14. Stephanie
— ? —
Stephanie
I woke up with a headache that pulsed behind my eyes with the steady insistence of a punishment for crimes I couldn’t remember committing.
Last night came back in slow, heavy pieces. The nightmare and the hospital that wasn’t real. The panic attack, and Kevin’s voice counting me through every breath. The ink over his heart with our names stacked on it. The hours we’d both spent crying on either side of three feet of floor.
I groaned and stretched, my body stiff from sleeping curled into a defensive knot all night. Morning light came soft through the window, early still, the gray-gold of six or seven o’clock.
I sat up.
And froze.
Kevin was sprawled on the floor next to my bunk.
He must have fallen asleep sitting against the wall and slid down at some point in the night, because he lay flat on his back now with one forearm thrown across his eyes.
He’d stripped off his shirt at some point in the night, the cut of muscle across his bare stomach rising and falling slow with sleep.
His sweatpants had shifted low on his hips.
Except those weren’t sweatpants at all. Black briefs, snug, the kind that left almost nothing for a person to wonder about.
Including the very prominent tent currently straining the front of them.
My mouth went dry.
I knew I should look away. The correct move was to gather my things without a sound, slip into the bathroom, and pretend on my grave I’d never seen any of it. That was what a rational, emotionally recovered adult would do, and I had spent three years becoming one.
Instead I stared.
He was bigger than I remembered. Or I’d made myself forget, filed it down into a memory I could survive. It had been three years since I’d seen him like this, since I’d felt him move inside me, since he’d taken me apart so completely I lost track of my own name in the middle of it.
I let my eyes move over him because he wasn’t awake to catch me at it.
The tendon standing up along the back of the hand thrown across his eyes, the fine dark hair on his wrist catching the early light.
The dip beside his hipbone where the briefs sat low.
The way his throat moved when he swallowed in his sleep.
I’d forgotten how much of wanting someone lived in the small, specific parts of them, the ones you couldn’t explain to anyone else without sounding unhinged.
I’d never wanted a stranger’s forearm in my life. Kevin’s could still stop my breath.
The memory arrived without knocking. His hands spanning my hips. His mouth working at my throat. His voice low in my ear, telling me I was beautiful and telling me to let go because he had me.
I pressed my thighs together against the ache that opened up low in my belly.
Stop it, Stephanie.
This was absurd. One look at his morning erection and I was ready to set fire to three years of hard-won distance. One shared night of grief and I was lying here composing filth about my ex-husband while he slept.
I’d been with exactly one other man since the divorce.
One. A perfectly kind guy I’d met at a work thing, who said all the right words and put his hands in all the technically correct places and did precisely nothing for me.
I’d spent the whole night chasing a feeling I couldn’t catch, trying to reverse-engineer what I’d had with Kevin from a stranger’s blueprint.
In the end I gave up, sent him home in a car, and finished myself off with my vibrator instead.
That had been the whole shape of my sex life ever since. Me and the vibrator and the memory of a man who’d ruined me for anyone who wasn’t him.
And the man himself was lying three feet away with an erection that was actively frying the circuitry in my brain.
I gathered my clothes as quietly as I could. Toiletry bag. A folded towel off the stack on the dresser. If I could just make the bathroom without waking him, a cold shower might scrub my head clean enough to get through the day.
The floorboard creaked under my heel.
Kevin grunted. “Steph?”
I gasped, jumped up, spun around, and put my foot straight into my own suitcase.
I was falling, definitely, gracelessly falling, and I braced for the floor.
Strong arms caught me.
By the waist, hauling me up against a warm bare chest. My hands landed flat on his pecs to steady myself, the muscle firm and unfamiliar-familiar under my palms, his heartbeat going quick beneath the ink I couldn’t see from this angle but knew was there.
“You okay?” His voice was gravel with sleep.
I looked up at him. His hair was a mess, pushed up on one side. His eyes were heavy-lidded, barely open. His arms stayed locked around me, holding me steady, and low against my stomach I could feel exactly how awake the rest of him was.
