“That’s where you met Lennix Hunter?”
“Yes.” A wide, open smile touches her lips. “We were two peas in a pod from day one and have been best friends ever since.”
“Is it silly that I still get a little jealous hearing you call someone else your best friend?”
“Yeah, that’s really silly.” She throws her leg over mine and pulls me close until her breasts are crushed between our chests. “Because you should know by now that no one could take your particular place.”
I search under the covers for her hand, link our fingers. “I didn’t even know how much I missed you until I got you back.”
“I felt it at the funeral.” She breathes out a shaky laugh. “As soon as I saw you again, I knew it would be like this.”
“Is that why you shut me down?”
She gnaws at the corner of her lip. “When I saw Noah and Aiko, realized you had a family, knowing the pull I felt between us right away, I knew it would be too dangerous to stay in touch.”
“We’d been having problems even before that, and we’d gone to counseling, but I wonder if some part of me gave up after I saw you, hoping our lives might intersect again.”
I hate to even say that out loud. I hear how it sounds. It was a subconscious thought I’d never given voice to.
She’s quiet, running her fingers through my hair, soothing the turmoil that idea causes.
“Does it make you feel guilty?” she asks after a few quiet seconds.
I press my forehead to hers. “I don’t know what I feel, but it’s nothing related to regret. I did try, had been trying, but after that funeral… I knew why you didn’t give me your number. I felt it, too, that pull. I can’t even reduce it to just attraction. It feels like we were this one thing that was severed in half, and our parts want to be rejoined.”
Wow. That sounded intense.
“I mean—”
“Yes. That is how it feels,” she says.
We’ve only been back in each other’s lives for two weeks. We just made love. It’s too soon to say what I know is true. What has always, on some level, at least for me, been true.
I love her.
She might not call it that yet, and I won’t say it aloud, but I know it. We were born on the same day. I’m not overly religious, and I’m not sure what I believe about other lives, other worlds, and other dimensions. I do know if soul mates are real, Kimba is mine. I believe that if people are “created,” we were made together. She was there for my scaffolding—there when my flesh was knit over my bones. And if love is not just an emotion, but a type of eternity, an infinity that lives in our hearts, then we have always been in love. It’s an ageless thing that isn’t about puberty or chronology, or even if we get to live our lives together.
But when we are apart, I ache.
I can disguise it with friends, mute it with other women, distract myself with goals and dreams, but the truth remains. If I don’t have Kimba, there is a part of me missing. And as much as I tried with Aiko, as much as we’ve done together, built together, despite the beautiful boy we made together—she is not my soul mate. How could she be when there was Kimba?
“What if she’d said yes?” Kimba asks. “When you asked Aiko to marry you? What if you’d been married when we met again?”
“I would have been faithful to her,” I say without hesitation, with absolute conviction. “I wouldn’t have betrayed my vows or done anything to hurt Noah and Ko, but I would have hurt. Probably for the rest of my life, a part of me would always hurt wondering if I could have had you.”
Barely visible in the moonlight, on the cusp of dawn, she glances up at me through a fan of long lashes. “Who says you have me now?” she asks, her voice teasing, but I see the contentment in her eyes.
“I say I do.” I caress her hip, her back, her finely boned face. “And you have me if you want me.”
“You know I want you.” She reaches up to brush her fingers over my face, too. “I always have.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Kimba
“You’re fucking brilliant.”
“Huh?” Ezra asks absentmindedly, paying more attention to the flame under his pan than to my compliment. “What’d you say?”