They walked halfway around the lagoon, listening to the frogs croak as they approached and then fall silent when they got too close, before heading back to the truck. Just like Stella thought, Sam had to get up early in the morning.
“I already stayed up way past my bedtime,” he said. “But it was worth it.”
“I hope so. I certainly had a good time.”
“A great time,” Sam amended. “The best time I can remember having in a long time.”
He wasn’t wrong. Everything about Stella’s time in Willow Beach had been wonderful. And usually by this point in a first date, she was fake-yawning and doing everything in her power to subtly express how ready she was to wrap things up and go home, but with Sam, she found herself walking slowly back to the car.
When Sam offered his hand to help her into the seat, she squeezed his fingers and met his eyes first, pausing before she stepped inside. Stella was trying to wring the date dry, squeezing every possible moment out of it that she could.
The drive back to the inn was short, only a few minutes. When they arrived, Sam let the truck idle on the gravel drive out front.
“I’ll walk you to the porch,” he said, voice suddenly rough, “but I don’t want to kiss you out in the open where all the guests can see.”
Stella’s heart took off, beating hard enough she was sure it would grow wings and take flight at any moment.
When was the last time she was kissed? She couldn’t remember, and had a sudden and absurd thought that maybe she had forgotten how.
Should she kiss Sam at all? If she was planning to leave tomorrow, was it right? They were both adults, and if they both consented to the kiss knowing she would be leaving tomorrow, there would be nothing wrong with an innocent peck.
Yet, Stella worried for her heart.
She liked Sam; that was undeniable. So many of her own feelings and hopes and desires had been unclear to her recently, but this one was not: she wanted to kiss him. But whether she should or not was still unclear.
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should was one of the phrases she’d repeated most often to Jace when he was growing up. When he was young, she used the phrase to warn against picking his nose. As he aged, she offered it as helpful advice when it came to navigating peer pressure and relationships.
Now, she said it to herself, but it didn’t seem to help.
Sam gnawed at his lower lip, his eyes flicking down to Stella’s mouth. “May I? Kiss you, I mean? Would that be okay?”
Stella hesitated, trying to figure out if it was possible for her to refuse him. She couldn’t just say no. She’d have to explain herself. She’d have to tell him that she might like him too much, which was why she couldn’t kiss him, and what kind of sense did that make? If anything, that admission said out loud would make her want to kiss him more.
“I know you’re leaving tomorrow,” Sam said with a sigh. “But I had a great time tonight, and I like you a lot, Stella. You are kind and warm and fun. You’re strong and smart and…I could keep listing attributes, but simply put, I’d rather use that time to kiss you.”
Her heart was now beating in her throat, making it difficult to speak, but Stella managed. “Yes, that would be okay.”
Her voice was shakier than she’d have liked, but Sam didn’t seem to mind. His face split in a wide smile, and he leaned across the bucket seat of the truck.
Stella kept worrying she wouldn’t remember how to kiss until the minute their lips touched, and then it felt as natural a thing as she had ever done.
The warm smell she liked so much from his truck was all around her now, emanating from him, and Stella drew closer.
Being with Sam made her forget her worries, and kissing him erased them entirely. Stella couldn’t imagine a single thing in the world that could be wrong or worth troubling herself over. She felt perfectly at peace, and she wasn’t keen to give it up anytime soon.
His face was covered in a thin layer of stubble, and Stella ran her fingertips over his cheeks and around to the back of his neck. Sam leaned closer, sliding a hand into Stella’s hair, and she melted.
There was an entire truck console between them—Stella could feel the edge of it pressing into her hip—but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.
She and Sam had spent the evening talking about time, whether they’d wasted it, whether there was enough of it, and now Stella realized they could’ve been kissing that whole time. Kissing would solve all of their problems. Because when they kissed, time stopped.
For days, Stella had been agonizing over endless questions about her future and her purpose and her dreams. Now, with this one kiss, her head had gone quiet, and all those wants boiled down to reveal that there was only one true desire lying at the heart of them: to kiss Sam again.
15
Stella could feel Georgia Baldwin staring at her while she ate her breakfast, but she did her best to focus on her French toast. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to talk about her date with Sam; it was that, if she started, she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to stop.
It was perfect.
From the food to the conversation to the knee-shaking kiss at the end.
Every single bit of it was perfect, and Stella couldn’t let herself feel those things right now.
Because she was leaving today.
The thought made her want to drop her face in her
