Not soft and careful, the way he did the first time. Not brief and managed and appropriate to the circumstances. This was none of those things. This was three weeks of accumulated want released all at once, his hands in my hair and my hands in his shirt, and both of us making up for every careful, reasonable, well-intentioned decision we’d made since the hospital room. I kissed him back with everything I had and stopped being afraid of it somewhere in the middle, and his hands slid to my waist and walked me back until I hit the counter, and I grabbed his shirt with both fists and pulled, and he made a sound against my mouth that I felt in my knees.
Daniel must’ve known it because his hands curved around my hips and lifted as if I weighed nothing, plunking me down on the counter in the lone space with room for me to sit. He stepped between my legs and devoured my mouth as if it wasthe last slice of pizza at a high school football game. My hands dove into his hair, my mouth opening under his, and I wrapped my legs around his narrow hips, pulling him closer. I wished fervently we had powers of—whatever would enable us to be naked right now, nothing between us but skin, because I wanted this man. I wanted my husband in ways I was only just coming to acknowledge.
“Ellie!” Grandpa’s voice, from the front of the house.
We froze.
“I’m home!” he hollered with cheerful obliviousness. “Hector says I did great, and the PT lady says I’m ahead of schedule.”
Daniel broke the kiss, and we looked at each other. His hair was slightly wrecked from my hands. I was fairly certain my lip gloss, such as it was, hadn’t survived the last few minutes. And the front of Daniel’s cargo pants showed what was clearly front of mind for him.
“That’s wonderful, Grandpa,” I called back, in a voice that was impressively steady given the circumstances.
“Is Daniel home? I wanna tell him about the PT lady.”
“He’s home,” I said.
Daniel pressed his forehead to mine, his hands still at my waist, both of us breathing slightly unevenly in the quiet of the kitchen. “To be continued.”
“To be continued,” I agreed.
He let go of me and stepped back and picked up his gear bag, making for the stairs and our room, presumably so he could make himself more presentable for my grandfather, who would no doubt be ecstatic about this turn of events. I turned to the counter and put both hands flat on it and took a breath, and then I went to greet my grandfather and hear about the PT lady.
I was smiling when I did it, which was not something I’d planned on but couldn’t seem to stop.
SIXTEEN
DANIEL
On Thursday, I burst in the wrong door on a call.
The alarm turned out to be a malfunctioning sensor in the dry storage of a restaurant on Commerce Street. No fire. No danger. Back at the station inside forty minutes. But I’d gone in the wrong door, which I had not done since my first year on the job, and Diego had stared at me over the roof of the engine in a way I knew I’d be hearing about for the foreseeable future.
When we returned to the station, he said, “Wrong door.”
“I know.”
“You’ve been in that building eleven times.”
“I know.”
“You want to talk about what’s going on with you?”
“Absolutely not.” I began to store my gear.
The problem was concentration. Compartmentalizing was a skill of mine. The ability to set whatever was happening in your personal life on a shelf and deal with what was in front of you was practically a job requirement, the kind of thing they didn’t teach you at the academy but you figured out fast or you didn’t last. I’d been doing it reliably for eight years, through breakups and family drama and one genuinely terrible flu season whereI’d functioned on four hours of sleep and sheer bloody-mindedness.
I was not doing it reliably now.
What I was doing now was thinking about Ellie. Specifically, Ellie in the kitchen with her hands in my hair and her legs wrapped around my hips and the sound she’d made against my mouth right before Gus had announced himself from the front hall in that carrying, unsuspecting voice of his.
I’d been imagining the continuation of that moment with a focus and dedication I was emphatically not bringing to anything else, because we hadn’t actuallymanagedto continue it in the past week and a half. Turns out having a septuagenarian housemate was like having a giant toddler. He interrupted at the worst possible times, required monitoring, and had absolutely no concept of what anyone else in the house might be in the middle of. Gus had wandered into the kitchen twice while the tension between us was sitting thick enough to taste, hollered up the stairs once at what could only be described as a critical juncture, and on one truly memorable occasion appeared in the living room doorway at eleven o’clock at night in his robe and ancient slippers wanting to know if anyone else heard something on the roof or if he was losing his mind.
It was a squirrel. There was no continuation that night either.
To be continued, I’d said in the kitchen, forehead against hers, both of us still catching our breath.
To be continued, she’d agreed, her fingers still curled in my shirt.
