“Not just that, but it did kind of push me over the cliff I was already standing at the edge of. My family name, reputation here in this city, started feeling like an albatross. I wanted to set it aside for a little while and have a clean slate in a new place. Arizona gave me that.”

“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.