“Because I’ve dreamed of this happening since I met you.” Her teary eyes moved to his. “And it all feels like a dream.”
“Ah, babe.” Caden laughed, hugging her with one arm. The baby squirmed between them as Caden pressed his lips to her temple.
“So, how’d he do it?” I asked, wanting details. They were so young, it made me curious how Caden went about it.
Caden chuckled, settling into his chair. “Maybe leave out some of the details.”
Kinsley’s blush was immediate. “Well, yeah.”
Hayden plopped down next to me in the camp chair, coffee in one hand, a muffin in the other. “Tell us everything.”
Gray, who’d followed her, took the muffin from her mom and glared at Caden. “I don’t want to hear this.”
Caden watched Gray walking away. “What’d I do? She won’t talk to me now.”
“She’s in love with you,” Hayden told him, slurping her coffee. “Fuck, that’s hot.” She leveled Caden a serious look. “But don’t go getting a big head. She loved Harry Styles too.”
Laughing, I glanced over at Rager to see him watching me. Noticing my legs were crossed, his eyes made a brazen pass over my body and then he winked. For some reason, I flashed back to the day he first told me he loved me.
The blanket around me, soft cotton touching overly sensitive skin, slipped off my shoulders. My body hurt to the point that I didn’t move to adjust the blanket. Every muscle had been pushed beyond comfort from sleeping on the air mattress.
Everything from the warm breeze kissing my skin, the light blue and gray clouds, and the man next to me relaxed me in ways I had no words to describe. A gentle sway of the trees, a bird chirping, sky growling, all reminders of why this place would forever hold a memory for me.
Coasting his nose along my shoulder, his lips pressing lightly to the freckles that kissed my skin, his touch torched mine. I breathed out, long and slow, wanting to hide everything I was feeling.
“I love you….” His lips brushed over my clammy skin as he spoke.
I twisted my head around at the words. My breath caught in my throat, pulse pounding in my ears as a shock of nerves rushed through me.
I’ve always loved you.
He’d never said those words to me before. He’d said he was in love… but never uttered the words in that context, delivered in that way.
“Rager—”
“Shhh. Don’t say anything. Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“Because, whatever comes next, I don’t care.” His arms bound around my shoulders forced me to stay against his chest. “I didn’t say it because I wanted to hear you say it. I said it because I wanted you to hear it and to think about what it means. I don’t want to hear anything back because those words were meant for you to feel, not to reply to.”
I would have said it back.
“I don’t want to let go,” he muttered into the breeze after a long pause, his lips pressing to my temple. His voice sounded so far away, so regret-filled that I hardly recognized it from the cool, collected boy I knew.
“I hate that this isn’t easy.”
In reality, Rager had no idea how much anxiety I had over this and how with every word we didn’t say, I felt like it was going to overwhelm me completely.
“Nothing is ever easy when it comes to us,” he noted, feeling the warm breeze against my back. “This could be us forever.”
“It will be us forever.”
A smiled played at his lips, and though it was a familiar sight, one I’d seen often these last two days, something seemed different about it. I wanted to say so much then, only anything I could say seemed inadequate to what I was really feeling.
The baby crying brought me back out of my trance to see Rager holding Bristol in his arms now. Tears stung my eyes. At the time, before that I love you, I had secret kisses with question marks. I didn’t think Rager and I would work out, and now that we had, I was even more thankful we found our way to one another.
As we sat around the camp lot that morning, time moved slower than usual. I watched Rager play with the kids and dance to Creedence Clearwater Revival with Bristol. I snapped pictures as he lay on the ground and played cars with the boys. And I soaked up every minute of our time with him.
“I WANNA WATCH Daddy tonight,” Pace told me, grabbing his hat from the counter in the T-shirt trailer and a sweatshirt.
“Me too,” Bristol added.
And then the younger two—“Me!”
Although I wasn’t entirely sure what Hudson said. It sounded like pee followed by him trying to take his diaper off. It was hard to take all four into the stands. I usually appreciated that when you have four kids, they never wanted the same thing at the same time.
Kinsley reached for a blanket she’d brought with her and adjusted the headphones she had on Grace’s head. They looked huge compared to her tiny head. Kinsley motioned to the pack on her chest. “Think she will be okay in this?”
I nodded. “I carried all my babies in a pack when I went up into the stands.”
We ended up having a couple of other regular drivers’ wives tend the T-shirt trailers. We took turns doing that each night depending on who made the main event and who hadn’t made it past the Last Chance Showdown.
The kids wouldn’t sit still during the pre-race activities. The twenty minutes it took for the cars to roll onto the track and introductions, they must have made over a dozen requests for what they saw others eating, anything from cotton candy to beer. Hudson was insistent that he needed beer.
And then came the heart-pumping anticipation of
