Present Day
PART SIX
SHE IS MORE TO BE PITIED THAN CENSURED
Present Day
E VEN WITHOUT A LABEL, I REALLY DIDN’T SEE A REASON NOT TO date Armitage Gallier. He was handsome, single, into me, and unless the Buddhists were right—I was only going to live once. Why not date the guy who looked at me like I hung the moon every time I cuddled into him on the couch?
Still, after that whole scene with his dad, I wasn’t about to push him. We fell back into familiar patterns. Spritzes on the terrace. Long drives through the city. Extravagant take-out dinners from his favorite restaurants—the kind that wouldn’t ever do take-out unless a Gallier ordered it.
It wasn’t wild. It wasn’t whirlwind. It wasn’t like what I imagined Thomas and Evelyn’s courtship had been like—at least, the parts that I could piece together. Our whatever-it-was was just … nice. Pretty much everything I ever could have asked for.
The only thing that was missing was sex. Well, labels too, but labels didn’t really matter to me, not when he made me feel so good.
And, to be honest, when you’re not confident, you don’t think you deserve labels. Who was I to think I should be Armitage Gallier’s girlfriend ?
For a while, I entertained the possibility that he wasn’t into sex—maybe ace or somewhere along that spectrum. But then I remembered that during my flu thing, he’d said those fateful words: When I work up the courage to get into bed with you, you won’t have to ask. You’ll know I want to be there.
So I knew he wanted to have sex. And I knew he wanted to have sex with me. But unlike America’s Top Nineteenth-Century Seductress Evelyn Cross, I had not yet worked up the courage to make it happen.
I’d had sex before. I wasn’t a virgin or anything. Maybe I wasn’t an Evelyn at all. Maybe I was a Thomas, one of those dreamers who thought sex should mean something, so when Armitage never broached the subject—never even kissed me—I didn’t dare ask.
I mean … what if he said no? I believed that there was something real between us, but what if he was just lonely and using me for company? Or what if we ended up having sex and then I realized he was just using me for sex? Or what if we did have sex and he wasn’t using me but it still ruined everything?
What if I was just delusional, and he wasn’t attracted to me at all? What if he said that stuff about wanting me in bed in the heat of the moment? What if, as he’d spent more time with me, he’d realized that I wasn’t desirable? Or what if I did manage to take my clothes off and he was so disgusted with my body—round and soft and too much, just like the rest of me—that he sent me packing? Or had sex with me just to be nice and then never spoke to me again?
The catastrophizing about sex never stopped. And honestly, I didn’t know which of those scenarios would be worse. So to protect myself, I stayed in our safe stasis, taking what little of him I could get.
Then, one night, my umbrella broke on the way to the Fifth Avenue residence.
He opened the door when I rang. I dripped in the hallway as I entered, bringing the storm in with me.
“Rain,” I explained simply.
His lips twitched. “I can see that. You couldn’t run between the drops?”
“These are New York raindrops. They don’t know how to stay in their lane.”
“You could have called a cab. I would have paid for it. You could have called me .”
“And what, you would have picked me up from my shitbox apartment in the Rolls?”
“No, of course not.” He sniffed. “I would have sent the helicopter.”
This time, it was my turn for my lips to twitch. He was becoming funny, this weird, tense man.
Hitting a pocket of drafty air, though, I shuddered from the cold.
“Come on, now,” he said, gesturing me toward the staircase.
“Where?”
“You’re going to freeze. You need a shower. I don’t want you catching your death.”
His hand went to the small of my back, strong and sturdy but forgiving and gentle, and he led me up the stairs to one of the guest bathrooms. Since his conversation with his father, he’d been sprucing up the house, moving in and making it feel more modern and lived-in. I guess so he could follow orders and sell it one day.
As we moved deeper into the house, I became very aware of the reality that I was about to be naked. That should have scared me, but it didn’t.
For one thing, I wanted to be naked here. And I wanted Armitage to be naked with me. Despite my reservations, despite my fears that it would ruin everything—I wanted him. And if Evelyn Cross taught me anything, it was that a woman should get what she wants. Damn the consequences.
And two: I thought maybe the quiet care of You’re going to freeze. You need a shower. I don’t want you catching your death was as close to I love you as a man like Armitage Gallier could get.
So he left me alone in the bathroom. I stripped, dropped my clothes in a soggy pile on the floor, and was fully ten minutes into a hot shower before I realized something.
I didn’t have any dry clothes.
Shit .
Scrambling out from under the spray, I helplessly checked my bag—which wouldn’t have helped even if I had put clothes in there, as it was also soaked through—and then moved into the adjoining guest room. Maybe there would be something I could wear until my own clothes dried. Or maybe Armitage had a hair dryer I could use to dry them or something —
But no sooner had I thrown open the empty wardrobe than the bedroom door opened, and I caught the reflection in the wardrobe mirror of the man himself tiptoeing in the room, dry clothes in hand.
He went to set the clothes down on the bed—and then realized that he wasn’t alone.
So there we were. Me, naked under a towel. And Armitage, standing like a deer in the headlights at the foot of a very inviting bed.
“Fancy meeting you like this,” I muttered.
“I didn’t—I was just going to drop off some clothes. I realized—”
“So did I. Just a few minutes too late.”
I gestured to the towel as best I could without letting it drop. His eyes traced a line from my eyes down to the place where the towel’s two ends barely covered my breasts.
He licked his lips. Just barely. Just enough that I noticed.
“I’ll just be going then,” he said, dropping the clothes.
“Why?” I asked.
There were a million whys in that one. Why won’t you just say you want me? Why haven’t you made me your real girlfriend or whatever? Why are we pretending we aren’t falling in love? Why have you been comfortable having me as a study partner, sexual tension sharer, afternoon tea drinker, sky watcher, terrace enjoyer, sometimes hand holder? Why won’t you just come over here and rip this towel off and show me that I’m not unwantable, that I’m sexy, that I’m yours and you’re mine?
He stopped in his tracks, not turning from the door.
“I don’t know if I’d be able to stop once we started … whatever this is.”
I knew he didn’t just mean sex. If I wanted to stop having sex for any reason, I knew he would. This was about something bigger, something cosmic.
“Why would you ever want to stop?” I asked.
Truth was, I didn’t want to know the answer. Not that it mattered then. Because in an instant, like a raging hurricane freed from a pillbox, Armitage had me in his arms.
Kissing me with a passion, a hunger, a need I’d only ever imagined.
He was right. When he wanted me in his bed, there was no question. I knew.
I’m not going to tell you what happened between us that night. It wouldn’t be fair to him to share the details—and this book is already pretty unfair to him, so I’m not going to make it worse.
But what I will say is this: It was beautiful. It was special. It was real.
And, at least to me, it was undeniable.