“In my defense, I told him to propose almost seven months ago,” Ollie said, holding his palms out in front of him.
Travis shook his head. “Thanks, Oliver. Thanks for that.”
“How did you do it?” Summer asked.
Ollie raised his brows. “Do what?”
“Propose. I love proposal stories.”
Ollie snapped his eyes to me, and I clenched my thighs together at the reminder of me on the piano back at Dolor, and Ollie inside me.
“I’m not giving your chap here any pointers,” he gripped Travis’s shoulder, “He’ll have to come up with his own.”
The evening passed with laughs, drinks, and good food, and after a few hours, we said our goodbyes after promising to get together soon before the baby arrived.
On our way back to our cottage, Ollie pulled me into a shop beside a small bookstore that sold tea, coffee grounds, and bottles of wine with book quotes on the labels. He filled the basket with pastries and grounds and picked out a bottle of rosé wine. “Love is longing for the half of ourselves we have lost, Milan Kundera,” Ollie read. “This is the one. It reminds me of a book I read.”
“Perhaps The Unbearable Lightness of Being?” I laughed, tapping the label where the title of the book was listed.
“No, another book I read based on soulmates,” he smiled at the memory. “I’ll have to read it to you. After a few glasses of wine.” He shook the bottle and placed it into the basket.
Halfway home, the sky parted and rain broke, and we ran the rest of the way until we reached our gate and crossed our bridge to our front door, drenched. Ollie dropped the bag in the kitchen as I started the bath, plugging the drain and sprinkling in bath salts. I heard his phone from the kitchen, which had been going off all night, but he didn’t answer. It was probably Leigh again, who’d rang nonstop at least once a week and beg for him to come rescue her from situations she’d get herself into. At first, Ollie had left to help her, but after two times, he’d had enough and ignored her calls.
I slipped out of my dress just as Ollie walked into the bathroom, wearing only his boxer-briefs and fedora hat over his head, the bottle of wine in one hand. “Bad news. We’ll have to drink straight from the bottle. I’ll have to remember to get us wine glasses.”
Laughing at his wardrobe, I turned off the water as Ollie set the wine over a wooden stool beside the clawed tub before shimmying out of my black panties and sinking into the water.
“Yes,” he nodded enthusiastically, losing his boxers and following right behind me.
Together, we drank the entire bottle and sat in the hot water as our fingers pruned, Ollie still wearing his fedora, and me making fun of him for it. “But it’s cool,” he explained, grabbing my hips and pulling me over his lap until my sex rubbed over his arousal. I arched my back, dropping my hair into the water, and Ollie’s hands trailed down the center of my chest.
His mouth reached for my breast, but the hat prevented him from going any further. Giggling, I leaned forward, and my forehead collided with his chin. A harder laugh clenched my stomach as I hunched over the side of the tub. Water splashed over the rim, and I tried to recover, but Ollie’s frown only made my giggle fit worse, bringing tears to my eyes and losing my breath. “Lose the hat, Ollie,” I said between spurts.
His eyes glazed over. He was drunk. I loved drunk Ollie. “I don’t want to.”
I tilted my head and flicked up the rim of the hat, and when my palm rested over his chest, my laughter faded. Ollie’s cock jerked against me, and I leaned forward, pressing my lips to his neck. His pulse ticked against my tongue, and my hips rolled over him, desperate for friction.
“Oh, that feels amazing,” he whispered, tilting his head to give me more access as he dug his fingers into my sides. “Don’t stop. I don’t want you to stop.”
My lips moved up his neck and across his jaw and to his other side. Every inch of his tattooed skin begged to be touched, and I sucked, biting him slightly. His muscles tightened, all the way down to his groin.
I kissed his chin, then his lips, tasting the rosé lingering upon the soft edges. Intoxicated, my thumb ran over them before my tongue did. Ollie grabbed the back of my head and opened his mouth, catching mine, and his tongue slipped inside, falling into a wild kiss. Buzzing and utterly savage, he lifted me until our parts aligned, and I sank over his length. Ollie gripped the edge of the tub, his knuckles turning white, with his other hand in my hair. Chests crashed, and we both got lost in each other, grinding and letting this drunken haze keep us spinning and spinning …
Eventually, Ollie carried me out of the tub—in his fedora hat—and we laughed as he stumbled all the way to the bed, dripping wet.
We made love all hours of the night, pausing for pastries and to start a fire, then back at it until the sun came up … Because it was a Wednesday night, and Wednesday nights should be spent making out, making love, and eating glazed croissants. We could sleep when we were dead.
By five in the morning, we had the blankets pulled around us on the back porch to watch the sunrise, our buzz long gone but still drunk on each other.
“As long as I’ve known you, you’ve always woke before the sun. Now, me? I love mornings. But you? You like your sleep. Why on earth do you always wake up at sunrise, then go back to sleep for a few more hours?” Ollie asked, tapping the tip of my nose with his pointer finger. “One of the many wonders of Mia Rose.”
I thought about it for a moment, compiling the right words to explain to help him understand.
“It doesn’t last very long,” I said through a breath, gazing up at the sky. “It’s the tiniest moment, just when the sun peaks above the skyline, but the moons still visible—when darkness and light can co-exist. It reminds me of hope, and that I wasn’t alone or lost in this world. A reminder that anything is possible, even between two beings such as the sun and moon who only meet for a fraction of a second. During that small moment, together, they can create something so beautiful across the sky. I hoped that could be me, you know? That I wasn’t all bad, and possibly I could do something beautiful with my life too.”
Cuddled under a live oil painting, pinks, blues, and purples made up the sky—a pastel dawn. I pointed up. “See, Ollie. Look at how beautiful.”
Ollie stared at me for a moment. “I am looking, love.”
I turned to face him, and his lips grasped on to mine, holding our kiss for a beat longer than usual. He said nothing more as we looked up into the sky, and watched as the sun rose beside the opalescent moon, a fiery orange, bleeding into the vast gray of the night, washing out the darkness like watercolor until the moon faded and stars turned into dust.
“It’s moments like these that are impossible to capture in words, but I’ll never stop trying,” Ollie whispered.
Every morning I’d passed by the unused room off from the kitchen. Currently, it housed a desk, desktop computer, printer, and clutter, but Ollie preferred to write in his notebook in the garden or odd places throughout the house. Ideas sprung, and at any given time, he’d have his notebook folded into his waistband with pencils always tucked everywhere, behind his ear, in his pockets, between his lips.
This morning, Ollie had put on a pot of coffee and brought a mug to me in bed before heading out for an early meeting with Laurie, then mentioned he had to later check on Leigh to make sure she hadn’t gotten herself fucked.