Nearlytwenty-fiveminutes of kissing?
She dropped her hand back to her side, staring at him. He shifted on his feet, looked away from her, and oh, god, ithurt. She could hardly understand how it hurt, could only let it gather in her, dark and spiky, and she wanted to get itout.
“It was maybe the wine,” he said.
“You hadwater,” she snapped, and that felt good, getting one of those spikes out and into him, watching his jaw tighten with its impact.
Not enough, though. He took one hand out of his pocket, moved it behind him, and then he had his phone out. The thumb that had stroked her neck, her earlobe, her lower lip—even as he kept kissing her—was now moving with brutal efficiency as he tapped and swiped across the cold, flat screen.
“Getting a car,” he said, as though he wanted to answer before she could ask.
But she was not going to ask. She was busy, trying to gather up all her spikes without cutting herself on them.
Because she knew, instinctively, that the car was not for both of them. That he meant for her to take it alone.
This was so…She was soembarrassed.So out of control and unlike herself: from that moment in the restaurant, maybe even before, all the way to now. Mind under matter, and the matter washim and what he’d managed to do to her in this doorway, on this street that was his.
In this other world.
She stepped out from beneath it. She wanted to wince from the reality check: All she could see now of that kiss was her own desperation during it. Her clutching hands, her rolling hips, her leg hitching over his.
“I’ll walk,” she said.
“No, you won’t.”
She started to pass by him, but he reached out—held her at her elbow, and she thought she heard a noise from him—another hiss, an exhalation, something—and it was enough to make her stop.
He dropped his hand immediately. Took a step away.
She should have kept going.
“Look,” he said, his voice low, a rasp in it now. “Today was good. We did good, for Michael and Emily.”
She absolutely could not look at him for this. She stared straight ahead, back toward the Boulevard Saint-Germain.Herstreet, her safety.
“That worked,” he continued. “You know, being friends.”
Oh, thespikeof it. The stake, straight through the heart.
“Amicable,” she said, and hoped he would argue.
He did not.
He said, after a beat of silence, as though she hadn’t said the word that started all this, “And tomorrow is—the itinerary is full. So we should, you know. Do what we did—”
She started to walk again, even as she heard the sound of an engine pulling up.
“Stop,” he said, right on her heels. “Just—the car is here. Just get in the car.”
She turned back to him, so angry now. Saying those things to her, kissing her that way,embarrassingher with his suggestion offriendliness, of all fucking things, and now he wanted to give hercommands.
Well, she wasn’t in his kingdom now. She was halfway back to her own. A place where she’d once been alone, and where she would happily be alone again.
But when she looked at him this time, everything spiky she wanted to say softened on her lips. HerI said I’ll walk; herHow dare you; herI’m not doing what we did today ever again.
Because now that she was coming back to herself, she could see it: those wild eyes, the restless way his body moved, a dampness at his temples that she hadn’t felt when she’d put her hands in his hair. A tension around his eyes and along his neck.
“It isn’t a panic attack,” he said.
