He set me down at the edge of the bed. I caught impressions—dark sheets, a massive headboard, the skyline reflected in amirror I couldn’t look away from—and then he was kneeling in front of me and the room stopped mattering.
His fingers found the sash of the robe. Paused. His eyes lifted to mine—a question, clear and patient, even now, even with his breathing ragged and his hands not quite steady.
I pulled the sash loose myself. Let the silk slide off my shoulders and pool behind me on the bed.
He didn’t move. Didn’t speak. He just looked at me, and I felt that gaze the way you feel sunlight—everywhere, all at once, warm against every inch of skin. The old insecurity flared—not enough, not built for this, not made for men like him—and died under the expression on his face. Because he was looking at me like I was the answer to something he’d been asking his whole life.
“Come here,” I whispered.
He rose and I pulled him to me by his shirt, my fingers twisting in the cotton, and we fell back onto the bed and his weight settled over me and everything—the penthouse, the city, the seven wasted years—compressed into the space between our bodies.
His mouth traced my collarbone. I arched into it, a sound escaping me that I didn’t recognize. His hand slid up my ribcage, slow, learning me like a language he’d forgotten and was remembering word by word. When his lips found the dip of my throat I sucked in a breath so sharp it hurt, and he paused there, feeling my pulse hammer against his mouth.
I pulled his shirt over his head and ran my palms down his chest—broader, harder, the landscape of him changed in ways that made my fingers want to map every new ridge and plane. When I traced the line below his navel his whole body clenched, a tremor that ran through him like a current, and the feeling of that—of making him shake—sent something blazing through my veins.
“Pauline.” My name in his mouth had turned into something new—low and broken and sacred, a prayer and a confession tangled together.
“I’m here,” I breathed. “I’m right here.”
He kissed my sternum. My ribs. The soft skin below my navel where I’d always been self-conscious. He kissed each place like it mattered. Like every inch of me was something he’d been missing, something he’d dreamed about in the years between us, something he was finally,finallyallowed to touch.
When the last barriers fell away, when there was nothing left between us but skin and heat and the city light painting us both silver and gold, he paused. Held himself still above me. His arms were trembling with the effort. His eyes found mine in the half-dark and held.
“Stay with me,” he said. Not a command. A wish.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
He moved, and I moved with him, and the world narrowed to the rhythm we built together—slow at first, achingly slow, every breath drawn out, every sensation given room to bloom. His forehead pressed against mine. My fingers dug into his shoulders. He whispered my name and I whispered his and the sound of us filled the room like music.
I lost myself in it. In the heat of his skin against mine, in the way his breath stuttered when I wrapped my legs tighter around him, in the low sounds he couldn’t contain when I pressed my mouth to his throat and tasted salt. The pleasure built like a tide—rising, gathering, pulling me toward something vast and inevitable. His hand found mine on the pillow beside my head and our fingers laced together, and I held on, held on, held on?—
I came apart with his name on my lips, my body bowing off the bed, every nerve singing. He followed a moment later—his arms locking around me, his face buried in my neck, my nameleaving him in a sound so raw it wrapped around my heart and stayed there.
Silence.
Our breathing. The distant hum of the city. The soft ticking of a clock somewhere I couldn’t see.
We lay tangled in his sheets, his arm heavy across my waist, my cheek against his chest. I traced lazy, aimless shapes on his skin and listened to his heartbeat slow—from a gallop to a canter to something deep and steady that felt like safety.
He shifted. His fingers found my grandmother’s necklace—that thin silver chain resting against my throat, warm from my skin. He lifted it gently and pressed his lips to it. The gesture was so tender, so unexpected, that my breath caught.
“I love you,” he said, his mouth still touching the silver. “I have loved you since you were sitting at a pool party reading about serial killers and pretending the rest of the world didn’t exist.”
The words moved through me—through skin, through ribs, through the marrow of my bones. My eyes burned. I let the tears come because they weren’t grief. They were the feeling of setting down something so heavy that standing up afterward made you dizzy.
He lifted his head. Saw my face. His thumb caught the tear at my cheekbone and held it there, against my skin, like he was collecting something precious.
I wanted to say it back. The words were right there—sitting on my tongue, solid and true and ready. But my throat wouldn’t open. Not because I was afraid. Because the feeling was so big, so overwhelming, that trying to fit it into three small words felt like trying to pour the ocean into a glass.
So I pressed my palm over his heart instead. Held it there. Let my eyes close.
His arm drew me closer. His lips brushed my temple.
I fell asleep to the beat of him—steady, sure, unwavering—and for the first time in as long as I could remember, the dark held nothing that could hurt me.
CHAPTER 15
Pauline
