I want to get her inside and out of the dress and onto whatever surface is closest and I want to learn every freckle with my mouth. I want to hear the sounds from the private contentexcept close, except real, except aimed at me while I'm the one causing them. I want to find out what her face does when I push inside her for the first time. I want to go slow enough that she begs me not to.
I want to do it white knowing whose daughter she is. I want to do it with her father's name in my head. And that wanting — that specific, detailed, unforgivable wanting — is so loud in my body right now that my hands are shaking and I put them in my jacket pockets so she won't see.
She sees anyway. Her eyes drop to my pockets. Back up. Something shifts in her face. She knows what I just hid.
"Come in," she says. Steps back from the doorway.
I see the hall light behind her. Her apartment. Her bed, somewhere behind her in that apartment, and I know exactly what I would do if I walked through that door and I know I would not stop and I know she wouldn't want me to stop and I know the sound of the door closing behind me would be the last sound of the version of my life where I am a man Ronan Callaghan trusts.
I don't move.
She waits. She wants me to come in. I can see it.
My hands are still shaking in my pockets.
I think about what happens if I go in. I put my mouth on hers. I get my hands on her. I hear the sounds I've been hearing through speakers except close, except real. And then it's morning and I have crossed something I cannot uncross and Ronan calls me the way he always does on a Sunday and I have to answer the phone as a man who fucked his daughter.
The wanting doesn't care. The wanting has no interest in Ronan or mornings or what kind of man I am. The wanting is in my hands and my chest and my cock, which has been hard since I came up the stairs, and the only thing holding me on this landing is thirty years of being someone Ronan trusts andthe knowledge that those thirty years end the moment I step through that door.
"I can't," I say.
My voice comes out even. It costs me everything I have.
Something moves in her face. She reads me. Whatever she finds makes her go still. Not hurt. Something more complicated.
"Okay," she says.
I should leave. I should turn around right now and go down the stairs and get in my car. I don't. I stand on the landing and I look at her and I let myself have a few more seconds of her face in the hall light because I am not strong enough to leave without them.
"I want you to be careful. Passwords, security—"
"Declan."
I stop.
"I know," she says. "I know why you came and I know why you're not coming in." Flat. Accurate. "You don't have to explain it."
One more second. I said three and I'm taking a fourth because I don't have it in me to stop at three.
The hall light. Her hair. Her mouth.
"Good night, Billie."
"Good night, Declan."
I go down the stairs. Every step is a decision. Twelve steps from her landing to the lobby and every single one of them requires a separate act of will because my body is not going down these stairs, my body is turning around and going back up and through that door, and I make it to the lobby by not looking back. If I look back I'm done.
I am sitting in a parked car in the dark and I want to go back upstairs and put my hands on her and hear my name in that voice and I am gripping this steering wheel with both hands because the alternative is opening the car door.
The shadow crosses the window again. Settles.
I think about Ronan.
His face at the BBQ this afternoon. The way he hugged her when she came through the gate. The warmth he carries for his kids, the easy, unguarded warmth that a man builds over decades of being the one person who always shows up. I am supposed to be the other person who always shows up. I drove across this city in fourteen minutes to stand at his daughter's door. I'm sitting in the dark pointed at her window with an erection and my hands shaking on a steering wheel and if he could see me right now thirty years of friendship would end in the time it takes to understand what he was looking at.
I check the time. I start the engine.
The drive home. The garage. The dark house.
