Page 29

“Come here,” I say.

He crosses the kitchen in two strides – my move, stolen, and he knows it’s stolen, and he grins as he steals it – and then his mouth is on mine and there’s nothing careful about it.

Eleven days. Eleven days of a sister on the couch and paper walls and goodnight-both-of-you, and it all comes out of him at once, his hands fisting in my shirt, walking me backward out of the kitchen with a confidence that would concern me in any other context. My hip catches the doorframe. Neither of us stops. I get my thumb under his jaw, at the hinge, and tilt his face where I want it, and he makes a sound against my mouth that I’ve missed the way you miss sleep.

“The door,” he manages.

“Elena’s at the Pierre.”

“The door, Luke. I’ve learned things about this family.”

He’s right. I lock it. When I turn around he’s already pulled his shirt over his head and thrown it at the garment rack and I stop for a second, because I always stop for a second. A year of marriage and my hands still forget what they’re doing when he does that.

“You’re staring,” he says.

“I’m assessing.”

“And?”

“Come here.”

We don’t make it graceful. Grace is for people who haven’t been waiting eleven days. His fingers are at my waistband and mine are mapping the long line of his spine, and we’re both laughing at something – the doorframe, the shirt– and then we’re not laughing. The bed takes us the way it always does, barely, a full-size mattress that has survived a marriage it was never rated for.

He’s beneath me and then he isn’t, because Preston has never once in his life stayed where he was put, and his mouth is at my throat, my collarbone, the centre of my chest, unhurried now, deliberate, taking an inventory he already knows by heart. My hands find his hips. The last of the clothes goes wherever clothes go.

“Hi,” he says, above me, absurd and gorgeous and totally mine.

“Hi.”

“We bought a house today.”

“Your father bought a house. We bought the lights.”

“God, that’s romantic,” he says, and kisses me before I can answer.

I take my time. I start at his throat – the spot below his ear that shorts his circuits, and his whole body arches into it like I’ve found a switch. I work down. Collarbone. Chest. Nipples. The soft skin below his ribs that makes him gasp and grab my hair and say my name in a register the neighbours have opinions about. He’s talking – Preston is always talking, a running commentary of yes and there and half-finished sentences that die in his throat – and I keep going until the words run out, because that’s the job. Anyone can make Preston York perform. I’m the only one who can make him stop.

By the time I reach his hips he’s pulling at my shoulders, impatient, demanding, gorgeous, and I press my mouth to the inside of his thigh and hold there, just breathing, until he makes a sound that’s barely human.

“Luke.”

“Almost.”

“Luke, I have been patient for eleven days. Eleven. We’re newlyweds – we’re supposed to be insufferable. People should be filing noise complaints about us. Instead I’ve spent a week and a half behind paper walls with your sister on the other side, married to that” – he gestures at all of me – “with no outlet whatsoever. I’m a man in his honeymoon phase, Luke. Have mercy or have consequences–”

“You haven’t been patient a day in your life.”

“LUKE.”

“Turn over.”

He turns over so fast the fitted sheet comes off the corner, and he’s still narrating – “bossy, you’re so bossy, I’m filing a complaint” – right up until I get my hands on him, spread him open, and put my mouth where the complaint used to be.

“Oh my God.”

I take my time here too. Long, flat, unhurried strokes of my tongue, learning him all over again, and Preston goes off like a symphony – gasping into the pillow, pushing back against my tongue, his voice climbing through registers I could chart. I hold his hips still and work him slowly, deliberately, until he’s trembling, until the pillow is muffling sounds our new neighbours are lucky they’ll never inherit.

“Luke – Luke – I take back every – oh – everything I have ever said about your patience, it’s a virtue, it’s a gift, do not stop–”