She stares at me for a long moment, like she’s committing me to memory. Then she lowers her head and kisses me, slow and deep and utterly lacking in performative heat. This is not for anaudience. This is justus.
“Good,” she whispers against my lips.
I smile, hands sliding into her hair, feeling the damp strands against my fingers. “We can debrief. Later. With tea. And maybe those otters.”
She laughs, the sound muffled against me. “Sex club, then otter documentaries. We contain multitudes.”
Outside, somewhere in the building, music plays, people laugh, lives intersect. Inside this room, in this moment, it feels like the two of us are in the eye of a storm. Everything wild and bright swirling around us; and, in the centre, a stillness made of choice.
She is motion; I have never felt more like I’m movingwithher.
And for the first time, the idea of stepping further into her tornado doesn’t feel like a risk of being blown apart.
It feels like the only way to really live.
Chapter 13
Tippi
Iwake up with my heart pounding.
For a few seconds I don’t know where I am. The ceiling looks unfamiliar in the half-light. Rhiannon’s fairy nightlight glows faintly in the hallway, painting little pink stars on the floorboards outside my door.
Foxton. Guest room. Leo and Sadie’s.
Right.
But the dream lingers like afterburn.
It wasn’t just sex. That’s the unsettling part.
Therewassex in the dream, of course; my subconscious is nothing if not on brand. Jacob had me bent over the kitchen counter, murmuring filthy things in that soft, careful voice of his that shouldnotbe allowed to sound that dirty. But that wasn’t the bit that’s got my chest feeling too tight.
It’s what came after.
In the dream, we were in some random airport. It was a mix of several I’ve been to, but somehow I knew it without anyone saying it, the way dream logic just hands you context for free. People wheeled suitcases past us. A voice announced a gate change. I had my battered carry-on at my foot, passport in hand, that fizzing excitement in my veins I always get before a flight.
And he was just… there. Calm and steady as can be. One hand on my suitcase handle, the other wrapped around a coffee. The bird tattoo was on his wrist, the one Sadie did, and he kept touching it like a touchstone.
“You ready?” he’d asked.
“Always,” I’d said, and kissed him, quick and easy, like we’d done it a thousand times before and would do it a thousand times again.
Security. Boarding. Window seat. His thigh warm against mine. Him reading something geeky on his Kindle and nudging me when he found a sentence he thought I’d like. Me writing a blog draft about “Ten Things Your Sex Life Can Learn From Airport Lounges”, which I should definitely write sometime. Us…doing life. Together. On the move.
No address. No white picket fence. Just continents and beds and new cities, and him in all of them.
“Absolutely the fuck not,” I mutter to the ceiling. “We arenotdoing this.”
I roll onto my stomach and bury my face in the pillow, willing the images away. Jacob asleep on my shoulder on a long-haul. Jacob laughing with someone at a street-food stall in Bangkok. Jacob’s hand at the small of my back while we walk through some crowded bazaar, his body between mine and the crush.
Fuuuuuuuuck.
I amnotbuilt for this. I am a subscription service, not a one-time purchase.
Except my body clearly didn’t get that memo because my chest still hurts and my throat feels thick.
I sit up abruptly, shoving the duvet off.Nope. No, ma’am. We are not catching feelings for a man who says ‘pardon’unironically.
