He cups my face in his hands and plants a kiss on my forehead. “You’re mine. And I’m yours.”

“Until the end of summer,” I remind him, searching his face for any sign of uncertainty.

He doesn’t give me what I’m looking for. There’s no resolve or acceptance in his eyes. He looks pained—his expression matching the truth of how I feel.

Seconds tick by, and then a whole minute passes in which neither of us says anything. I hate this. And yet here we are already. Three weeks to go. It won’t be enough. Part of me wants to put us both out of our misery and end it now.

Finally, his jaw ticks, and he glares at me like he’s glowering into my soul before he grips my head tighter in his hands and presses his forehead into mine.

“Until the end of summer,” he finally relents.

40. Dempsey

Chapter 40

Dempsey

We’re both sleepy and sated on the drive from Brooklyn to JFK. Neither of us slept much, instead choosing to spend the night fucking each other senseless.

There was a desperation between us after the run-in with Brooke. We didn’t speak of it; we just acted on instinct. It was a fire in my belly that I couldn’t douse, no matter how many times I made her orgasm or how long I stayed buried inside her.

For her to challenge me like that… and for me to respond the way I did…

I had no intention of staking my claim, pouring my heart out, and finger fucking her in the middle of Times Square to prove a point.

But apparently that’s what we both needed.

It was wild running into Brooke, in a city she and I used to dream about living in together. It was also a wake-up call.

What Maddie doesn’t know is that Brooke did, at one time, have a hold on me. There was a time in the not-so-faraway-past where I would have run into her, with or without someone else by my side, and the night would have gone a very different direction. Things with Brooke were good and easy when we were together, but that’s because my life was good and easy back then.

There was nothing good, easy, or pleasant about the end of us.

Brooke and I didn’t break up as much as she just didn’t show up. She chose not to follow through on her promise, and I couldn’t even be mad about her choice.

Toward the end of our senior year at Harvard, Fielding declared he wouldn’t be going to medical school as planned. Instead, he decided he’d move back to Hampton to take care of our mom. It was an idea I had considered time and time again. He just came to the decision first.