“You’re different than you were yesterday,” I murmured, feeling the cross against my palm as I traced the contours of his muscles.
“Yesterday I had to be careful,” Judah replied, rolling me beneath him in one fluid motion. His weight pressed me into the mattress, his thighs caging mine. “Today I can show you whatIthink redemption feels like.”
I let out a breath that didn’t sound steady, even to me. “That’s a strange word to use for this.”
His mouth brushed my throat again, slower this time; he was in no hurry to answer. “Is it?”
“Yes.”
His hand didn’t stop moving. That was what made it worse — the certainty of it, the way he acted like this had already been decided somewhere outside of me.
“You’re still here,” he said.
“I know.”
“Then don’t pretend you don’t understand.”
I tightened my hand against his chest, feeling the cross under my palm. “Understanding and agreeing aren’t the same thing.”
“No,” he said, calm as ever. “But they tend to lead to the same place.”
My stomach turned at that, even as my body refused to follow the logic of it. I could leave. I knew I could. The door was there, the hallway, the rest of the house.
I didn’t move.
His eyes dropped to my mouth for a second before lifting again. He noticed everything. That was becoming clear in ways I didn’t like.
“Say it again,” he said.
“What?”
“That you should go.”
I swallowed. “I should go.”
He held my gaze, searching for something I couldn’t name, and then he nodded once.
“Then go.”
He didn’t move his hand. He didn’t shift his weight. He didn’t make space for me. He just said it and waited.
I stayed exactly where I was.
He didn't ask if I was hungry. He told me to get dressed.
Not rudely. Just the way he said most things — as if the question had already been asked and answered somewhere he hadn't bothered to include me in. I stood in his bathroom in yesterday's underwear with my hair doing something catastrophic and considered, for approximately four seconds, telling him I had things to do.
Then I put on the sundress.
It was the only thing I had. He'd driven me here from the fish fry and my apartment was across town, and this was the bed I'd made, figuratively and literally. So, I zipped the back myself, found one of my pins on the nightstand and did what I could with my hair, and walked out.
He was already dressed. Dark shirt, dark trousers.
“I look like I'm doing the walk of shame,” I said.
“You look like you're having breakfast with me.”
“In last night's dress.”
