In all my favorite movies, and in all my favorite books, there’s this moment that I like to call the cotton candy cloud moment.

It’s usually at the beginning, but sometimes a little toward the end, when everything is working out perfectly for the main character. They’re high on life, everything going their way, and they bear an impenetrable smile as they seemingly float through every day on a cloud of fluffy pink and purple sugar. It usually happens right before everything crashes down.

That was me.

I was having my cotton candy cloud moment.

And there was no crash in sight.

Charlotte was so impressed after the auction and especially by me handling our away game in Maine that she offered to extend my contract through next season — and with that came a signing bonus and a raise. I was shocked to silence when she first told me, but she’d only smiled and arched a brow.

“Your determination to prove everyone wrong about you worked,” she said. “But now, I want you to ask yourself what it is you really want from this. And then, I want you to take it.”

Her belief in me had stoked a fire, making me consider all the ways my career could pan out. It was intoxicating to think about.

But nothing was as intoxicating as Clay.

I woke up with him in my bed almost every morning, and on the ones I didn’t, he would be at my door within seconds of me waking. Classes dragged by, practice always seemed too long, and even happy as I was in my job, I couldn’t wait for the work day to be done, for the interviews and publicity events to end.

I couldn’t wait to be back in his arms.

Every moment he spent unraveling me was ecstasy, my body singing like never before under his symphonic conduction. Just when I thought I’d found my favorite way to have him touch me or fill me, he’d find a new way, something to excite me and surprise me and bring me pleasure not even my books could rival.

And that wasn’t even the best part.

The best moments were when we were wrapped together in the early hours of the morning, talking and laughing and discovering one another more than just physically. Or when we’d have a whole conversation across the crowded practice field with just one single glance. Or when anxiety would start to creep in for one of us, and the other would quickly soothe it with just the right words and a kiss to seal the promise.

“What would you think about coming home with me for Christmas?”

I blanched at Clay’s question one morning, the first words he spoke in the early light.

“To California?”

He nodded.