Inside Out - Lauren Dane [124]
Just a few days before, they’d been out and had run into not just one woman he used to sleep with, but two! Until that day, she’d met a few others in passing and had found herself wanting in some way. None of them were like her. They were all petite and tended toward blonde. Fake tans usually, lots of makeup. He had a type, clearly. And she was not it.
It made her insecure. Who wouldn’t be?
But that day when they’d bumped into those two women, he barely saw them. He’d been friendly enough, not rude, but his attention had never really left Ella. She’d been his focus, and those women, pretty though they were, had not been her.
It had been a lightbulb moment and the time she’d let go of her own fear. Suddenly, she realized that she was his type in a way those others would never be. He’d chosen carbon copies of the same woman over and over, but they’d never gone anywhere. He’d never shown them his house, never shown them how to use a band saw.
She laughed at that, but the man was passionate about his tools, and it had been a big moment for her when he’d let her use it the first time without standing over her every moment.
As she walked toward the door to grab her coat and bag, she noticed the pale, cream-colored envelope someone had slid under her door.
She looked through the peephole and then carefully opened the door, but no one was there.
One glance at the front of the envelope, and she knew who it was from. She braced herself for the worst as she opened it up and pulled out the letter inside.
She unfolded the smooth, thick paper and smiled. The handwriting was typical of him, of his voice. Bold. Masculine. His words unfurled across the page as if he never doubted a thing he thought. She knew differently by then, of course, that Andrew Copeland was far more than what he appeared on the surface. But his letters had become essential. Part of the rhythm and play of their relationship, like foreplay. And this one could make or break that.
Dearest Ella,
Imagine my surprise when I opened my mailbox and found your letter and the picture. I looked at it and read your letter. Then I read it a dozen more times, railing against myself for not seeing the obvious.
I found this snippet in a journal I keep. A snippet I’d written intending to send you at some later date in a letter. But then I figured today was precisely the day I needed you to read it, because it’s the truth.
As you slept, the rain fell outside and warm, I lay with you, naked, against your heart and body and you were mine. You are mine, and I don’t think I know all the words to tell you just what that means. Only that when you breathe, I do, when you smile just for me everything inside me stills and knows it’s found the key.
He’d sketched her on the paper, a quick pencil sketch of her shoulders and the top of her back, of the way her hair had swept forward over her face.
This is what I see. This is what I feel. This is what I want to feel every day for the rest of my life, and you’re the only one who can make me this way. Let me love you, and I promise you all of me.
I love you,
Andrew, Cope and Andy
PS—Look out front when you’re ready.
She read it twice more and, holding it to her heart, she went to her windows and looked outside. He stood there, looking up at her windows as he leaned against his truck, and when he saw her, his face lit with a smile so beautiful it nearly felled her.
Instead, she smiled back and waved.
He motioned up and managed to put a question on it, so she nodded.
And then she ran to the bathroom and tried to tame her hair, wished she had enough time for at least a bit of styling but opted for a quick, one-handed brush of her teeth while she buzzed him up.
She opened the door with a yank, not pretending she wasn’t anxious.
He came into her arms just the way he was supposed