“You think I don’t know?” The words came out before she could stop them. “You think I haven’t been trying just as hard? You think I wanted this?”
Miller’s breath caught. “Astoria?—”
“Eleven days.” Astoria heard her own voice as if from a distance, the ice queen facade cracking along fault lines she hadn't known existed. “Eleven days since that conference room, and I haven't stopped thinking about what would have happened if Rachel had taken five more seconds to come back.”
The space between them had shrunk without either of them consciously moving. Astoria could see the flecks of gold in Miller's warm brown eyes. Her heart was pounding so hard she was certain Miller could hear it.
“We shouldn’t,” Astoria whispered.
“I know.”
“If anyone found out…”
“I know.”
“It could destroy both of us.”
Miller’s hand came up, hovering near Astoria’s face without touching. “Tell me to stop,” she said. “Tell me to stop and walk away, and I will. I’ll go back to my table, and we’ll finish our research and pretend like this conversation never happened.
Astoria should say. The word was right there, simple and final:stop.
“I can’t,” she admitted, and she wasn’t sure if she meant she couldn't tell Miller to stop or couldn't keep pretending or couldn't survive months of this exquisite, impossible wanting.
Maybe she meant all of it.
Miller’s fingers brushed her jaw, feather-light and devastating in its caress.
Every thought in her head went quiet, and she stopped breathing.
The touch was barely there, just the pads of Miller’s fingers tracing the line of her jaw, hesitant and questioning. It would’ve been so easy to pull away, to step back and break the spell, to retreat behind the walls she’d spent a lifetime building.
She didn’t move.
Miller’s eyes searched her face, looking for permission or refusal, and Astoria couldn’t give her either. She was frozen, caught between everything she knew she should do and everything she wanted, and wanting was winning. It had been winning for weeks now, maybe longer, and she was so tired of fighting it.
“Astoria.” Miller’s voice was barely a whisper. “I need you to tell me?—”
Astoria kissed her.
She didn’t decide to do it. There was no moment of conscious choice, no deliberate closing of the distance. One second, Miller was speaking, and the next, Astoria’s mouth was on hers, swallowing whatever words had been coming next.
The kiss wasn’t gentle. Weeks of tension cracked open between them—everything that had been building since the mediation, since the preliminary hearing, since every moment they’d pretended not to notice each other. She kissed Miller like she was drowning and Miller was oxygen, desperate and graceless and nothing like the controlled veneer she showed to the world.
Miller made a sound against her mouth, something between a gasp and a moan, and then her hands were in Astoria’s hair, pulling her closer. The book Astoria had been holding hit the floor with a thud that neither of them acknowledged. Miller’s back hit the edge of the table, and still, they didn’t stop, couldn’t stop, the kiss deepening into something that made Astoria’s knees unsteady.
She was burning. After all those years of Valerie’s voice in her head, she was burning alive in a courthouse law library with her hands fisted in Miller Scott’s sweater, and she’d never felt anything like this in her entire life.
Miller’s fingers scraped against her scalp, and Astoria heard herself make a sound she didn’t recognize. She pressed closer, needing more contact, more of Miller’s warmth against her, more of this thing she’d told herself she didn’t want and couldn’t have and shouldn’t need.
They broke apart gasping.
For a long moment, neither of them moved. They stood tangled together between the table and the bookshelves, their foreheads nearly touching, breathing each other's air. Miller's hands were still in Astoria's hair. Astoria's fingers were still twisted in the soft fabric of Miller's sweater.
“This can't happen,” Astoria said. Her voice came out wrecked, nothing like her own.
“I know.”
“We can’t…”
