“It was. It honestly blew my little mind. I didn’t believe it at first. I kept telling my mom that she had to be lying, but she would always smile in that special way she had… I don’t know, it was like when she looked at me, I could feel the love coming off her.”
She gets teary-eyed and then purses her lips as though she’s angry at herself for the display of emotion. I reach over and brush my thumb along her cheek again, and this time she reaches up and clutches onto my wrist.
“I want to say something,” she whispers. “But I don’t want you to think I’m taking things too far.”
There’s no such thing as too far or fast with us. Everything we’re going to share, everything we’re going to do, it’s going to be accelerated.
I fell in love with this woman the moment I laid eyes on her.
There’s no other way to describe the cataclysm of want, need, desire, and lust that tore through me the second we met. The instant.
“What?” I whisper.
“I just feel like something magical is happening here.” She keeps her hand on my wrist, holding tightly like she’s afraid I’m going to let her go when I never would. “I keep coming back to that text, the one that brought us together. What are the chances?”
“I tried to calculate them,” I say huskily. “When we first met, I tried to do the math. But the odds are simply too low.”
“Why did you do that?” she asks.
Fuck.
I meet her eyes briefly, but then turn my gaze to the Viking exhibit behind her, the candlelight glinting off the edge of a shield.
“Our modern idea of romance is skewed,” I say carefully, knowing that once I tell her, there’s no going back.
I’ll never be able to rewind time and return to the way things were before she knew just how desperately I needed her.
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“Take a Norseman, for example. They would think nothing of meeting a woman and marrying her the same week. It’s been the same throughout all of human history. Of course, there are some complications – arranged marriages, marriages of conveniences, alliances. But there were rare occasions when love led the way… when two people met or only spoke through letters, and that was enough for them to know they wanted to be together forever.
“But in this modern era, that’s been mostly lost. If you hear about people who met one week and got married the next, you think they’ve lost it. Or that they were in Vegas.”
Her grip gets even tighter, her fingernails digging into my skin now. “I know. People these days think you need to know someone for at least a year before you can even move in together.”
She shakes her head.
“You don’t agree?” I ask.
She blinks away tears, shaking her head vehemently now, causing hope to flutter inside of my chest. “No, I don’t. In my opinion, when you know, you just know. When two people work…”
“They just work,” I finish, my tone getting lower, more intense, as the feeling of hope expands and dares me to believe.
“Exactly,” she says. “That’s how I think about it, anyway.”
Could she really be hinting at what I think she is?
Could I really be that lucky?
“So are you going to answer my question?” she murmurs, shifting her hand so we’re clasping fingers now.
Her touch is so warm, so welcome, making me think of all the closeness we’re going to share, all the love.
If I’m right about this.
I could easily be wrong.
“Do you remember the first time we met?” I ask.
“At the Memorial? Of course.”
“I don’t mean the field trip,” I tell her. “I mean the first time we met, specifically. It was only a brief exchange. It was when I was giving out my phone number to the group, just in case anybody got lost, and you wouldn’t meet my eyes. You were such a shy thing, your cheeks turning red. I guess you were nervous to be on the field trip.”
“It wasn’t that,” she whispers, her voice cracking.
“I was obsessed with you,” I growl.
She gasps.
I take both her hands in mine and lean across the table, staring hard into her eyes, praying I haven’t made the worst mistake of my life.
“The first moment I saw you, I knew I had to have you. I tried to convince myself otherwise. I reasoned with myself that you were only eighteen. It would be improper for me to think about you like that… hell, maybe that’s too light a word. I told myself you were a stranger.
“But all during that trip, I watched you. I couldn’t look away. You were so damn captivating. It was every little thing about you – the way you twirled your hair around your finger, the way you struggled to contain your excitement when we were discussing the history of the memorial, the way you… it was just you, Autumn, everything about you.