Oh, my God, he looks good. Tired, yes, and Louisa wasn’t kidding about the scruff, but that’s definitely a feature, not a bug. He’s got his arms crossed and his eyes down and that bad-boy off-center back-on-his-heels thing going, and my whole body pretty much tunes into his station.

I try to say hey back, but my voice fails me. I try again. “Hey.”

“I want to be part of the plan,” he says.

It’s slowly dawning on me that Brody Wilder has just flown across the entire country to tell me he wants to be with me. My heart is pounding, my pulse beating in my throat. My hands are icy.

“I’ve spent my whole fucking life feeling like I wasn’t invited to the party, when the truth is that I was too busy blowing off the party so I wouldn’t feel shitty if I didn’t get an invitation.”

“Oh,” I say, because this makes perfect sense. In fact, it makes everything about Brody make sense.

“I did it with Justin, with Gabe, with you—and I’m not fucking doing it anymore. There are things I want, Rachel. I want Justin in my life. I want to be Gabe’s partner—like, for real. And—”

Brody is looking at me with the full, unfiltered force of those green eyes, and they are wrecking me. Or maybe it’s the longing and the hunger in them.

“I want you. And I have a plan. For the first time in my entire life, I have a plan.”

I start laughing.

“Jesus, Rachel,” he says, taken aback. “That wasn’t exactly the response I was expecting.”

I stop laughing immediately, but of course I have to explain. I step back, opening the door wider so he can see my two suitcases, sitting there.

“I was coming back to Rush Creek. Without a plan.”

“Oh,” he says. Just that. And then his arms are around me and his mouth is on mine, and it’s—

Well, honestly, it’s perfect. The real, messy, complicated, imperfect kind of perfect.

It takes a humongous effort of will to stop kissing him long enough to say, “I just booked an Uber to the airport. Give me thirty seconds to cancel that and my flight.”

I have barely hung up the phone when he starts kissing me again, and I lead him down the hall to my bedroom, in which, sadly, the bed is unmade because my sheets are packed in my suitcase. But maybe that’s for the best because it turns out that standing-up sex is a perfectly good way to show someone how much you missed them and how much you want them to be part of your plan, or not-plan, as the case may be.