “Yes.”

“You didn’t come over after lab, a little . . . worked up?”

“No,” I lied.

His eyebrow rose, a smile curling half of his mouth. “And you didn’t interrupt my preparation of the very romantic dinner I was planning for you?”

“Me? No.”

“And pull me down onto the couch asking me to ‘do that thing with my mouth’?”

I held my hand to my chest. “I would never.”

“It wasn’t you who then ignored the delicious smells coming from the stove and pulled me to the bedroom and asked for some very, very dirty things?”

I closed my eyes as he leaned close, grazing his teeth over my jaw and murmuring, “I love you so f**king much, my naughty, sweet Plum.”

Images from the night before pulled me deeper into the hungry, achy place I practically lived in anytime I was near Will. I remembered his rough hands, his commanding voice telling me exactly what he wanted me to do. I remembered those hands tugging my hair, his body moving over mine for hours, his voice finally low and begging for my teeth, my nails. I remembered the weight of him collapsing on me, sweaty and exhausted and falling asleep almost as soon as he found his release.

“Maybe that was me,” I admitted. “It was a long day working in the safety hood, what can I say? I had a lot of time to think about your magical mouth.”

He kissed me and then returned to my phone, smiling as he finished what he was doing and handing it back to me. “You’re all set.”

“I’m still going to sleep.”

“Well, at least if Chloe needs you, your phone is working.”

I slid my eyes to him, confused. “Why would she need me? I’m not in the wedding.”

“Have you met Chloe? She’s a fearsome general that could conscript you at a moment’s notice,” he said, gripping the back of his neck in the way he did when he was uncomfortable. “Whatever. Just sleep then.”

“I have a feeling about this trip,” I murmured, leaning into his shoulder. “Like a premonition.”

“How uncharacteristically spiritual of you.”

“I’m serious. I think it’s going to be amazing, but I also feel like we’re in a giant steel tube headed toward a week of insanity.”

“Technically airplanes are made of aluminum alloy.” Will looked over at me, bent to kiss my nose, and whispered, “But you knew that.”

“Do you ever have a feeling about something?”

He hummed, kissed me again. “Once or twice.”

I stared up at him—at the familiar dark lashes and deep blue eyes, at his five o’clock shadow at six in the morning, and at the goofy smile he’d been wearing since I woke him up—again—four hours ago with my mouth on his cock.

“Are you feeling sentimental, Dr. Sumner?”

He shrugged and blinked, clearing a bit of the lovestruck gleam in his eyes. “Just excited to go on vacation with you. Excited for the wedding. Excited that our little gang is having a baby soon.”