Her. Only her. The one clean thing. The only shelter I had left.
I needed her, and nothing else in this poisoned world, and I let myself need it.
25
MARY CATHERINE
He kissed me like he was angry about it.
Not at me—I understood that immediately, the way you understood things about people you'd let close. He was angry at something else, something enormous, and I was the only solid thing in his reach and he was holding on. I felt it in the quality of it—the desperation underneath, the barely contained force of a man who had been through something in the hours since I'd last seen him and had no other language left for it.
I had a speech prepared.
I had been building it since I drove away from this studio, adding to it through the tea and the kitchen and the tickets and the packing, a careful architecture of everything I needed to say about trust and timing and what it meant that my father's business had been raided on the second day of knowing him. It was a good speech. It covered the relevant ground.
I forgot every word of it.
His mouth was thorough and his hands were in my hair and the anger underneath wasn't the kind that hurt—it was the kind that meant something, the kind that saidI needed to get back toyou and didn't know any other way to say it. I kissed him back with everything I had because I had been sitting at my parents' kitchen table for hours with a stone in my pocket and now the stone was gone and there was only this.
We hit the sofa sideways. He caught us before it became a problem, one hand finding the back of it. We broke apart laughing—both of us, at the same moment, at the gracelessness of it.
"You didn't call," I said. “I was mad, but?—”
"I know." His forehead dropped to mine. "I got into something. I'll tell you all of it." A pause. "Not right now."
"Not right now," I agreed.
He pulled back enough to look at me. Whatever he found there, it made the tension in his jaw ease slightly. His hand came up to my face and his thumb traced my cheekbone. I turned into it without deciding to, the way a plant turned toward light.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
"Better than I was an hour ago."
"Your family?"
"Working on it." I held his gaze. "There are things to deal with. Later. Tonight—" I paused, thinking of the airport, the flight, Daniel waiting—I would tell him, but not this second, not while his hand was on my face and we were still breathing hard from the kissing. "Later, I need to take care of some things. But right now, I'm here."
He studied me. The eyes that didn't miss anything.
"Okay," he said. "Right now, you're here."
"Right now, I'm here," I confirmed. "And you look like you've been through something terrible and haven't told anyone about it."
"Yeah." Something moved through his face that was too big and too complicated to name. "That's about right."
I put both hands on his face and looked at him steadily. "Later," I said. "You'll tell me later. Right now?—"
He kissed me again and the rest of the sentence went nowhere.
This kiss was different. The desperation still there, but with something else settling into it—an intention, a direction. His hands moved with the certainty that I had come to understand was just how he did things, with no wasted motion. I pulled at his shirt because I had been thinking about his chest and I was not going to pretend otherwise.
He helped. Shirt gone, and then mine. I got my hands on him properly for the first time in daylight and took my time about it.
"You're staring," he said.
"I'm appreciating," I said. "There's a difference."
He made a sound that was almost a laugh and pulled me up the length of him. Then, his mouth was at my throat and moving down. I stopped being able to make distinctions about anything.
