23. Stephanie #2
The building was still under renovation, plastic sheeting hanging in the doorways and the smell of fresh drywall thick in the air, barely safe to be inside.
Exposed studs and a floor half-tiled, a ladder leaning where a light fixture would go.
This was the clinic I’d been pouring myself into for three months, the place I’d told everyone was the reason I hadn’t left the island, and it wasn’t finished yet, and neither was I.
I didn’t care. I yanked open a door to a mostly-finished patient room and pulled Kevin in after me by the arm.
Shut the door.
Locked it.
The click of the latch was loud in the small room.
He stood there watching me, still damp at the collar, glitter in his hair, waiting to find out why I’d dragged him into an unfinished exam room and sealed us both inside.
My heart was going so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
I’d carried this question for three years and I’d never once had the courage to ask it, and now it was going to come out of me whether I was ready or not.
The locked room was the size of a confession booth and it had gone airless the second the latch caught.
He was close enough that I could smell the fountain water and the sun still on him under the warm scent of his skin, one I had no business recognizing after three years and recognized instantly anyway.
My skin had gone tight all over, the fine hairs on my arms standing up like the air before lightning.
Somewhere below conscious thought my body had already decided what this was, and it was three steps ahead of me, and I hated that it still knew the way.
“Did you ever have something with Jennifer?”
The question burst out of me, the poison I’d been swallowing since the first time I heard her name. Since the night of the miscarriage. Since I’d watched her fingers curl around his arm an hour ago, claiming a right to him she’d never had.
Kevin’s face twisted with genuine disgust, an involuntary recoil. “What the fuck? No. Of course not.” He actually shivered, a full-body shudder. “Never. Not even close.”
“And any of the other women outside? I heard people saying you and Jennifer are ‘together again.’”
“People love to gossip.” He took both my hands in his, folding them up between us. “I’ve never touched her. Wouldn’t with a ten-foot pole. There’s just one woman I desire, Stephanie, and she’s standing in front of me.”
I made a show of looking around the empty patient room, at the bare walls and the patient bed. He rolled his eyes at me, but a blush crept up his neck all the same, red climbing over his collar.
“You’re the only woman I’ve ever been with,” he admitted quietly, the joke draining out of him. “More than thirteen years now, since the first time, and there’s never been anyone but you.”
My chest went tight. “These past three years?”
“I haven’t been with anyone. I just didn’t want to.” His voice cracked down the middle. “They’re not you. No one is you. Only you are you, and you hated my guts, so I stuck to my hand and my memories of you.”
Tears slipped down my cheeks, and I let them.
I hadn’t expected this. Hadn’t expected honesty stripped this far down, this raw, from a man who’d spent a decade hiding behind his own competence.
The Kevin I’d married would have died before admitting to a weakness, and here he was handing me the softest part of him with both hands, telling me he’d spent three years alone with nothing but memories of me.
I thought about all the nights I’d assumed the opposite. All the times I’d lain awake and pictured him moving on, easy and clean, some woman in the space I’d left. I’d built a whole ache around it. And none of it had been real.
“I tried,” I admitted, the words barely a whisper, dragged up from somewhere I’d kept locked. “Once. I tried to erase you from my skin and my thoughts.” Shame burned up my chest and into my face. “I couldn’t go through with it. I asked him to leave and finished myself thinking of you.”
Kevin went still, the breath going out of him. His hands came up to cup my face, his thumbs sweeping the tears off my cheeks as fast as they fell.
“You’ve got no idea how much I’ve missed you, Stephanie,” he breathed, his forehead dropping toward mine. “Every day. Every hour. Every minute since you left.”
“I’ve missed you too.” The admission tore out of me, the one I’d guarded harder than anything. “So much it scares me.”
His eyes searched my face, moving over every inch of it.
Looking for permission. Looking for the sign he’d been waiting three years to see.
And I was done fighting it. Done being the woman who wanted him and punished us both for it.
Whatever came after, whatever this cost me, I wanted him in this half-built room with the drywall dust settling around us.
He was still holding my face, and I let myself look at him the way I hadn’t allowed myself to all night.
The whole handsome sum of him was easy to armor against. The specifics weren’t.
The knot of muscle that jumped at the hinge of his jaw when he clenched it.
The vein that stood up faint at his temple, going harder now, betraying a pulse as wrecked as mine.
The way his throat worked when he swallowed, once, like he was trying to keep a word down.
His mouth was slightly open. I watched a breath go out of it and felt it land somewhere low in me, an actual physical drop, like missing a stair in the dark.
This is a spectacularly bad idea, said the version of me who’d survived him, the one who kept her arms crossed and her voice level and had gotten us both across three years in one piece.
You know exactly how this ends. You were there for the ending.
I heard her. I heard every word. My thumb was already moving against his sternum through the damp cotton, tracing the place I knew the ink started, and I hadn’t decided to do that.
My body just kept casting votes my brain hadn’t authorized.
I pressed my thighs together and it did nothing, because the ache had set up somewhere my thighs couldn’t reach.
So I made my choice.
I grabbed the front of his shirt in both fists and pulled him toward me.
His mouth crashed onto mine.