Always Only You by Chloe Liese (z-lib.org).epub

and my heart takes off inside my chest. “I’m so sorry. You loved me and I threw
it in your face. It…it scared me, Zenzero. I’m not going to lie. No one’s ever
loved me with no reservations.”
I stare at her as rain pours down, as a love whose magnitude and depth and
strength I can barely fathom wraps around my heart and pulls me toward her.
Her eyes search mine. “What I said at the hospital, it wasn’t true. I have—I
do—” On a shaky exhale, she steps closer. “I love you, Ren.”
“Frankie. I love you,” I whisper, cupping her face, so close, so soft.
“Still?” she asks warily. “Even after the past few weeks?”
“Still. Always. I’d wait lifetimes for you, Frankie. You would always be
worth it.”
She peers up at me. “Ask me.”
“Ask you what?” I say dazedly.
“‘Membership is contingent upon authenticity,’” she repeats, just as I told
her months ago. “‘Upon words spoken from the heart.’ Ask me what I’m
prepared to say.”
I shake my head. “Frankie, you don’t have to—”
“This.” She brings her hand to rest over my heart, her eyes searching mine.
“I want in. Lifelong privileges, ideally, but I’ll settle for a month-to-month trialmembership
if necessary.”
“Frankie, you already have it.”
“‘Love is not love,’” she blurts, wiping rain from her eyes and blinking up at
me. “‘Which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to
remove. O no! It is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never
shaken.’”
“It’s cold, you’re still—”
“Please, Ren, let me tell you. Let me say what you mean to me.” She inhales
roughly, then shouts through rain and thunder, a rush of wind through the trees,
“‘Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.’”
I hold her close and kiss her, then pull back enough so I can stare into those
wide, deep eyes. “I love you. I always have.” Wind rushes through the trees,
wraps around us, as I tuck her close, as I press a kiss to her lips and whisper, “It
was always only you.”