"That's interesting." Her hand had moved up to rest against the side of my neck. Her thumb was tracing a slow circle there that was not helping me. "Most people think I'm easy to read."
"Most people aren't paying attention."
"And you are?"
"Trying."
She tipped her head a quarter inch, studying me, the way she'd studied me on the sidewalk before she'd kissed my jaw. Whatever she was working out, she didn't tell me. She was getting better at not telling me. I was finding it interesting.
"What are you trying to read?" she asked.
"What you want."
"From you?"
"From this."
She didn't answer right away.
She took her hand off my neck, slow, and slid it down to the front of my shirt, flat, palm warm through the fabric. Her eyes didn't leave my face.
"I want you to take me to bed," she said.
The room got quiet.
The kind of quiet where you could hear the building settle, and the radiator ticking somewhere down the hall, and the distant low hum of King Street through the closed window, and your own pulse in your own ears like a thing that belonged to somebody else.
I opened my mouth.
I had a line. I had a line ready, the way I always had a line ready, because Tommy Dane responded to incoming intensity with deflection the way other men responded with their fists, and I was about to deliver something useful and dry and just south of devastating to break the moment open and let us both breathe.
"Sweetheart, you don't have to?—"
She caught the back of my neck.
She pulled me down.
She kissed me open-mouthed, slow and warm and without any apology at all, and when she pulled back enough to speak, her mouth was a half inch from mine.
"I want you inside me," she said.
She breathed it.
It wasn't loud. It was a confession. The kind a woman made when she'd had to run the math three different ways to get there and had decided she was going to be one of the people who said the thing out loud instead of one of the people who kept it under.
The line I'd been working on died in my throat.
Whatever I'd been about to be funny about, the funny went out of it.
She watched my face change. I watched hers stay where it was.
Her fingers curled into my shirt like she needed something to hold on to.
I rested my forehead against hers and breathed her air for a second.
"You sure?" I asked.
She nodded. Then, said it anyway, quiet but level. "I want you inside me, Tommy. I've been thinking about it since the donut shop."
