“Daniel. It’s a queen bed. You’re not sleeping on the floor like we’re at a middle school sleepover.” I pushed off the door and pulled a clean shirt out of the dresser with the focus of a woman concertedly not thinking about the fact that she was about to change in a room that Daniel was also in. “We’re adults. We can share a bed.”
“Right,” he said. “Yeah. Absolutely.”
Neither of us said anything for a moment.
“I’ll stay on my side,” he said.
“I know you will.”
“You’re a blanket thief.”
“I am not a blanket thief.”
“Ellie. You once pulled a blanket off a sleeping person at a New Year’s Eve party and didn’t notice until morning.”
“That was one time, and the room was cold.” I turned around with the sleep shirt in my hand and pointed at him. “You’re not sleeping on the floor.”
He held up his hands. “Okay.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“It’ll be fine,” he agreed.
He said it the way he always did, easy and certain, the way that had always made things seem more manageable than they were. I held onto that and changed in the bathroom, trying not to think about the fact that when I came back he would be in my bed.
He was in my bed.
On his side, covers pulled up, already turned slightly away in the careful way of a man who had decided on an arrangement and was committed to it. Chairman Meow was a warm weight at the foot of the bed, which was either a comfort or a complication, and I didn’t have the bandwidth to decide which.
I turned off the light and got in on my side and lay there in the dark looking at the ceiling while the house settled around us, old and familiar, doing what old houses did.
“Ellie,” Daniel said from his side of the bed.
“Yeah.”
“It’s going to be okay.”
I closed my eyes. “I know.”
He didn’t say anything else. I didn’t say anything else. The cat shifted at the foot of the bed, resettling himself with the complete indifference of a creature unbothered by any of this.
I lay there in the dark listening to Daniel breathe, and I thought about Grandpa’s hand over mine at the dinner table, and about the pot roast, and about all I ever wanted, and I thought that the most complicated thing about this whole situation was that it was getting harder and harder to remember which parts of it were supposed to be pretend.
FOURTEEN
DANIEL
I was dreaming about Ellie.
This wasn’t new. The dreams had started the night of our wedding. The day of the kiss I hadn’t been able to scrub from my memory no matter how many shifts I’d worked or how many cold showers I’d taken. They were warm, persistent things, soft at the edges, the kind that dissolved the moment I reached for them but left something behind that took far longer to shake. A residue. A wanting that had no clean place to go. I’d been telling myself they didn’t mean anything with the same dogged conviction I’d been telling myself everything else didn’t mean anything. Which was to say not much conviction at all.
This one didn’t dissolve.
Her body was warm against my chest, her back tucked flush against my front, her hair spilling across the pillow and tickling my face. Awareness trickled in slowly, the way it does in the deep hours of the night, reaching my body long before it reached my brain. My arms were already around her, one snaked beneath her pillow, the other spread wide and low across her stomach. Her shirt had rucked up at the hem, ridden up in sleep, and the skin it exposed was warm beneath my palm. Warmer thananything I had a framework for. Warmer than I was prepared for.
And she was moving.
Slowly. With the unguarded, liquid ease of someone caught in that narrow space between sleeping and waking, her hips rolling back against me in a rhythm so unhurried and instinctive that it bypassed every careful, reasonable thing I’d spent the last several weeks constructing and shot straight to the base of my spine. The obvious animal response was to meet her, to fall into that rhythm and press my straining erection against the soft heat between her thighs. And oh, fuck, yes—that felt incredible. Better than it had any right to. Better than anything I wanted to examine too closely.
