I'd never felt my throat close up at the sight of her sleeping in my t-shirt.
I'd never been afraid—genuinely, irrationally afraid—that I'd wake up and she'd be gone.
With Willow, the fear was a living thing. It sat on my ribs at night and pressed down.
Forty years old. Award-winning architect. Founded a firm. Survived a divorce. Raised a daughter—badly, according to said daughter, but she was alive and functioning and only moderately resentful, which I counted as a partial success.
And here I was, undone by a twenty-three-year-old barista with an ancient Honda and an opinion about everything.
The irony would've been funny if it hadn't been so goddamn unnerving.
I reached for her. Not with purpose—just need. My fingers traced the line of her shoulder, down the warm skin of her arm, back up again. A mapping exercise. An act of memorization disguised as tenderness.
If she leaves, I'll still know this.That's what my fingers were doing. Building a sensory archive. Filing away every dip and curve and warm, smooth inch of her.Just in case.
Just in case she woke up and realized she wastwenty-three with her whole life stretching out in front of her, and that the forty-year-old man sharing her bed came with enough baggage to fill a cargo terminal.
Just in case she met someone her own age who wasn't already broken in and held together with routine and control and the stubborn refusal to feel things too big.
Just in case.
She stirred under my touch. Made a sound—not awake, not asleep, somewhere in the in-between where her guard was down and her body responded to mine on pure instinct.
I shifted closer. Pressed my mouth to her shoulder. Warm skin. A faint trace of her body wash—coconut and vanilla, which I'd mocked relentlessly the week she moved in and now associated so powerfully with her that I'd caught myself standing in the drugstore aisle staring at the bottle with a level of yearning that should've triggered an intervention.
My lips moved across her shoulder blade. Along the ridge of freckles. Into the curve of her neck, where her pulse beat against my mouth—calm, trusting, oblivious to the storm happening inside the man kissing her awake.
She made a sleepy, pleased sound that vibrated against my lips.
"Mmmm." Her body arched, a lazy stretch that pressed her back against my bare torso. "S'early."
"I know." I kissed the spot behind her ear. The one that made her shiver every time, reliable as gravity.
She shivered.
“You’re incorrigible,” she mumbled into the pillow.
“I am,” I agreed.
“Is that a complaint?”
She rolled onto her back. Her eyes were still half-closed, cheeks creased from the pillowcase, hair a glorious disaster. She looked rumpled and soft and so far removed from the sharp-tongued woman who terrorized me across a coffee counter that it made my ribs ache.
"Zero complaints," she said, her voice husky with sleep. She reached up and ran her fingers along my jaw. "Hi."
"Hi."
"Come here."
I went.
The kiss was unhurried. Her mouth was warm, soft, tasting of sleep and the mango lip balm she applied with religious devotion every night. I kissed her upper lip. Her lower lip. The corner of her mouth. Taking my time. Not rushing toward anything.
Her hand drifted up the back of my neck and into my hair, nails scraping lightly against my scalp, and thesound I made was not dignified. A groan. Low, coming from deep in my gut, pulled out of me by the simple act of this woman's fingers in my hair.
I never made sounds with Jessica.The thought intruded, unwelcome but true. Sex with my ex-wife had been competent and contained. Two people going through choreography they'd perfected, arriving at the destination on schedule, rolling apart, going to sleep. I'd kept quiet. She'd preferred the dark. We got the job done but there’d been an emptiness to the act that always lingered.
With Willow, I was none of those things.
