When I go back upstairs, she's sitting cross-legged on the bed with the phone beside her and her eyes red. She's been crying, and she hasn't tried to hide it, and that tells me the call with Mehta went the way it needed to go.
"Okay?" I ask from the doorway.
"Okay." She wipes her cheek with the heel of her hand. "She cried, too. In case you were wondering."
She looks at me standing in the doorway in my funeral suit with my tie loosened and my top button undone, and her gaze drops from my face to my throat to my chest, then comes back up.
"Come here," she says.
I cross the room. She unfolds her legs as I reach the edge of the bed, and I sit down beside her. Her hand comes up to the knot of my tie, she pulls it loose, slides it from my collar, drops it on the floor beside the bed.
"Sadie." My voice comes out rougher than I intended. "You're four days out of a concussion."
"I know what I am." Her fingers move to my top button. The second. The third. She parts the shirt and puts her palm flat against my chest, over my heart, and the warmth of her hand makes my eyes close.
"You don't have to—"
"I know I don't have to." She says it with a finality that feels like a warning. "I want to. I've been lying in this bed for three days listening to your voice through the walls while you madecalls and buried your father and held everything together for everyone, and I want to do something for you. So let me."
I open my eyes.
She's looking at me with her chin up and her hand on my chest and her blue eyes steady. The bruise at her temple has faded to a greenish yellow. Her mouth is soft.
I take her face in both hands and kiss her slowly, tasting the mint of toothpaste and the faint sweetness of juice. Her fingers curl into my shirt and pull me closer. She kisses me back with an urgency that wasn't there in her apartment, something hungry and specific, and when her tongue finds mine, I make a sound against her mouth that I'd be embarrassed by if I could think straight.
She pushes my jacket and shirt off my shoulders. I let it fall. Her hands move across my chest, my ribs, the scar she traced with her finger before, and this time she doesn't stop to ask about it. She presses her mouth to it instead.
I pull back just enough to look at her. "The rule still applies. Stop means stop."
"I remember." She reaches for the hem of my shirt she's wearing, the one that's been driving me out of my mind for the last twenty minutes, and pulls it over her head.
She's wearing nothing underneath.
My hands find her waist. I pull her into my lap and she wraps her legs around me, and the heat of her against my stomach makes my vision narrow to just her face, her throat, the line of her collarbone.
I put my mouth there. I press my teeth against the skin, gently, a question, and she arches into me and says "Yes" in a voice that makes my blood feel like it's on fire.
I lay her back on the bed. I take my time the way I took it the first night, mouth on her throat, her breasts, the strawberry mark on her ribs. She's less tentative this time. Her hands are in my hair, pulling, guiding, and when I reach her stomach she lifts her hips without being asked.
"Nick." My name in her mouth is a sound I will never get enough of. "Please."
I give her what she's asking for. Slow at first, then steady, reading her body the way she read mine in the sedan, with attention and precision, and when she comes it's with my name on her lips and her fingers twisted in the sheets and her back arched off the mattress in a way that makes me want to start all over again.
I kiss my way back up her body. She reaches for my belt.
"Are you sure?" I ask, forehead against hers.
She looks at me with those eyes. "I have never been more sure of anything."
I let her take the belt. I let her take everything. Looking down at her face in the late afternoon light, I understand something my father tried to tell me in his last clear breath.
The thing you love.
This is the thing.
She is the thing.
And I will burn the world to the ground before I let anyone touch her again.