“Yes,” I breathed. Too breathy. Embarrassingly, hopelessly breathy.
His hands tightened at my waist, fingers spreading over the small of my back. “You look a bit shaken.”
“I do?” My voice climbed an octave without permission. “Oh, I’m not. No. Why would I be?”
I shifted, just slightly. By accident. Or not by accident, some newly appointed committee in my hindbrain casting the deciding vote, because the movement pressed me flush against him and I felt him twitch against my belly.
He grunted, low. “Steph.”
We shouldn’t. The thought arrived clear and useless, bobbing up through the heat no matter how many times I pushed it back down. We were divorced. He’d wrecked me. I’d rebuilt from the studs. This was the ledge I’d promised myself I’d never stand on again.
“Yes?”
“If you keep coming closer…” He let the rest of it hang unfinished between us, and the unfinished part did more damage than any threat.
I looked up at him through my lashes. I didn’t know what I was doing. Every functioning part of me knew I shouldn’t be doing it. But my body had gone fully rogue, operating on old muscle memory and three years of wanting, and my brain had been relegated to a horrified spectator.
“What will you do?”
His eyes went dark, the sleepy softness burning right out of them. In one motion he yanked me in and erased the last inch between us, his mouth dropping to the shell of my ear.
“Get on my fucking knees and beg you to let me taste you.”
He bit down on my earlobe.
I gasped, the sound out of me before I could catch it, my fingers curling into his chest.
His hands had moved to grip my hips now, fingertips digging in through the thin cotton, and I could feel the effort it was costing him.
The way every muscle in him had drawn tight and rigid, the restraint it was taking not to do the thing he’d just breathed into my ear.
He was letting me feel it, letting me hold the leash. That undid me more than the words had.
My hand traveled down his body. Slow. On purpose. Over the plane of his chest, the ridges of his stomach, all the way to the waistband of the briefs. I stopped there and dragged one fingertip along the elastic, back and forth, not going under.
We stared at each other. His pupils were blown wide and black, his breath sawing in and out.
We shouldn’t, the cork bobbed up again, and I pushed it under and held it there.
“You, begging?” I let a slow smile curve my mouth. “That’s a sight I’d love to see, Kevin.”
I rose up onto my toes. Brought my lips to within a breath of his, close enough to feel the warmth coming off them, close enough that all he had to do was tip his chin.
He swallowed hard, the muscles of his throat working.
His whole body was shaking with the strain, every line of him coiled and waiting on me.
He’d always been the one in control of this, in the good years and the bad ones both, and I’d spent three years telling myself I didn’t miss the way he could take me apart.
Watching him tremble and hold, watching him leave the choice with me and refuse to steal it back, I understood I’d been lying about that too.
“Thought it’d take a lot more than that,” I whispered against his mouth.
Then I stepped back.
His hands slid off my waist and hung there in the air where I’d been. His expression fell open, from ragged desperation into pure stunned disbelief.
I collected my towel and my clothes with every scrap of dignity I could still lay hands on, walked past him to the bathroom, and shut the door.
Then I put my back against it and tried to remember the mechanics of breathing.
What the HELL was I doing?
One night. One night in a bunk bed and I couldn’t keep it together. One touch and I was grinding against him half-dressed in a room full of stuffed rabbits. Three years of careful, hard-won distance, and one shared cry and thirty seconds of dirty talk had reduced it all to ash.
I cranked the shower on and stepped under the spray without waiting for it to warm, and the cold hit me and did absolutely nothing. The fire was already lit and running through me on its own supply.
I closed my eyes and there he was. The look on his face when I’d traced the waistband. The wreck of his voice against my ear.
Get on my fucking knees and beg you to let me taste you.
My hand slid down my stomach before I could talk myself out of it.
My fingers found the slick heat between my legs and I had to bite back a sound.
I was already wet, had been since the second I clocked that tent in his briefs, my body several steps ahead of my consent.
It remembered exactly what he could do to it, no matter how badly the rest of me wanted to forget.
