I’m hit with the smell of the freshly cut grass, the scent that floated off Parker’s hair. I can feel how her pulse raged beneath the thin, delicate skin of her wrist as I held it while we ran for cover. Her fast heartbeat matched my own. That night, Parker’s heart raced because of the adrenaline. And mine raced because of Parker.

“Why didn’t you?” she asks.

Bringing my eyes up, I lock them on hers. “I was afraid you didn’t want me to and then I’d ruin everything.”

“If I kissed you now,” Parker whispers, “would I ruin everything?”

The pin of Parker’s name tag pierces my hand as I fight against the urge to be the one who does it. But I can’t tonight. Not after putting it all on the table. Not after all of her pretending.

“Only if it’s not real.”

It’s not when Parker lifts her head and presses her mouth to my lips that I know it’s real. It’s the moment her free fingers wind with mine that hang at my side. It’s in her delicate wrist I feel it—the wild racing of her pulse that matches the beat of my heart.

The softness of her pillowy lips feels like a swipe of velvet against my own, and I let myself linger, appreciating without pushing for more. I want Parker to take it. And when she presses her mouth to mine, punctuating the end of the kiss, I worry I know what false hope tastes like.

But in the next breath, she pounces, and somehow it seems like this is our first real kiss.

I abandon the delicate hand-holding. The name tag and puzzle piece fall to our feet, and even though they’re precious, there’s nothing else in the world more important to hold than Parker. But I know how intensely I hold her doesn’t matter. Parker shows me she isn’t going anywhere in the way she jumps up, wrapping her legs around me, in the way her nails scrape at my scalp with one hand and the scruff on my cheek with the other. She’s here, clutching and clawing, and trusting me.

I palm her ass more firmly, drawing a delicious rock of her hips against my middle that sends the blood rushing and pooling below.

“Fitz.”

Parker keeps saying my name over and over, making me determined to hear it out of her mouth at every level of her voice—a whisper, a scream, a moan like the one she releases, which I swear I feel in every part of my body. To prove it, I lower her so my hard, swollen tip rubs against the apex of her thighs.