She kissed me again, and then drew her head back.

“I was a fool,” she paused and then let her eyes wander all over my face, my body. Even if she wasn’t touching me, I quivered. There was a hunger in her eyes that made me remember how she’d looked at me the night I’d asked her, seduced her, into making love to me.

It was the primal, haunting look of a lover.

“You are still so beautiful, Harley,” she said hoarsely. “There was something about you then, even when I was forcing us to break up two years ago … and something about you now, that my eyes, my body, my heart, can’t let go of, can’t get enough of …

We looked at each other with an openness and soul-baring desire that I’d never shared with anyone else.

“There’s been no one else for me, Aerin,” I finally said something. “I mean, I did have a relationship … but it couldn’t work. I tried. But it wouldn’t work.”

She ran a finger down my nose and rubbed her thumb lightly over my lips. I sucked the thumb slightly into my mouth and licked it.

“He wasn’t you…”

“He?” she asked.

I nodded. “Haven’t been with any other women.”

“I kinda dated him for about a year,” I added. “He was good to me, but …”

She said softly as my voice trailed away, “It didn’t feel like us.”

She gave me a small smile and continued to run the tips of her fingers all over my face, under my chin, across my jaw, as if rediscovering a place she’d known well and was returning to. I took shallow breaths to stay conscious, otherwise, I was afraid to breath, in case she was just a dream I’d conjured up and would disappear if I shattered this whole scene with breathing.

“I had a six-month relationship with someone, Harley,” she said quietly.

“Longer than ours,” I observed.

“Longer,” she admitted. “But not like ours. Even at our worst, what we had was better than anything I had with anyone else after.”

“She was nice, too, like your guy must have been. But she was pressing me to move on, to forget …”

She paused, and drew a breath in and slowly exhaled. “I forced you … us … into ending things two years ago, because I panicked, Harley. I can make the stress of everything that happened to me a reason for that … but I know that you suffered, too. You handled the whole thing much better than I did, though, and begged me to give you … us … a chance … but I was too wrapped up in the thought of having lost our magic … our love, or the way I’d idealized it, that I didn’t realize the reality of what you were saying. That we were together, at least, and could work on a future, build a new love, if we dared to try.”