I run my thumb over his swollen bottom lip, then take it between my teeth, just to shut myself up.
“It’s you,” I say, breathing the words into his mouth.
XVII
An hour later, I’m wrapped in Reid’s T-shirt, the scent of him mingling with the neroli-and-pepper fragrance of the hotel body wash emanating off my skin. Reid is sitting up in bed next to me, and his hand is absentmindedly stroking my thigh over the sheets as he checks his email on his phone. He was supposed to read over some notes from the director tonight. “Before you came here and ruined my plans,” he said with a smirk.
I haven’t felt like this in years. It’s not just the sex (though, god, the sex) but this easy intimacy afterward. Reid lifts an arm, and I curl into him. It’s almost a reflex, simple and unfussy, as though I’d learned it over thousands of nights just like this.
It was never like this with James. Even in our prime, we retreated to opposite sides of the bed after sex.
Is it possible to let this thing with Reid grow into something?The thought blooms in my chest, tentative and hopeful. Maybe we can find a path forward. Maybe I can be brave enough to try.
But then my eyes drift to his suitcase, already halfpacked. The hotel key card on the dresser. Everything that points to how fleeting this moment is, that we’re borrowing time we don’t really have.
And now I feel it—that dangerous jolt into something beyond simple affection. It threatens to rearrange my priorities, to upend the careful architecture I’ve built since my divorce. What happens if that tremor becomes an earthquake, toppling the life I’ve constructed?
But if I stop this now, maybe we can both walk away intact.
“I’m panicking,” I say suddenly, “and I don’t know why.”
Reid looks up from his phone, then sets it aside, and I watch his expression shift into concern. “Let’s talk about it, then.”
His kindness makes it harder, somehow. James would have sighed, told me I was being dramatic, and gone back to his phone. But Reid turns his attention to me, waiting.
I take a deep breath to shore myself up for what I need to say. But then I shake my head, like I’m trying to rattle something loose. I want to stop trying to craft a perfectly nuanced and diplomatic response. I want to tell him exactly how I feel, despite how hard it is to translate those feelings into words.
“I care about you so much,” I blurt out, “and I don’t want to not see you again.”
Reid gives me a smile. “Sex was that good, huh?” I nudge him gently, and he catches my hand. “Hey. I feel the same way, Lili. Seriously.”
“So you would want to keep in touch?”
He laughs softly. “I would want to do more than keep in touch.”
“OK.” I take a deep breath and try to let it out slowly. I’m still lodged too far inside my panic to appreciate what we just admitted to each other. “And it’s not freaking you out at all? How suddenly this all happened?”
“Is it sudden? I would argue we’re three decades late.”
“Right.” I hold his hand tighter, as if to steady myself. “But how would we make this work? We live three thousand miles apart.”
“That’s what planes are for.”
“So we fly back and forth across the country until... what?”
“Until we find a place to land.”
“What about the girls?” The more granular this discussion becomes, the more my heart races. “We can’t uproot their lives. And what about our parents, and our work?”
“We can figure out the logistics,” Reid says. “Lili, these are all solvable problems if we want to solve them.”
The way he says it, so matter-of-fact—it terrifies me, because I understand he’s right. I know these aren’t real obstacles; they’re excuses. And the fact that he can see right through them so easily, that he won’t let me hide behind them, makes me feel more exposed than I have in ages.
For years, I could disappear behind the smoke screen of my arguments, free to talk myself into my anxieties without any pushback. But Reid sees everything. He sees that I’m afraid of making the wrong decision again, of dragging my daughter into yet another heartbreak.
But that doesn’t make my feelings any less present.
“Long distance doesn’t work,” I say. “It didn’t work for us the first time.” And there it is: The thing we’ve never discussed.
