Back to Me (Book Three ✓)

forty-nine

"Are you ready?" Emma asks, her cheeks rosy from laughter. She squeezes Maggie's thigh roll as I hand her back to Gemma.

God, yes.

Instead, I tuck her hair behind her ear. "For what?"

She smacks my shoulder, a pretend frown over her plump lips. But her eyes are smiling, big and brown and full of joy. Her freckles dance across her skin under the string lights overhead and as always, my resistance fails.

"Our dance. We're ready to turn up the music and dim the lights, but we're up first."

"Ah." I mumble into the soft skin of her neck, gripping her hips tightly as I rise to my feet, bringing her with me. "A dance with the hottest girl in the room, I'd be honored."

I take her hand and walk her to the center of the dance floor, oblivious to the eyes watching us. It's just me and her and the blush across her cheeks.

"The real question," I murmur, placing a hand on the small of her back and pressing her body firmly to mine, "Is, are you ready?"

My heart beats faster as Emma gently clasps my other hand with her dainty fingers, her head tilted back just enough so that she can gaze into my eyes.

She only asked me to take charge of one aspect of our wedding: the song for our first dance.

"You have such strong musical opinions," She'd said, "I don't want to pick a song and have you hate it. The entire dance, you'd just be thinking 'wow this song sucks,' 'Emma has such bad taste in music...'"

"No, I would not-"

She continued, "'I hope Mags doesn't have her mom's music taste.'"

I'd finally gotten her to stop teasing by tickling her into submission. But try as I might, I couldn't find us a song.

Not for weeks. There was just nothing out there that summed up exactly how I feel about her. Besides my song for her, of course.

So I wrote her another one.

With Parker's help keeping her distracted, I laid down the piano first, added some guitar, and then perfected the lyrics, rewriting and editing and re-recording until it all sounded just right. Until it was perfect.

"Of course I am." Emma replies, not taking her eyes off mine as we begin to sway and slowly spin, the opening notes coming through the sound system as the rest of the world falls quiet around us.

Her brows furrow, her head cocked at me as she tries to place it. A look of wonder passes over her delicate features before my voice finally accompanies the instruments and realization sets in.

I watch as she listens, my breath caught in my throat.

My love letter to Emma. To the woman I fell in love with when we met, to the grey-haired grandmother she will be some day, to the best friend I've ever known, to the mother raising our child.

To the love of my life, to my light in the darkness, to the one girl I will never stop singing about.

The things I should've said and never did, the things I'm lucky enough to remind her of every day from here on out.

Her eyes are watery when she reaches up to kiss me, but I know they're the best kind of tears. The only ones I'll ever make her cry again.

It seems like we're paused in that moment forever, her velvet lips on mine, our fingers intertwined, bodies melding together on the dance floor.

I only know it's not a dream because someone interrupts it. Eyes blinking open to see what it is, I slip back into what still feels like my fantasy world, taking Maggie's plump little self from Nadine and cradling her between Emma and me.