While Danny fills out the bright orange luggage tag and gets it strapped to his pack, I give myself a mental pep talk worthy of my toughest volleyball coach back in high school. It’s time to leave all the shit in the locker room and get out onto the court.
If I carry my misery and pain onto the plane, I’m going to ruin my new life before it gets started. There’s no room for that junk in my head anymore. I’m going to leave it right here, at the door to the Jetway, a pile of psychic waste I’m better off without. Regret isn’t going to change the past, and I can’t survive for much longer carrying the weight of two ruined lives on my shoulders.
It may make me a bad person or a sociopath or something worse, but I’m officially erasing the past five months—and anyone or anything that reminds me of them—from my timeline. From here on out, it’s Danny and me against the world and I will do whatever I have to do to protect our second chance.
Our last chance, because if this fails, I know there won’t be enough of me left to try again.
“Ready?” Danny shoulders his pack and turns to me with a smile.
“Ready.” I take his hand and follow him down the Jetway without a single look back over my shoulder.
I’m leaving the past behind and I swear on everything good in the world that I will never, ever look back.
Chapter Two
Danny
“You gave me the key to your heart, my love,
then why did you make me knock?”
-Lord Byron
* * *
I’m determined to stay awake and keep talking to Sam until I can get to the bottom of whatever’s been going on, but by the time the plane reaches cruising altitude, my eyelids feel like they’re made of granite slabs. The week before I left Croatia, I led three mountain bike tours and four overnight rock-climbing expeditions, wedging in as much work as I could before I headed to Maui to take a month off before opening another branch of Extreme Adventures on the island.
Now, I’m feeling every adrenaline-packed hour.
I can barely stay awake long enough to wolf down the teriyaki chicken and Hawaiian shortbread cookies on my dinner tray and then I’m out, sucked into my first deep, peaceful sleep since Sam stopped returning my calls six days ago.
No matter how long we’ve been together, or how much we’ve been through, a part of me had been certain she was about to end it. End our seven-year relationship and take a sledgehammer to my life in the process because I can’t imagine who I would be without her.
I’m the owner of a thriving adventure-tourism business, but only because it’s a career I knew would blend well with our dream to travel the world before we settle down. I’m a brother, an uncle, and soon-to-be an uncle again when my sister Caitlin’s first baby is born, but no matter how much I love my family, they could never fill the place Sam holds in my heart.
Sam and I have grown up together, and all I want is to grow old with her. We’re like trees planted too close, our roots tangled and our trunks fused together. If I lost her, I would lose my foundation, a part of my heart, and everything that makes me happy. Without her, I can’t imagine what there would be to look forward to. There would be no reason left to dream, and without a dream there’s no fucking point in being alive.
Watching my father piss his life away taught me that lesson early.
The world would have been better off without Chuck Cooney in it, and I never want to be anything like him. That’s why I’ve been sober for two years and fight through temptation every time someone, who doesn’t know I’m an alcoholic, offers me a drink. But if I’d lost Sam, I might have started shuffling through life in my father’s footsteps, drinking too much, caring too little, choosing selfish oblivion over facing the world.
To say I’m relieved that Sam and I are still together is an understatement.
I feel like I’ve surfed past a shark lurking beneath the water and escaped with all my limbs intact, and when I wake up to the humming silence of a darkened plane and feel Sam caressing me through my faded khaki shorts, the bliss of her fingers gripping me through my clothes is enough to make me dizzy.
“What time is it?” I ask, my voice rough with sleep as I shift toward her, granting her easier access.
“The middle of the night,” Sam whispers, her full lips moving in the shadows. “You’ve been out for hours. I was getting lonely.”
“Sorry.” I scan the aisles across from us.
Everyone in my line of sight is passed out and snoring, and that’s all the permission I need to reach under the blanket covering Sam’s lap and return the favor.
I slide my fingers up and down the ridge of her jeans, lingering over her clit, wishing she were wearing one of her sundresses. It would be so easy to push the fabric up, pull her panties to one side, and get my fingers inside her. It’s been almost half a year since we’ve been together, and I’m dying to touch her, taste her, feel her body gripping my cock as her muscled legs wrap around my waist and pull me deep.
“It’s okay.” Sam’s breath hitches as I pop the button on the top of her jeans. “You’re awake now.”
“Wide awake,” I confirm, teeth digging into my lip as Sam drags my zipper down and reaches inside my boxer shorts, taking my cock into her hand.
She wraps her fingers around me and slides her fist up and down, tugging me with the perfect amount of pressure before she pauses to circle her thumb around my swollen head, spreading the cum leaking from my tip in teasing circles that are almost enough to set me off. Her palm is warm, but my dick is on fire. I’ve jerked off more than my fair share the past few months, but it’s not the same.
I know I’m going to come fast, but I don’t want to come before her.
Even our first time, the summer before our sophomore year of high school, when I was so horny I felt like I was going to pass out from excitement the night Sam told me she wanted to go all the way, I made sure to go down on her first. I brought her over on my tongue before I slid on the condom we’d stolen from her mom’s latest boyfriend and pushed inside her.
She’d been so wet, so tight, and the sounds she’d made as pain became pleasure were the most erotic things I’d ever heard. I can still remember every moment of our first time—all sixty seconds of it. Tonight I’m going to last longer, but maybe not by much.
As Sam continues to jerk me off with the skill of a woman who’s spent years pleasuring the same man, I slide my hand down the front of her jeans, beneath her panties, and begin to demonstrate my own expertise. Her jeans are tight, but not so tight I can’t reach her entrance. When I do, I curl two fingers inside her, fighting the urge to groan as her wetness coats my skin and her breath rushes out over my lips.
“Danny,” she whispers, her head falling forward until her forehead rests against mine.
It’s only my name, but those two whispered syllables tell me a thousand things at once.
They tell me she’s as desperate for this as I am that she’s felt just as lost without this connection, this touchstone to who we are together. Sam and I have always been able to talk, but there are some things that can’t be communicated with words. Like the fierce and forever way I love her, like the fact that I’d fight an army single-handed for the chance to lie by her side for even one more night.