"I know." Her hand doesn't move. "I've had my own version of it."
"You're twenty-one."
"I know how old I am."
"Ronan—"
"I know." No waver. "I know all of it. I've known all of it since March and I'm still standing here." Eyes on mine. Steady. "You drove nineteen minutes to tell me things I already know. I'm not sure that's what you came here for."
I look at her.
Her hand on my chest. Her face. The freckles the filter hides. The mouth that has said my name in registers I haven't stopped hearing for two days.
I know what happens next. I've known since I pulled out of my driveway. I built the whole drive around not looking at it directly, and I'm done.
I cup her jaw. I kiss her.
She makes a sound against my mouth. I've been hearing it in my head since the first night and the reality is nothing like memory. Nothing. I walk her back toward the bedroom with my hands in her hair and she goes, pulling at my jacket, and I shrug it off somewhere in the hall and hear it land. The list is in the inside pocket. Seventeen items, handwritten.
I don't think about the list.
She turns at the bedroom doorway. Mouth already reddened. Expression clear. Want, and something steadier underneath it.
"You're staying," she says. Not a question.
"Yes."
She takes my hand.
She reaches for me the moment we're through the door. Hands at my shirt, moving fast.
I catch her wrists.
Not pinned. Just held. She goes still. Looks up at me.
I'm unhurried about everything. Always have been. Decades of knowing what I want and having the patience to take it the right way. I bring her wrists together in one hand and watch her face. Something shifts in her expression. Startled for one second. Then not.
"Turn around," I say.
She turns.
I set her wrists at the small of her back. Not restrained. Placed. I lean close to her ear.
"Keep them there."
A beat. Her fingers curl inward against her own spine. Staying.
I take the hem of her shirt and pull it over her head. Her arms come up to let it go, then return to the small of her back. I put mymouth to the back of her neck and she makes the sound I've been hearing since the first night. The real one. The one she doesn't plan.
I run my hands from her shoulders down the full length of her back. Slow.
She is never not thinking. I can feel it. The active quality of her attention, even now. It should be distracting. It isn't. It makes me want to take her apart more thoroughly, just to see what happens when she runs out of thoughts.
I turn her back around.
"Hands on the headboard," I say. "When we get there."
She arches an eyebrow. "Are we making rules."
