That didn’t surprise me either. Dottie, like my parents, had loved Logan. They’d missed him. Dot had tried repeatedly (and failed miserably) to talk me out of ending things with him.
However, Logan going to get in her face wasn’t fair.
He didn’t know that.
But it wasn’t.
I bent closer to him and shared carefully, “You should know, she didn’t agree with what I did. She tried—”
He slid his hand to cup my cheek in his palm. “Babe, you don’t gotta say no more. She told me you were in a state. I told you I get the state you were in. We’ve talked that through. Let’s not go back there.”
I stared at him.
I knew I missed him. I lived with that pain every day.
But now I was remembering all the reasons why I missed him.
One of these being that he was understanding. He listened. He did it with focus. He heard what you were saying and if it meant something to you, he found a way to get it so it wasn’t an issue. Alternatively, if he didn’t get it, he eventually found a way to accept it. That didn’t mean there weren’t arguments or out and out fights, but that was usually about unimportant stuff.
The important stuff Logan treated as important.
Another of these things was the fact that once an issue was put to bed, it was done. Not only did Logan not dredge it up again, hold a grudge, use it as an example, reopen discussions, he also didn’t let me do it either.
If we found ourselves at a hurdle in life, once we cleared it, we kept going.
No turning back.
These thoughts were profound and made me an alarming mixture of happy, hopeful, and sad, thus they made me drop my head so I hit his collarbone with my forehead. I turned so my cheek was pressed to him and his fingers were forced to glide into my hair. To get more of him, I then slid my hand down his stomach and up so I could shove it his shirt, skin against skin, around to his back.
“What’s on your mind?” he rumbled.
“I never forgot why I loved you so much, missed you so much. But having you back, I find that I still forgot.”
“Baby,” he said softly.
“I’ll get over it,” I told him, hoping that was true and I didn’t live with new wounds, wounds reminding me of all I’d missed over the years.
“Yeah,” he murmured, gave me more soothing strokes, then moved us along. “Now we should take a shower. You got shit to sort bein’ back and we got shit just to sort and we should get on with that.”
I didn’t want to.
The day was sunny and warm. The snow was thawing. And this time we had together would be at an end.
Logan was intent we’d have more times together and no matter how bumpy that ride got, this time I was going to hold on tight along the way.
But now we had this moment. This final stretch of time in our reunion before we had to get on with life.
And I wanted more.
Even if it was just a little bit, I was going to finagle it.
In order to do that, I lifted my head and shifted so I took some of my weight off him as I slid my hand into the other side of his shirt.
“How about we sort out life in a little bit?” I asked quietly, watched his eyes fire, and I not only got my answer to my question, I got tingles.
“Works for me.” His words rolled over me, through me, in me, and I got more tingles.
Then I lifted my hands, arching my back to free his shirt so I could pull it up, and High raised his arms and did an ab curl so I could pull it off.
And with him right there, in my bed, all mine, again, I decided to multitask.
I’d get to do the catch-up I wanted while we had these final moments of our reunion.
This was such an excellent idea I set about doing it immediately, taking him in, lazy but intent, smelling the smell of Logan I remembered, running my lips along his rough jaw, down his throat, my hands down the bristly hair on his chest.
I followed them down.
I found none of this had changed. The brothers had a workout space and they used it. They might drink and smoke and carouse but they took every opportunity to commune, including while lifting weights.
So the hard swells of Logan’s pecs might have been bulkier, but they weren’t unfamiliar. The compacted bulges of his biceps might have been bigger, but that only meant better. The furred boxes of his abs were no less defined. The sleek ridges of his ribs no less delineated.
I found a large tat along his side, losing sight of it on his back, but it protruded quite a way across his ribs. It was a set of scales, one tray having the word Red on it, blood dripping off the sides, the other having a ghoulish reaper floating up from it with the word Black. The base of the scale was the words Never Forget.
I took one look at it knowing all the brothers got tats that meant something, told a story, proudly displayed a brand, shared history. Thus the story behind this troubling work of art, I decided, would wait for another day.
So, quickly, I moved my lips across the word Black and trailed them down his abs and along the waistband of his jeans.
His hand, already cupping my head, convulsed, the pads of his fingers digging gently into my scalp.
He knew where I was going next. He wanted it.
I wanted it too.
I slid a hand up his hip and in, dragging it over his hard crotch.
His voice was a coaxing growl as he said, “Keep goin’, beautiful.”
He had nothing to worry about.
I undid the button at his waistband, the next, the next. His fingers tangled in my hair as I went on and undid them all. The minute I was done unbuttoning his fly, I pulled his jeans down an inch, intent on getting to one of my favorite parts of him that I knew I still loved from recent experience, a part I would always adore, but I hadn’t been together enough to fully take it in.