Page 63 of Wish For Me

“Surely they’d let you write what you want to?”

“I don’t honestly know. The more I think about the professorship job, the more constrained I feel. The more I feel like I should just get a job at a community college to pay the bills and do what I want on the side.”

Noelle stops moving against me.

“I don’t want much, Noelle. I want a home. A family. Someone to grow old with.”

“That’s a good dream,” she whispers.

I lean over her, cradling her head in my hands. “I want you, Noelle.”

“You can’t give up everything to live here.”

“Why not?”

She presses her lips together. “I don’t ever want to be the reason you give up something bigger.”

“Noelle, you’re my biggest dr—”

Noelle presses a finger to my lips before I can say it. “We have some time, don’t we? You’re in town until when?”

I grasp her hand and kiss her knuckles. “I have a flight back the day after Christmas.” I open my mouth again to say I can change it; I’m going to change it. I’ll cancel it and never look back.

But she presses her finger against my lips again. “So we have…”—she looks up as if adding it up—“two weeks?”

“Twelve days,” I say under her finger.

“The twelve days of Christmas,” she says with the most spectacular smile I’ve ever seen. “Let’s just enjoy these days together and we can decide then what to do, okay?”

“I’m not going to change my mind.”

“Fine. But just think about everything, okay? Really think about if you’d be happy here. Take me out of the equation.”

Impossible. But I relent. This is for her, not for me. “Okay,” I say. “Fine. But I’m not going to let you out of my sight.”

She smiles. Then she gasps, as if remembering something. She jumps up and runs fully naked, toward her clothes.

My confused body makes my stomach drop, while my dick swells at the sight of her. “Noelle, you okay?”

“If you don’t want to let me out of your sight, you’ll have to join me downstairs.”

I rise up on my elbows, watching as she shakes out her dress and holds it up over her head to put it on. “You’re a goddess, you know that?” She’s something the universe drew with its own hand.

But as she covers up her gorgeous body I come back to my senses. “Wait, why are you going downstairs?”

“I want to look at that room with the photos.”

Five minutes later, half-dressed with open sleeping bags wrapped around our shoulders for warmth, we’re back downstairs in the room with the picture frames and costumes.

Noelle heads straight for the framed photos, crouching down and flicking through them like she knows what she’s looking for. I’m confused, but trust she’s going to explain what she’s doing at some point.

She lets out an adorable little squeak partway through.

“How did I not know you sneezed like that?”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

She’s right. There’s a whole lifetime to learn.

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