“We forgot to order dinner,” he remembered.
“We didn’t, actually,” Lainey corrected. “I called in a favor with one of my friends from my Little Groff days who now works at Barton and Bird.” She was calling in favors left and right tonight. “Come on in, Abe,” she called out through the door.
“I was never here.” The familiar tall man with dark brown skin and an impeccably groomed beard opened the door wide and wheeled in a cart packed with plates. “While you have this food, you are not you. You are the poet laureate for the state of Oklahoma, and you are devastated you could not make it to your scheduled reservation. Devastated. Do you hear me? If anyone knocks on this door—”
“I’ll recite a haiku. Got it. Thank you, Abe. You are an angel sent from heaven.”
He wiped the rim of a plate with a napkin out of habit, then pocketed it in his black chef’s jacket. “You and me are morethan square now. If I get caught for this, Chef is going to iron a grilled cheese sandwich against the side of my face. Dude is terrifying. He has no eyebrows. Have you ever tried to read the social cues of a man with no eyebrows? It’s like talking to an empty Mr. Potato Head.”
She sighed, more than ready to move off the subject of her eyebrow mishap for the second time that night. “Good night, Abe. Thank you for this. Seriously.” She raised a fork in gratitude.
She closed the door behind him and opened each of the containers one by one, citrus scents slicing through the air, chased by the aroma of mushrooms and cream, and followed with a breeze of a stinky cheese she couldn’t place. Lainey was by no means a gourmand, but as a born-and-bred Wisconsinite, she could appreciate a pungent cheese now and again.
“This looks incredible.” Elliot lifted a container of sauce to his nose and sniffed. “I can’t believe you pulled this off.”
“Believe it, baby—oh crap!” The lid of the salad container burst open in her hands, spraying her stomach with dressing.
“I’m sure we can wash that out,” Elliot said with the confidence of a man who’d never gone head-to-head with an oil spill on polyester.
“I was going to return it.” She peeled her shirt away from her stomach, feeling sticky.
He scrutinized her outfit. “How?”
“I have an honest face and a tagging gun.”
He narrowed his eyes. “You know that you’re inflating the price of clothes for everyone, because then—”
“Do not fall for the big-box propaganda machine. They’ve got us so distracted, pointing our fingers at each other, we’veforgotten that they are the ones choosing to pass their own losses on to the consumer. It’s not our fault corporate America can’t figure out how to close the tagging gun loophole. We’ve already allowed fast fashion to destroy the planet, but once we let them turn us against each other, that’s when they’ve really won.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
She shrugged. “Billionaires. Corporations. If I’m being honest, I lost the thread a while back and just kept saying things,” she explained, analyzing the stain in the floor-to-ceiling mirror.
He sat on the foot of the bed and took her hips in his hands, pulling her backward until his thighs straddled hers. “Sometimes you say things with such confidence, I can’t tell if you’ve made a good point or if I just like you too much.”
She stared at her reflection in the mirror, her cheeks flushed and her hair untamed. Aside from his bent legs around her and his big hands splayed at her waist, Elliot was hidden from view. “Two things can be true, Hodges,” she responded, her own legs wobbling.
“I want to be all the things to you,” he whispered into her back. The heat of his breath on her pulled her spine taut. “All the husband things people vow to be. Someone who cares for you and protects you and cherishes you. I’m kicking myself for not saying those things back when I had the chance.”
Lainey’s mouth went bone dry. “Vows like that wouldn’t have meant anything back then.”
“You’re wrong,” he said, his voice gravel. He let his fingers slip under the hem of her shirt, lifting it just enough to place a gentle kiss at her back. “It was always going to mean something for me.”
But it couldn’t have, she thought. Vows were forever. Vows were until death and through sickness and all the things they would never face together, because their marriage would end in a few short months. They’d built it that way. They couldn’t have everything. They had the summer, and that was it. That’d always been the plan.
But he hadn’t saideverything. He’d saidsomething. Maybe they didn’t need to promise each other forever, and maybe that was okay. They were happy for now, and there was a safety in knowing the bounds of what they had. That it wouldn’t be ripped away, because she’d let it go when the time was right.
He turned her around to face him. She wondered if Elliot could hear her heart pounding in her chest. There was no way he couldn’t feel it as his lips met the space between her ribs.
He gathered her onto his lap, his back flopping to the mattress as he watched her remove her shirt. Quickly, she lowered her mouth to his, only to feel a gentle press of his hand at her sternum.
“I want to look at you,” he breathed out, his voice thick. “Can I look at you?”
She sat back up. The request was so vulnerable and adoring. Headoredher. She could feel it in the way his thumbs reverently brushed at the high planes of her cheeks and his eyes took her in like she was art. Like the sight of her like this, messy and flushed,movedhim.
She nodded. Her skin tingled at every inch where his eyes trailed over her, as if his gaze were accompanied by a gentle sweep of his thumb. She hadn’t known how much she’d needed him until he was underneath her, staring up at her body like a masterpiece.
“Are you still looking, or can I kiss you?” she teased.
