Show Me How

When a stop at a shady motel puts Brandon Parker face to face with his best friend, Mary, for the first time in over a decade, he almost doesn’t believe it. He’d never stopped looking for her, but even a career in law enforcement couldn’t help him find a woman who wanted to stay invisible.

When Mary Benson ran away at eighteen, she did it with good reason. A man was in the hospital because of her, and the people she loved were in danger. She had to leave to keep them safe.

Mary’s guilt is her consolation. She’d lived with her decisions and accepted the hand dealt to her. But Brandon was about to shuffle the deck in a way she never expected.

“You destroyed me. My soul, my heart.” She pulls back and wipes her tear stained face, but I continue. “Thank Christ I found you again because you’re the only one who can put me back together. And I’m not leaving you, you’re not leaving me, until the emptiness I know we both feel is filled with so much fucking love that we wonder how we ever took a breath without it.”

She leans up and kisses my cheek, my jaw, before she reaches my lips. A calmness enters the room, and we take our time. Slow, gentle, soft kisses that I feel in my chest and my dick. When she finally pulls away, I have to grab the wall to steady myself.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I missed you. So much. And I can’t tell you how many times I dreamed about you, about us. Where we would be in our lives if my stupidity hadn’t—”
“You’re not stupid. You were scared.”

“I made a huge mistake.”

“What mistake was that? What could you possibly have done differently?”