Page 107 of Her Rival

I stood in the entryway. He stood across from me. He did not move toward me. I did not move toward him.

We stood there and looked at each other for what was probably six seconds and felt like substantially longer, and then he said, very quietly:

"Hartley."

"Yes."

"I'm going to kiss you now."

"Yes."

"I'm telling you because the last time I did it without warning you, I didn't know what to do with the information that you'd let me, and I'm not going to be that man tonight. I'm going to tell you what I'm going to do."

"Okay."

"I'm going to kiss you."

"Okay."

He crossed the three feet between us. He put one hand on the side of my neck. The other came up to the small of my back.

He kissed me.

It was not a slow kiss. It was not the kiss against the door from Thursday three weeks ago, and it was not the kisses of Saturday night, and it was not the deliberate languid kiss before the rug on Tuesday. This was the kiss of a man who'd spent twenty hours alone in a house thinking about whether he was ever going to kiss this particular woman again and had now been given the answer, and the answer was yes, and it landed in the kiss with the force of twenty hours of not-knowing released all at once.

My back was against the door before I knew the door was behind me. His hands were on either side of my face. His knee was between my thighs. I'd reached up at some point and gripped both his wrists, not to stop him, to hold them where they were, the way you hold a thing in place when the thing is the only thing keeping the rest of you upright.

"Hartley," he muttered against my mouth.

"Yes."

"Tell me to stop."

"What."

"Tell me to stop. So I'll stop."

"Why."

"Because you're going to have to tell me to if you want me to. Because tonight I'm not going to figure out the no on my own. I'm going to need you to say it. I'm not going to be the man who keeps reading the room. I'm going to be the man who's told what to do, by you, in words, so we're clear."

I pulled back from the kiss. I looked up at him.

His face was the careful flat thing it had been on Friday night with the photograph on the counter. The controlled thing. Except this time the thing being controlled was the wanting.

I had not understood, until I was looking at him with my back against his front door, that there was a version of Jett Sturgill that wanted things and didn't let me see how much, and that the version had been operating, in some quiet way, every time we'd been in a room together over the last twenty days. He'd been calibrating his wanting against mine. He hadn't, until I walked out of the house on Wednesday night with the LLCs on my laptop, lost the calibration.

He was telling me, in the entryway, that he wasn't going to make any more guesses tonight.

"Don't stop," I said.

"Say more than that."

"Don't stop. I came back here to be in a room with you, Jett. I came back to be on the inside of your house. I came back to take off my coat. I came back to be told the size of you in every single way you are. Do not stop tonight. I am not telling you to stop tonight. I'll tell you to stop if I need to stop. Tonight, do not."

"Okay."

"Tell me you understand."