Birding with Benefits

Chapter 35

The bath was everything. It was hurts-to-step-into hot, the kind of bath that turned her skin pink and called for a cold washcloth on her face. The heat leached out all the negativity and worry, if only for an hour.

Her head was still spinning as she put together the pieces she’d been missing in her conversations with Morgan and reckoned with the words her daughter had thrown at her. Celeste knew Morgan had been speaking in anger and defensiveness, but she’d managed the sinister teen magic of getting straight at Celeste’s deepest fears and yanking them out to shake in her mother’s face.

Had she been selfish? Had Celeste made her postdivorce life about only herself? And if she had, could anyone really blame her? She was over forty, her life half done. If she couldn’t be selfish now, then when?

She shook away the thought and sipped at the tea John had handed her. She hadn’t asked him to stay, but she also hadn’t asked him to leave, and his presence was a comfort.

If Maria had come over instead, Celeste would be three glasses of wine deep and sobbing on the couch, reliving every moment of her fight with Morgan and questioning every decision she’d made in the past two years. And that would have been fine. But this was fine, too. In fact, crying in the car with John’s hand on her knee and then sharing a puddle of ketchup as they ate their fries at her kitchen table was so much more than fine that Celeste almost wished he’d hadn’t come at all.

Almost, but not quite.

She just needed to soak, and think, and gather herself for whatever was to come with Morgan. She knew that no matter what sense she tried to talk into her in the weeks between then and August, that Morgan would go to LA. She’d recognized the determination in her daughter’s voice, because it echoed her own.

Morgan was creative and daring and brave, with the confidence and sense of adventure and belief in herself that Celeste had raised her to possess. She was everything Celeste could have hoped for, and more.

But she was also seventeen, and naive, and letting her heart take over the rest of her life. Next thing she knew, she’d be blinking awake in her late thirties, wondering where she’d gone.

Wouldn’t she?

She rose with a sigh, water streaming down her body. Her hazy outline stared at her from the bathroom mirror and she stepped closer, the thick weave of the bath mat soft under her toes, her array of notes spread out and curling before her on the fogged mirror.

So many messages.

What about all your little mantras?Morgan had asked.

What about them, indeed? She’d started collecting them for answers, but sometimes there were so many voices in her head that she couldn’t sort out her own. Was she supposed to Find happiness alone or Grab life by the horns? Was it better to Seek joyor Relish safety? What happened when doing one meant turning her back on another?

Lecture Morgan all she wanted, it had taken Celeste only a few weeks with John to start wavering about the plans she’d made for herself.

Yes, it would be easy to fall into real relationship territory with John. But it had been easy with Peter. Easy to fall, harder to climb back up, and more difficult still to grow once out of that shadow.

There were times with John, especially with their bodies pressed together in the dark, when she believed altering her course was worth the risk. But then daylight would come, and she didn’t know. Didn’t know when she was being controlled by emotion, or lust, or logic.

She was as lost as she’d ever been. She’d spent two years trying to lay the foundation for her second life, and she was no closer to finding it than when she’d started.

When at last she opened the door to her bedroom, John was in her reading chair, those sexy-as-hell glasses perched on his nose. It was her favorite spot to read in, though lately she’d spent more time there simply looking out the window, waiting for birds. Seeing John there, surrounded by the small intimacies of her bedroom, squeezed her lungs. They’d never explicitly agreed to keep their activities to his house, but she’d never invited him back to hers after their birding session in her yard. Somehow it had felt safer to keep him far removed from these parts of her.

John brought two fingers to his mouth, flicking his tongue against them before sliding a page between his fingertips.

“Hey.” Her voice was raspy in the aftermath of the cry she’d had.

His eyes shot up to her as he slid the glasses off his nose. “Hey, how are you feeling?”

She fiddled with the belt of her robe, watching his hands on the book. “I’m all right for now. Thank you for the fries.”

“Of course.” He stood, dropping the book onto the chair and slipping his glasses into his back pocket before tugging at his folded sleeve. “I can go.” His eyes looked to her bedroom door. “I should probably—”

“Stay.” She wasn’t ready to lose the sight of him in her bedroom. “Maybe you could stay?”

“Sure.” He swallowed. “If you need me to.”

A little dizzy from the heat of her bath, Celeste tugged at the neckline of her robe, pulling it loose over one shoulder. John’s gaze drifted across her exposed skin until he seemed to catch himself, bouncing his attention back to her face.

But that had been enough to wake her up. Just one minute under John’s careful attention and she was lighter. This was what she needed. To be out of her messy brain and fully in her body, to lose herself in the give-and-take she and John did so well together.

One tug on the belt undid her robe. A shrug of her shoulders sent it to the floor.

John blinked but didn’t look away. Instead, he took his fill of her, as he always did. But he left the space between them. “I can stay without sex, Celeste. You’ve had a tough night, and—”

“And I want to feel good. Please, John, let’s feel good.”