Chapter 16 #2
She told me about her afternoon in the same way she would have told Audrey, not how she'd told it to me at her counter the morning before.
Two more walk-ins after we left. A woman with a basset hound who'd been Caldwell's for fifteen years.
The Bishop family called to schedule Cooper's spring shots a season early.
A man whose name she didn't have yet came in at five with a parrot that had a sore on its foot.
"A parrot?"
"In Hartsdale. A sore on its foot."
"What did you do with it?"
"I treated it."
She was looking at me over her wineglass. The smile was sitting at the corners of her mouth in a way she was no longer keeping off it. The roast had done its work, and so had Duke, Halsey, and Mendoza.
She set the wineglass down.
"I know what you did."
"You did?"
"I knew the second the four of you walked in the door."
"I figured."
"Mrs. Halloran called me at four."
"She did?"
"She wanted to know if the Hartsdale Fire Department was sponsoring my clinic now, because if so, she had questions about the contract."
I laughed. Real one.
"What did you tell her?"
"I told her I'd let her know."
"She's going to gossip."
"She started before she hung up."
"That was the idea."
A beat.
"I'm not going to thank you."
"Don't."
She got up from her chair, came around the table, and sat down in my lap.
She was warmer than the room. She had wine on her mouth.
Her hand came up to the back of my neck, and her other one went flat against my chest, where her hand went every night she slept in my bed.
The difference this time was that she wasn't keeping it there to keep it there.
The difference this time was that her thumb was moving.
I'd been waiting on this kiss for four weeks. I'd been waiting on it since the water tower, if I was honest about it, and I was done not being honest about it.
She broke first. She pulled back an inch. She looked at me. Her eyes had something in them that wasn't a question.
"I'm staying tonight," she said.
She got off my lap and took my hand.
I let her lead me out of the kitchen. The cast iron was off the heat. The light was on. I left both where they were.
I took her hand back at the bedroom door. I caught her at the doorframe, turned her, put my hand on the side of her face, and kissed her again.
It was a different kiss.
This one had nowhere to go but where it was going.
Her sweater came off over her head. I didn't remember pulling it off.
She had a thin tank under it, and her bare shoulders had the freckles I'd been watching since a Tuesday morning ten weeks ago, the ones that had been wet under a bath towel and that I wasn't allowed to look at then.
I was allowed now. I looked, and she let me, and neither of us said anything about it.
I unbuttoned my own shirt and dropped it on the floor.
She put her hand flat on my chest and moved it once over the cat-scratch scar at my collarbone. The scar had healed. She'd done good work. I told her I thought about it. She asked what part. I said her hip, and she laughed against my mouth.
A scratch at the bedroom door.
We both stopped.
Moose. On the other side.
"You have got to be kidding me," I said.
She started laughing—the one that came up out of her in a place she didn't try to manage. Her forehead landed against my collarbone, and her shoulders were going.
"Are you serious?" she said.
I told her not to go anywhere, got up and crossed the room, and opened the door six inches. Moose was on the other side, his tail at half-mast, wearing the deeply offended expression of a dog who had been excluded from a room with Astrid in it for the first time in three months.
I told him we were going to have a long conversation about boundaries. His tail thumped once.
I closed the door.
She was on the bed by the time I turned around. Up on one elbow. Hair around her shoulders. Looking at me with the green-eyed steadiness she'd had at the council vote, only warmer.
"You're a man who has closed a door on a dog tonight."
"Welcome to my new life."
I went back to her.
The bed dipped when I put my knee on it. She watched me come, eyes on my face, hand in my hair, before I got close enough for her to do it.
I caught my weight on one elbow over her. The other hand went to her hip. The tank had ridden up over her ribs. My hand found bare skin between the hem and the waistband of her jeans. Her breath broke at the contact. I held still.
I leaned down and put my mouth at the hinge of her jaw. Her hand tightened in my hair. I worked down the side of her neck like I'd been thinking about doing for ten weeks. She made a sound that was almost a laugh and almost not. I felt it under my mouth before I heard it.
Her tank came up next. I had it bunched at her ribs, and then it was off, dropped over the side of the bed. She had a thin bralette under it, the color of unsweet tea. I put my mouth at the curve of her shoulder. She put her hand at the back of my neck and held it there.
My belt came after that. Hers after mine. The jeans took longer than I expected. There was a hook at the back of hers I had to wait out, her laughing into my shoulder while I worked it. By the time we were down to skin, the sheet was a wreck.
"My hands are shaking," she said.
"Mine, too."
I put my forehead down to hers. We were chest to chest. She was warmer than the room had any business being. Her hand on my back was flat. Her hand on the back of my neck was holding on.
"I'm right here," she said. "I'm not going anywhere."
I nodded.
"Don't go slow," she added.
I laughed against her mouth. She caught the laugh in hers, and it became a kiss. The kiss became the thing I'd been waiting for. I let myself have her.
I woke up sometime past three with her hand on my chest and the room very dark.
She had her hair on my shoulder. Her thumb was moving along my collarbone the way it had been moving on the back of my neck at the table. She wasn't asleep.
"Hey," I said.
"Hey."
"Did you sleep?"
"A little."
"Astrid."
"Yes."
"Are you okay?"
"Yes."
A beat.
"Easton."
"Yeah."
"I'm okay."
I put my hand over hers on my chest.
The knot I'd been carrying through every shift had gone quiet. I hadn't noticed it go. I'd been busy in the kitchen, cutting onions, reading my grandmother's handwriting, and figuring out what it meant to be the man taking the cast iron down off the shelf.
This night mattered. Not the way the Tuesday nights of the last eighteen months had mattered, which was not at all. This one mattered because she was in it.
Astrid breathed out against the side of my throat. She was no longer holding what she'd been holding. She was asleep within the next breath.
I stayed awake a while longer. I wanted to know what the room sounded like with her in it. I'd been a man with somewhere else to be my whole life, and tonight, I had nowhere to be but here.
I went under sometime after four.