And she steps towards me.
Chapter 30
Aspen
Four steps. That’s all it is — four steps of hotel carpet and courage to go after something I want — and I cross them quickly before I lose my nerve. I’ve been thinking about doing this all dinner, watching him tangle himself in his own jokes and feeling his nerves bleed into my own. And now I’ve got my chance.
I grab his shirt and pull his face down to mine, and I kiss Stanley Ermington for no other reason on this earth other than I simply want to.
His lips touch mine, and a small, stunned sound leaves his chest. Our tongues collide, and he’s kissing me back like he’s hungry for me. He drops his hand and grabs his keycard out of his pocket. His hand finds the door behind him. The little green light flashes, and then I hear the door unlock, and we’re inside his room. The door clicks shut, and it’s just us in the dark room. And I’m the one pushing this. I’m the one who started it. Running on the clean, bright adrenaline of having finally chosen something with my own two hands.
It escalates because I want it to. Because I let it. His jacket falls on the floor. Then my coat. His hands are careful, and his mouth is at my jaw, my throat, and I’m pulling him toward the bed.
And then it gets real.
Real enough that I hear Gavin’s voice in my head — are you even sure it’s mine — because the last time I was under a hockey player, I got hit with reality so hard that I thought my life was going to change forever.
I go rigid.
It isn’t a decision. That’s the worst of it. I want Stanley — I have never not wanted him, the wanting was never the problem — the problem is that doing this is the exact thing that nearly took me apart. And I freeze because my body can’t tell the difference between then and now, and it locks up around the memory like a fist.
I pull back. My hand comes up between us, flat against his chest.
“Wait—”
He stops.
Instantly. Completely. The second my palm hits his chest, he goes still, and then he’s easing back, giving me air, both his hands lifting off me and up into the space where I can see them. There’s no sigh, no held breath, no flicker of come on anywhere on his face. No friction at all. He just stops.
“Hey,” he says, low, even, and no edge on it. “Hey. It’s okay.”
And I’m bracing for his annoyance by me telling him to stop, the pressure, the gentle wheedling, the sigh that turns this into my fault, the thousand small ways a man can tell you that your fear is an inconvenience he’s being very patient about.
He doesn’t do any of them. He sits back on his heels in the dark and gives me space.
“We don’t have to do anything,” he says. “Nothing’s a great option. I’m a huge fan of nothing. We can put the TV on andwatch strangers buy houses they can’t afford.” He looks at me then. “We can just hang out. I’m not going anywhere.”
And he doesn’t ask. That’s the part that undoes a thread in me. He doesn’t say what’s wrong or did I do something. He doesn’t make me find words for the thing crouched in my chest because he already knows. He’s the one person in my life who knows. So he just connects it, quietly, without mentioning it.
We end up lying down on top of the covers, turned toward each other in the city light. His hand is loose around mine like that was always going to be enough. And because he cannot survive thirty consecutive seconds of silence, he starts to talk.
“You’d be terrifying, you know.” He says it to the ceiling. “Pregnant. If that ever happened. Hypothetically. To you.”
I freeze. “What?”
“You’d have a spreadsheet.” Total confidence. “Don’t argue, you’d have a color-coded spreadsheet for the nap schedule before the stick was even dry. Feeding windows. A tab for the pediatrician. Cross-referenced. There’d be a binder, Linwood. A laminated one.”
“Oh my god.” It comes out as a horrified laugh. “Stop. Why are you saying this? This is so weird—”
“I’m just saying you’d be efficient about it. Frighteningly. The hospital would be scared of you.” He’s grinning at the ceiling, lazy, like we’re discussing nothing serious. “And I’d be the worst. The actual worst. I’d be so insufferable about it. I’d tell everyone. I’d go back downstairs right now and tell Channing.” He pauses. “I’d be at every appointment. Every single one. Annoying every doctor in the building, asking nine hundred questions, getting in everyone’s way. You would not be able to get rid of me. You’d try. It would not work.”
I know what he’s doing now. I don’t think he has the faintest idea that he’s taken the single worst thing that ever happened to me — the thing that taught me how much it matters who I givemyself to — and he’s standing on top of it, in the dark, telling me a different possibility. One where I’m not left. One where I’m not second. One where the hockey player doesn’t vanish. He’s insufferable, he’s at every appointment, he won’t go. If it happened.
The cringe drops out of me without my permission.
I go quiet because it’s working. He thinks he’s just being ridiculous to make me smile. And somehow that’s what makes it work. He isn’t making it a moment, and he’s not watching my face for the effect. He’s taking the terror off me, holding the nightmare up to the light and turning it slowly until it stops looking like the thing that ended me and starts looking like something I could almost want.
“You’d really stay?” I say softly.