My other hand came up to my own breast and I thought of his hand there instead, the size of it, how he used to cover me and go still and just breathe for a second, bracing himself, before he let his mouth follow.
I braced a forearm against the tile and let myself have the fantasy, the whole of it, no editing.
Kevin on his knees on this bathroom floor, looking up at me the way he’d looked at me a minute ago, dark-eyed and starving and asking permission with his whole face.
His mouth on the inside of my thigh, working higher, taking his time because he’d always known that making me wait was half of it.
The scrape of his stubble against skin that never saw the sun.
His hands wrapped around the backs of my legs to keep me upright when they gave out under me.
His tongue doing the specific, unhurried thing he used to do that always made me forget where I ended and the rest of the world started.
I could hear him in my head, the low hum he made against me, the way he’d say my name into me instead of to me.
My hips rolled forward into my own hand without asking.
I imagined looking down and finding his eyes already on mine, that unbearable focus he used to give me and no one else, the one thing about our marriage I’d never been able to reconstruct with anyone since.
We shouldn’t, one last time, thin and drowning under all of it.
I held it under and let go.
My fingers moved faster. The water had gone hot at last, sheeting down my spine, and I pictured his hands there instead. His hands, his mouth. Everything he’d promised in six words against my ear.
“Kevin,” I whispered.
I came with his name on my lips and my own wrist between my teeth to keep from crying out, the orgasm rolling up through me in long pulls that wrung sounds out of my throat I couldn’t fully swallow. My knees nearly went. The tile was the only thing holding me up.
When it finally let go of me, I slumped against the wall, chest heaving, water pounding my shoulders.
Someone cleared their throat.
Inside the bathroom.
I shrieked and yanked the shower curtain aside just far enough to see Kevin standing by the door. His face was red, but his expression was pure delight, a grin fighting its way loose at one corner.
“You forgot these.”
He held up a scrap of fabric.
My panties. The ones I must have dropped on the floor when he startled me into the suitcase.
I wanted to die, wanted the tile to crack open and take me down through the foundation into the cold Nantucket ground.
I had just gotten myself off to explicit thoughts of the man standing ten feet away, loud enough that he’d clearly heard some of it, and now he was dangling my underwear off one finger with that insufferable smirk.
I forced my voice toward casual. “Leave them there. I’ll be counting my underwear tonight, Kevin. Don’t try to steal any. I know how handsy you get when you see cute lingerie.”
His smirk deepened, slower now, and meaner around the edges. His eyes moved over the parts of me the curtain didn’t cover, shoulders and soaked hair and a face I could feel burning.
He lifted both hands in surrender, the panties still hooked on one finger. “I swear I’ll be good.”
He swallowed, and the humor went heavy and serious in his eyes for half a second, want he didn’t bother to hide. Then he set the panties on the counter and left, pulling the door shut behind him with a softness that felt deliberate.
I stood under the spray, heart slamming hard enough that I might have just sprinted the length of the island.
I swear I’ll be good.
That line took me apart worse than the first one had. The promise folded inside it. The plain implication that being good was a choice he was making, on purpose, every second, and that being bad was standing right there on the other side of it, waiting on one word from me.
I was turned on again. Somehow, impossibly, thirty seconds after coming, I was turned on again.
Because he was built the way he was built. Because I remembered exactly how he filled me. Because he’d inked our names over his heart and cried with me in the dark and sat on a hard floor all night guarding my sleep and asked for nothing.
Because underneath the divorce and the distance and everything he’d broken, some part of me still wanted him with a ferocity that frightened me.
I dropped my forehead against the cool tile and groaned.
“Get your shit together, Stephanie.” I said it out loud, hoping the sound of it’d land. “Just today, and you can leave. You can take the last ferry at ten. You can do this.”
One more day. A handful of hours. Then I’d be back in my own apartment with my own locks, an ocean away from Kevin Coleman and his tattoos and his promises to be good.
I turned off the water and reached for the towel, already rehearsing the polite, distant face I’d wear out that door.