The candles had burned lower. The dinner table had been cleared away by someone with a key and a quiet efficiency I was going to think about later. In its place the room was just a room—the wide bed, the low light, the partial harbor view through the glass doors of the balcony where the palmettos were black against the city glow.
He closed the door behind us.
I turned around.
He was already watching me, the way he'd been watching me in the helicopter—steady and patient and with that focused attention that made me feel like the only coordinates in a very large map. His jacket came off. He laid it over the back of the chair without looking at it, eyes still on me.
"That was—" I stopped. Every word I had felt insufficient. "That was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."
"Good," he said. Low and simple.
"I've never—" I stopped again. “I’d never been in a helicopter."
"I know."
"How did you know?"
"The way you held my hand when we lifted off." He crossed the room toward me, unhurried. "You went tight and then you let go. That's what people do the first time, when they decide to trust the machine."
I looked at him.
"I wasn't trusting the machine," I said.
Something moved in his face. Quiet and deep, like something settling into place.
He reached me.
His hands came up and found the lapels of my cardigan and he pushed it back off my shoulders slowly, watching it go, watching me. It pooled on the floor behind me and neither of us looked at it.
"Rebecca Lynn," he said.
"Yeah."
"I want to take my time with you tonight."
The way he said it—not a question, not exactly a warning, but a statement of intent delivered in a voice that was already doing things between my legs—made my breath go shallow.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay?"
"Yes." I held his gaze. "Take your time."
He kissed me.
It started soft, the way it had started soft in Proof, the way it had started soft every time. But soft with Tommy was not gentle—it was deliberate, the kind of soft that was a choice a strong man made when he had other options and chose this one. His hands moved into my hair and held my head the way he'd held it before, certain, not rough, just—decided. Like he'd decided where my head was going to be and it was going to be here.
I went up on my toes.
He made a sound low in his chest and deepened the kiss, slow, and I felt it run through me the way the helicopter had run through me when we'd lifted off the grass—the thrill of leaving the ground, of being held up by something you'd decided to trust.
He walked me backward toward the bed.
I went.
He sat me down on the edge of it and stepped back and looked at me, and the looking was its own thing. It didn't makeme feel examined so much as seen. I reached for the hem of my top.
"Let me," he said.
