I’d learned from our chats that he’s a 1342 Small Craft Mechanic. I’m sure I got my wording wrong but it basically means that that’s what he chose his job to be when he enlisted and while he was deployed. Besides, you know, saving the world and all that.

So I guess it’s safe to say that he’d be pretty disappointed in himself had he not connected the engine to the shell properly. But going off of the widening of his grin, he’s done all right.

He rubs his hands together as he makes his way to the passenger seat, carefully placing my Kindle in the glove box. Swear, he thinks that Kindle is made of unicorn leather or something. He handles it with more care than he handles me… but then again… the books I’ve read have taught me that not all lovemaking should be sensual. Sometimes, you just want a good, hard, rough spanking. True story.

“Let’s take her for a spin,” he tells me.

“You want me to drive?”

He looks at me like I’m stupid. “Of course you’re driving. It’s your car.”

“What?!” I shout.

“Why the hell do you think I’ve been working on it?”

“You can’t give me a car! Did Afghanistan give you brain damage?”

He rolls his eyes. “I have a car! What the hell am I going to do with this one?”

“You can’t buy me a car, Dylan!”

He scoffs. “Technically, I didn’t buy you a car. I made you one.” His smile widens as he pretends to write in the air. “Dear Jeremy,” he says, his voice high pitched. “Dylan made me a car and I love him so much.”

I laugh. I can’t help it. Because I know he’s not mocking me. He’s just being Dylan.

“Seriously,” he adds. “What am I going to do with this?”

“You didn’t buy it with the intention of giving it to me, though.”

“I beg to differ.”

“You got it a few weeks after you got home. We’d barely started dating.”

“Yeah, and I wanted to get in your pants back then. This was my go-to if all my other plans failed me.”

“What? Give me a car in the hopes I’d put out?”

“Yep.”

We argue about this for another five minutes before he finally gets sick of my nagging and tells me to shut up and be grateful. So… I shut up and be grateful.

We’re gone a couple of hours before we get back to our neighborhood, but he tells me to turn onto a street two before ours. He doesn’t tell me why. Just says it’ll be worth it. Then he tells me to stop in front of nowhere familiar and gets out of the car. I stay. Just in case this is one of his crazy Operation Mayhems and I need to bail quickly. He walks to my side of the car, opens my door, undoes my belt, and holds my hand, helping me to get out. “What’s going on?” I ask, looking around me.

He’s pulling one of his shitty pranks. I can feel it. My heart can feel it. It’s already hammering in my chest. I suspect his crazy friends will retaliate his retaliation and throw shit at me. Probably under his advisement. I do tend to throw shit at him often.

He must sense my concern because he chuckles. “Don’t worry, Riley. Nothing bad is going to happen.” He walks up a path leading to a single story house, similar to ours, but a little bit bigger.

“Are we visiting with someone?” I look down at my clothes—my standard grease stained shirt underneath one of his and my torn denim shorts and I grasp his hand tighter and dig my heels into the ground. “I’m not dressed for this.”

He laughs again. “There’s no one here.”

“Oh my God, you’re going to kill me in this abandoned house.”

He shrugs. “Maybe,” he says, pulling a set of keys out of his pocket and stopping at the front door. Then he proceeds to open it. “But that would be a really bad way to start out in our new home. Not to mention the resale value.”

I stop in my tracks, my breath leaving me and running far away to the land of sense, abandoning me in the land of—“What’s going on?” I ask.

This makes him laugh harder. “I spoke to your mom about it,” he tells me. “She was hesitant at first, but after an hour or so of me convincing her that it was a good idea for you to get out of the house, get on your feet, and maybe even get a job… if you don’t plan on going back to college, that is…”

My eyes roam the space of the empty living room, but they’re not looking at the house. They’re still looking for my breath. And the sense. Because right now, neither exist.

“So?”

I look over at him, standing a few feet in front of me with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on mine. “Huh?”

He shrugs, his voice lowering, and I can see the insecurity masked behind the cockiness. “I bought us a house, Riley. I want us to move out and move on. I want us to do it together.”

“But the car…” I whisper stupidly.

“The car goes with the house, and both come with me. If you want them.”

“I want them,” I squeak, feeling it impossible to breathe through the lump in my throat, the overwhelming emotions and the love I have for the man in front of me. “But what happens… I mean, when you leave?”

“That’s why I got one close to your mom, so you can visit and if things ever get too hard, you can always go home… to her home.” He takes a step forward, licking his lips as he does. Then he takes my hand and dips his head so we’re eye to eye. “But I’m hoping we can make this our home, and while I’m gone, you’ll continue to keep it that way. So that when I’m done, I can come home, Riley. To you. You’re my home now.”

We make love on the hardwood floors of our new living room, our sounds of pleasure echoing off the walls and into my heart. I cry. I’ve never cried when we’ve made love before—but then again, he’s never made me feel like this. There was always a question between now and the day he redeployed… what would happen to us? And he cleared up that question with an act that defies logic—an act that denied permission. He didn’t ask if I wanted these things. He didn’t need to.

He knew I wanted it.

Wanted him.

And for the first time since he knocked on my door—angry and pissed off at the world—we found what we were looking for. And it sure as hell wasn’t in the bottom of a bottle.

It was in each other.

We found the horizon.

He found his calm.

And I found my reality.

We drive. His hand on my leg. The sun beaming down on us. While we talk about my new car and our new house.

Dreams—they do come true.

Twenty-Eight

Riley

Dylan rolls up the sleeves of his shirt, his eyes on mine and his lips pressed tight.

I take another look around the empty kitchen. “Well,” I ask him. “Where should we start?”

He smirks. “Probably where it all began. On the kitchen counter. Then the bedroom floor. Oh, and the shower. I’ve always wanted to fuck you in the shower. The possibilities are endless, Hudson.”

He jumps back, avoiding my smack on his stomach. Then he laughs. “I don’t know, babe. It’s your house.”