The Brightest Sunset

I nodded even though he couldn’t see me, yet he somehow understood.

He resumed his tortuous rhythm, driving into me in the hunt for his own release. “Fuck, Charlotte,” he groaned, his breaths coming quicker, his shaft swelling inside me.

He was close.

I was closer.

Circling my hips, I ground against him. “Baby,” I called in a whisper.

“I’m right here, Charlotte,” he swore. “Always.”

My release climbed higher until I wasn’t sure I could hold on any longer, and when I felt Porter step off the edge, I eagerly followed him over.

He folded forward, burying his face in my neck, his hips never faltering as we rode our orgasms out together.

Lazily, I trailed my fingertips up and down his back, his large frame hovering over me, both of us panting.

“Jesus,” he breathed.

I smiled.

Righting himself, he gripped my hips so I didn’t teeter off the edge of the counter and grumbled, “Why is there never a fucking bed in the darkness?”

There was no way I could have stopped the loud bubble of laughter that came from my throat.

His shoulders shook as he joined me. Cupping the back of my neck, he pressed his smiling lips to mine in a kiss that meant more to me than he would ever be able to comprehend. Sans the incredible sex that had preceded it, there was nothing special about that kiss.

But maybe that was what made it so perfect.

It was easy, and it made the overwhelming world outside my apartment feel easy too.

“Close your eyes. I’m gonna turn on the lights,” he whispered.

My stomach sank, and I gripped his shoulders tight. “Nothing’s going to change when you do, right?”

He caught my hand and folded his around it, intertwining our fingers before bringing it to his lips. “Everything’s going to change, Charlotte. And I swear to you, no matter what happens, we’re going to do that together, okay?”

My nose began to sting. Fucking Porter and his hand holding.

God, I loved it so much.

“Okay, baby. Turn on the lights.”

“I didn’t know!” I defended.

Porter smirked across the kitchen, his hip propped against the counter and his long legs crossed at the ankle. “Seven?”

“I didn’t know!” I repeated.

After we’d cleaned up, which was surprisingly convenient when you have sex in the bathroom, we’d gotten dressed and begrudgingly left our private sanctuary. I hadn’t been eating much over the last few days, and with Porter securely holding my hand, making my mind blessedly quiet, food had become a priority. On the way to the kitchen, I’d stopped at the bedroom door, cracking it open to peer in at Travis, as I had done so many times over the last few days. Every time I’d done it before, half of me had expected him not to be there. That fear had become a reality only hours earlier, after he’d climbed out the window in an attempt to escape me.

But that escape had become the precipice that had brought Porter back to us.

“Seven though?” he teased, lifting a piece of pizza to his mouth.

I glared at him, all the while smiling on the inside. “Well, he likes mushrooms.” I waved my hand at one box before amending, “Sometimes, anyway.” I swung my hand toward another box. “But then I wasn’t sure about Hannah, but all kids like cheese, right?”

He swallowed a bite and washed it down with beer before saying, “So that’s two. You got five more to go.”

I took a sip of my wine. Not the warm one from the end table. Porter had poured me a new glass. “Well, I figured, with you being a grown man, you’d probably want yours to be a little heartier. I’m sorry to say they didn’t have your precious Wagyu on the menu, but I got you all the other meats.”

He smiled wide and counted off, “Three,” before taking another bite.

“Seriously, Porter?” I huffed, not even the least bit annoyed. “Fine. I like supreme, but I remembered you picking the onions out of your salad that night at The Porterhouse, so I got one with onions and one without in case you wanted a piece of mine.”

He lifted three fingers in the air and, one by one, flipped up two more to show five. “For the record, I like onions, but you didn’t order onions that night, and I had high hopes of my mouth being on yours by the end of the evening, so I made the sacrifice in the name of onion breath.” He winked. “Two more.”

My stomach got all warm and fluttery at the thought of our first kinda-sorta kiss. He’d only brushed his lips with mine, and even before I had known how perfect his mouth truly was, I still would have killed for more. He could have eaten a field of onions and I wouldn’t have cared.

Rolling my eyes, I finished with, “Then I thought maybe Travis wouldn’t like mushrooms, so I got sausage. Everyone likes sausage. Except…then I thought maybe it was ground beef that everyone liked.” I shrugged. “So I ordered both. There. Are you happy now?”

He set the rest of his crust aside and prowled over to me. “Happy to be standing here, surrounded by seven pizzas that had to have cost you at least a hundred bucks and are now more than likely going to go to waste? No.” His hand came up to my face, his thumb trailing back and forth across my cheek. “Happy to be standing here, listening to you pretend to be annoyed with me while rambling on about ordering at least a hundred bucks in pizza because you weren’t sure what kind we would like, but you knew I needed that time alone with Travis as much as he needed it with me, and you didn’t want to interrupt to ask what kind of toppings we liked on our pizza and, instead, just ordered the left side of the menu? Yeah. Charlotte. I’m really fucking happy.”

I bit my bottom lip. “It was only seventy dollars. I had a coupon.”

A wide, breathtaking smile split his face. “Beautiful and thrifty. I knew I was falling in love with you for a reason.”

“Porter,” I whispered, my whole body warming. “Don’t say you love me.”

His hands went to my hips where he tugged me against him. “I didn’t say I love you. I said I was falling in love with you. And it has nothing to do with pizza and everything to do with the fact that you called me tonight.”

“He needed you.”

“You needed me too, Charlotte. And believe me, that is not something I take lightly. Because I really fucking needed you too. You are the strongest woman I have ever met. You’ve lived through hell, and I know you think you were barely surviving, and maybe some days you were, but you kept holding on when others would have let go. You never needed me to stop the world for you. You simply needed someone to accept you for who you were. But, tonight, after a week that’s shaved years off my life and left me questioning everything I’ve ever known, you stopped it for me. And you stopped it for Travis too. I don’t know what’s going to happen when the sun comes up tomorrow. And I don’t know what the judge is going to say in two weeks. But because of you, I have tonight. So yeah, Charlotte. My last confession of the night is that I’ve been falling in love with you since the first day I met you.” He settled his hands on either side of my face and bent at the knees so we were eye to eye. “And, sweetheart, you have to know that, with a woman like you, it’s a really short trip.”

“Don’t say that,” I pleaded, but my heart was swelling.

He tipped his forehead down until it was resting on mine. “We can pretend if you want. But it’s still true.”

“We still have a long way to go, Porter. Don’t complicate this any more than it already is.”

Smirking, he asked, “Sweetheart, our road has never been smooth. Not for a single second since you brought me that fucking pickle jar at the spring fling. And yet you think me loving you is going to change when the road gets bumpy?”

“It could.”

“It won’t.”

“But it could, and I think the two of us have suffered enough heartbreak to last a lifetime. Don’t add this to the list.”

“Charlotte, your name had been carved on the top of that list for over a month.” He sucked in a deep breath, released me, and strolled back over to the counter, where he resumed his position. Lifting a piece of supreme pizza (with onions) out of the box, he smiled. “But, if this is what you need, I’ll give it to you. Just let me know when you’re done pretending.”