Page 24 of Let it Crackle
It took three bedtime stories, two spilled sippy cups, a broken nightlight emergency, and the kind of bargaining that would put hostage negotiators to shame—but all four kids are asleep.
Thank God.
I ease the door shut behind me, exhale, and pad down the hall barefoot. The floor creaks once beneath me—Basil lifts his head from the couch, gives me a lazy wag, then flops back down like even he’s too exhausted to care.
And then I step into our room.
Soft lamplight spills across the bed. Maya’s already there, curled beneath the covers in one of my old T-shirts. She sighs when she sees me, reaching a hand across the sheets.
I’m not even halfway to the mattress before I’m hard.
Because even now—after four kids, a thousand school runs, and a decade of double grocery store runs because she forgot eggs the first time—she still does that to me. Still makes me feel seventeen and desperate and stupid in love.
I slide in behind her, wrap an arm around her waist, and press a kiss to the base of her neck. Her skin is warm and faintly sweet—vanilla and sleep and something soft that’s justMaya.
“You smell like cookies,” I murmur into her hair.
“I baked,” she says, voice already half-asleep. “You wrangled toddlers. We all contributed to the survival effort.”
I chuckle, rough and low in my throat. “You still wearing that little cherry-printed pair under here?”
“Nope,” she says, popping the “p” with a grin I can feel even in the dark. “Too much laundry. Too little energy.”
Fuck.
I roll her beneath me before she can blink, bracing myself on my forearms, and look down at her like I’m starving. Because I am.
That look in her eyes? It’s the same one she gave me the first time she kissed me back in the library. The same one when she said yes to a proposal made between dusty shelves and fairy lights. The same one every time one of our babies entered the world.
Soft. Fierce. Mine.
“You do realize,” she says, fingertips brushing my jaw, “we’re pushing forty.”
I smirk. “And yet you still get me hard just by breathing.”
She rolls her eyes—but her cheeks flush, and that mouth I’ve kissed a thousand times curves in that way that tells me I’m winning.
“Bet that line kills at the fire station.”
“You think I’m out here turning hoses for anyone but you, Gibbons?”
She laughs—really laughs—and it shoots straight to my chest. That sound is still my favorite thing in the world. Right next to the way her body curves into mine like we were made to fit.
I kiss her jaw, her throat, the soft slope of her collarbone. Her hands slide up my chest, fingertips trailing the line of my shoulders.
“You’re still it for me,” she whispers, and her voice wobbles, just a little. “Even after all this time.”
I go still. Because I know she means it. And because it still floors me—this quiet, daily love she hands me without asking for anything back.
“Yeah?” I say, brushing her hair back, watching every flicker of emotion in her face.
She nods, eyes soft. “You still make me feel like the heroine. Like I’m not just the one writing the story... I’m living it.”
And that?
Thatwrecksme.
I kiss her again, slower this time… Like a prayer whispered into skin. And when my hand slides down, when her breath catches, when her legs wrap around me with a familiarity that’s somehow still thrilling—I feel it again.
