I kissed him.
Not the way we’d kissed at the gala—that had been collision and heat, the reckless physics of two people crashing into each other because the pull was stronger than the braking system. This was different. This was slow and deliberate and my hands were still on his face and his were still at his sides, like he was letting me set every parameter, and the kiss was soft and serious and tasted like coffee and cold air and something underneath both of those things that I didn’t have a name for.
He pulled back first. Barely. An inch of cold air between us.
“We should go inside,” he said. Not because of the cold. Because of what was going to happen if we didn’t, and he was giving me the choice to stop it.
I didn’t stop it.
We walked through the house without turning on any lights. Past the living room where the fire had burned down to embers. Past the dining room with the twelve-seat table that had never been full. Up the stairs, his hand on the small of my back—not guiding, just there, a point of contact that said I’m with you. I’m here. Every step was a decision. Not one decision—a hundred small ones, each made with my eyes open.
He stopped at the door to his room. Looked at me. Not asking, not assuming. Just standing in the hallway outside the room I’d glimpsed through a half-open door yesterday and thought: that bed has never had anyone in it but him.
I walked through the door. That mattered. I’d needed it to be me. I needed to know that whatever this was, I’dchosenit.
His room wasdark except for the windows. Mountain light on the bed, the floor, the outline of him in front of me. The same peaks I’d been staring at for two days, but from his angle now—the view he woke up to every morning in this room that had never held anyone but him.
He kissed me again at the foot of the bed. Slower this time, his hands finding the hem of my sweater—the wrong-for-the-altitude sweater I’d been wearing for two days—and pausing there. Fingers against the bare skin of my waist. Waiting. Not hesitating. Waiting. Like the difference between those two things was everything.
“This OK?” Low. Against my jaw.
“Yes.”
He pulled the sweater over my head and the cold hit my skin and I should have cared but I didn’t because of the way he was looking at me—not the quick up-down, not the performative hunger that was really about the guy’s own ego. He was looking at me like I was something he wanted to understand before he touched.
I reached for his shirt. The gray Henley, the one with the pushed-up sleeves, the one he’d been wearing through two days of bad eggs and rebuilt fires and deck conversations that had taken us apart. He helped me get it over his head and then he was bare-chested in the mountain light and I put my hands flat against his sternum and felt his heart hammering at a pace that contradicted every calm, controlled thing he’d ever said to me.
“Liar,” I said.
His mouth twitched. “About what?”
“All of it. The composure. The steady hands.” I pressed harder against his chest. His heart slammed back. “You’re a wreck.”
“Complete wreck,” he agreed, and the last wall came down—the one he’d been holding even on the deck, even during the compass story, even when he told me about Tommy. What was behind it was a want so bare and uncalculated that my breath caught in my throat.
He kissed me like that. Open, unhidden. His hands cradled my face the way I’d cradled his on the deck, and I felt the reversal—an hour ago I’d been holding him, now he was holding me,
We fell onto the bed that had never held anyone but him.
His mouth moved from mine to my jaw, my throat, the curve of my collarbone. His fingers found the clasp of my bra with a competence that, under other circumstances, I might have had opinions about. Under these circumstances I was just grateful because the air hit my bare skin and his mouth followed and I stopped having opinions about anything.
He kissed the hollow between my breasts. Traced a slow line with his tongue to my nipple and I heard myself make a sound that would have been embarrassing if I’d had the bandwidth for embarrassment. He stayed there—patient, thorough, the attention of a man who understood that the quality of the work was in the details—and when he moved to the other side I fisted my hands in his hair and held on.
“God,” I managed. Eloquent.
I felt him smile against my skin. That almost undid me more than the rest of it—the fact that he could smile right now, that this wasn’t solemn, that we could be desperate and amused at the same time.
His mouth moved lower. The curve of my waist. The hollow of my hip. His fingers hooked into the waistband of my leggings and tugged, and I lifted my hips to help and the leggings wentand his breath was hot against my stomach and I was shaking. Actually shaking. I didn’t shake. I was not a person who shook. And yet here I was, trembling because a man was kissing my hip bone.
I wanted him as undone as I was.
He settled over me and the weight of him was—God. Real. Warm. Grounding in a way that made the rest of the world feel theoretical. I wrapped a leg around his hip and pulled him closer and the sound he made against my neck was low and rough and gone.
“Wait,” I said, because one of us had to be practical and it clearly wasn’t going to be him. “Please tell me you have something.”
He stilled. Dropped his forehead to my shoulder. “Nightstand. Top drawer.”
“Thank God.”
