Page 135 of Lovestruck at Sundown
“I bet we can.” I smiled and looked up to meet his beautiful, light sapphire eyes that could get me to agree to anything in two seconds. “You’re not kidding about this, are you?”
He shook his head no and puckered his lips slightly.
“We sleep together almost every night,” I reminded him. “I’m starting summer school, and you’re leaving soon. Will we have the time to work on joining the bedrooms right now?”
He bobbed his head yes and blinked slowly.
“William!” I let out an exasperated laugh. We’d beenneighbors for a while before we even started dating. And thanks to the invisible door separating our rooms, moving from his place to mine was easy. We had that added closeness not many couples had at the beginning of their relationships.
At the end of the day, he still arrived at his place, and I arrived at mine. We had our privacy if we felt like it, even if I spent the night at his place or him at mine on a regular basis. Still, William asking me to move in with him was a huge deal. It was a significant step up our relationship ladder. And as exciting as I found the idea of sharing my life with William in an even more intimate way, it also made me feel sad because hewasleaving soon.
William knew me well, and by the way he was looking at me, I was sure he was trying to guess where my reluctance was coming from. It wasn’t about not wanting to say yes or feeling afraid about taking that next step. “I’m afraid I’ll miss you more if we do this right before you leave.” I grabbed the flaps of his jacket and pulled him closer to me.
“I’ll miss you to death either way,” he whispered back.
With a sigh, I pressed my forehead against his again, then dropped a peck on his lips.
“My Girl” started playing, and Lily and her father took the dance floor for the father-daughter dance.
“Say yes,” he said.
“Yes.” There was no other answer. It felt right, and it made my heart beat faster with excitement.
William lifted his fist and mouthed, “Yes!”
I laughed, cleared my throat, and said, “Jag—älskar—dig.”
William gaped at me with exaggerated shock. I never attempted to say anything in Swedish. As much as I loved languages, Swedish was a language that was completely out of my comfort zone.
“Jag älskar dig också, och jag är väldigt glad att du sa ja. Jag tar hand om allt. Jag lovar. Du behöver inte oroa dig för någonting.”
He could’ve been telling me to fuck off, but I was still a puddle on the floor. I loved how his voice turned slightly graver when he spoke in Swedish. He knew I loved it, especially during sex. I’d mentioned it to him more times than I could recall. Still, I tilted my head and rolled my eyes at him because heknewI didn’t understand one lick of whatever he had just said. Except for the first part where he said he loved me, too.
“What?” he said with a laugh. “I thought you’d learned Swedish by now.”
“Shut up.” I laughed, remembering Astrid’s earlier comment. “What were you saying?”
“That I’ll take care of everything.” He kissed my temple. “And that you don’t need to worry about a thing.”
“Thank you.” I took a slow, calming breath and pushed away the nagging thoughts that reminded me William would soon be moving twenty-four hundred miles away. “Now, let’s watch Lily and her dad dance.”
William tapped his thigh twice, asking me to sit on his lap, and I did.
“Thank you,” he said. “For saying yes.”
After helping Lily into her third and last dress of the night, we all switched gears to full-on party mode. I was having the time of my life. It’d been a while since I allowed myself to have a good time without holding back or feeling guilty about it.
Zara and Moira had been dancing close to us, and I caught William shooting curious glances at them before we decided to take a break and drink some water. “Why was Zara afraid you’dget mad about Moira being her plus one?” I asked him. When I helped Lily get changed into her third dress, Zara came with us, too. She told me all William had said to her was, “We’ll talk about this after the wedding.” Evidently, Zara had interpreted William’s comment as a win and had taken the liberty to shamelessly enjoy Moira’s company for the rest of the evening.
William lifted his brows as he drank half a glass of water in a single gulp. Then he set the glass on the table and clicked his tongue. “Fredrik, one of my best friends growing up, asked Zara on a date four years ago,” William explained. “She asked me first if I was okay with it, and I said no. Zara had just turned eighteen, but I still saw her as a child, and Fredrik and I were twenty-four. She went out with him behind my back. He obviously didn’t know Zara was my sister. Nobody knew. All he knew is that she was a family friend.
“So one day, Fredrik calls me to catch up and mentions how he’d been fucking around with Zara, among other things I’ve already drilled out of my brain.” William signaled the server to bring him another drink. I wasn’t drinking much and had since switched to water. “I lost it,” William continued. “As much as I tried to keep it together, I failed. And Fredrik didn’t get why I was so upset. He probably thought I had a thing for her, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t tell him she was my half-sister, so he didn’t take it very well when Zara called him the next day to end it after I made her do it.” He licked his lower lip. “My friendship with Fredrik ended because of it, and I made Zara promise she wouldn’t date any of my friends, male or female. So she knows better than to get too attached to Moira.”
Damn.
The situation was more complicated than I thought. I’d promised Zara I would say something to William, but Zara had left out the most important details when we discussed it.All I could think of saying was, “Zara mentioned earlier shereallylikes Moira.”
William shook his head, and I could sense the irritation building up inside him. “I can’t risk my relationship with Moira. It goes beyond our friendship, which I’m also not willing to give up if things were to go south between them.” William took a deep breath when the server came back with his drink. He took a sip and carried on. “You know I don’t usually like to speak of things before they’re set in stone. But let’s just say if I ever decide to act upon certain business endeavors, I’ll want Moira in my corner. And Zara getting involved with her makes me uneasy.”
