I should laugh. Instead, I step into him and put my hands on his jacket.
He lets me take it off. That is the first undoing. The fabric sliding down his arms. His patience while I learn the shape of him again in better light. White shirt, throat, the pulse beating there with less control than his face ever allows.
I touch the open collar with one finger.
“You look too civilized,” I say.
“Fix it.”
The words go through me low and hot.
I pull him down.
The kiss starts slower than the last one. It has to. There are too many choices inside it now. Dinner. The public hand. The fan photo. The article waiting on the table. Ryan’s mother alive. Finn awake. The city reaching for pieces of him and me reaching for the part that does not belong to anyone else.
Ryan kisses like he knows all of that and wants anyway.
His hands settle at my waist, not taking, holding. I hate how much the restraint affects me. Hate that it makes me arch into him first, that it makes me the impatient one, tugging his shirt from his jeans and pushing my palms over the warm, hard plane of his stomach.
His breath changes.
There.
I chase it.
Buttons give way under my fingers. His shirt opens. I put my mouth to his chest because I want to know whether he will let me have that too.
Ryan’s hand slides into my hair.
Not guiding.
Holding on.
“Peyton.”
My name sounds rough enough to count as a confession.
I look up. “Still staying until I tell you to leave?”
His eyes are dark. “Yes.”
“Bedroom.”
He moves then.
Not rushed. Worse. Decisive. He picks me up with one arm under my thigh and the other at my back, and I make a sound I would deny under oath. His mouth finds mine again while he carries me down the short hall. I kick off one boot, then the other, dignified about none of it.
At the bed, he sets me down like he is still giving me the choice.
I choose.
I pull the dress over my head and let it drop. Let him see what wanting looks like on me. It is more exposed than skin.
Ryan goes still. Not the controlled stillness I have spent weeks cataloguing. Something under it has come loose. He looks at me like a man who got very good at not reaching for things, deciding to reach.
“You can look,” I say. It comes out less steady than I meant.
“I know.” His voice is rough. He does not move, and I understand the stillness is the last of his control, spent on going slow.
