Chapter 12 - Benedict #2
The silence between us is so thick I can hear her breathing. In and out. The slightly elevated rhythm that tells me her heart rate is climbing the way mine is. We're standing in the dark and our bodies are having a conversation that our mouths haven't caught up to yet.
"Tell me to leave, Lucy. Mean it. And I'll go."
She opens her mouth. Closes it.
The not-speaking is louder than anything she's said. The held breath. The visible effort of a woman trying to form the word go and finding that her body won't produce it.
I step forward. Two feet. Close enough to see the pulse in her throat.
Close enough to smell her—that clean, warm scent I know from her apartment, from her towel, from the ghost traces I've been carrying on my clothes for a week.
But this is different. This is her, right now, in the cold, her skin flushed and her breath visible and her eyes locked on mine with an expression I haven't seen before.
Not fear. Not anger. Not the clinical assessment or the professional composure.
Want.
She wants me. She's standing two feet from me in the dark, and her body is saying what her mouth won't—what three weeks of clinical frameworks and professional distance and twice-checked locks have been trying to contain—and the containment is failing. Right now. In front of me. In the dark.
I put my hand on her jaw.
She doesn't flinch. Doesn't pull away. Her skin is cold from the November air and warm underneath, and when my thumb traces the line of her cheekbone, her eyes close for a half-second. Involuntary. The body's response to a touch it's been waiting for, whether the mind authorized the waiting or not.
Her eyes open. She looks at me. And the look is the answer to every question I've asked—the texts, the silence, the I haven't decided yet.
She's decided. She decided before I touched her.
She decided on the street when she heard my footsteps and didn't walk faster.
She decided at the crisis center when my shoulder touched hers and she didn't move away.
She decided at midnight when she typed not the way it should and pressed send.
I kiss her.
Not gently. My mouth finds hers and the contact is not a question.
It's the same statement as the texts and the donation and the hallway and the doorway and every move I've made since the wedding—mine—but in the only language that has ever mattered, the language of bodies, and her mouth opens under mine and the sound she makes is small and sharp and breaks something in me that I didn't know was whole.
Her hands come up. Not to push me away. They find my coat, the lapels, and they grip—hard, the knuckles white, holding on the way you hold on to something when the ground shifts under you. I feel the force of it through the fabric. Three weeks of containment breaking open in her fists.
I push her back. One step, two. Her back meets the wall of the brownstone beside us—cold stone, dark alcove, the recessed doorway of a building with no lights on.
She's between me and the wall and my hands are on her waist and her jaw and the angle changes and the kiss deepens and she tastes like wine and cold air and something underneath both of those that I will never be able to name and will never stop wanting.
She kisses me back with the full force of everything she's been holding.
Not gently. Not carefully. With anger in it—I can feel the anger, the three weeks of surveillance and manipulation and engineered proximity, all of it pouring into the way her mouth moves against mine, the way her teeth catch my lower lip, the way her hands pull me closer even as some part of her is screaming to push me away.
The anger makes it better. Makes it real. This isn't surrender. This is collision. Two forces that have been building pressure for weeks finally meeting, and the meeting is violent, the way honesty is violent, the way truth is violent when it's been held back too long.
My hand finds the back of her neck. Her hair, loose, cold from the air.
I wrap my fingers in it and tilt her head back, and her throat is exposed and I press my mouth to the place where her pulse has been hammering for three weeks—the place I've been watching, monitoring, reading like a text—and I feel it against my lips.
Fast. Hard. The rhythm of a body that has stopped pretending.
She makes a sound. Not a word. A sound—low, involuntary, torn from somewhere she doesn't control.
The sound of a woman whose clinical framework has shattered, whose professional distance has been reduced to rubble, whose body is doing what it's wanted to do since a shoulder touched hers in a fluorescent-lit hallway.
I pull back.
Not far. An inch. My forehead against hers.
Our breathing ragged, visible in the cold air, mixing.
Her hands are still gripping my coat. My hand is still in her hair.
We're pressed together from chest to hip in a dark doorway on a residential street and the city doesn't exist. Nothing exists except the two of us and the heat between us and the fact of what we just did.
"That's why I'm here," I say. Low. Against her mouth.
She doesn't speak. Her eyes are closed. Her chest is heaving. I can feel her heart through her coat—or maybe it's my heart, I can't tell anymore, the rhythms have merged into something singular.
I let go.
Step back. One step. Then another. Cold air rushes into the space between us, filling the gap my body left. She stays against the wall. Eyes still closed. Hands empty now, hanging at her sides, the fingers opening and closing on nothing.
I watch her. Stand three feet away and watch her lean against the cold stone and breathe and feel the absence of me against her body. I watch the way her hand comes up and touches her own mouth—lightly, involuntarily, as though checking whether it's still there. Whether what just happened was real.
It was real. And I'm going to leave her with it.
"When you've decided," I say, "you know how to reach me."
I turn and walk away. Down the dark street, away from the blue door, away from the woman leaning against a brownstone wall with her eyes closed and her mouth swollen and the taste of me on her lips.
I don't look back. That's the hardest thing I've ever done—harder than any Brotherhood operation, harder than the patience I've maintained for twelve years of hunting my father's killer.
Walking away from Lucy Anderson in the dark, knowing what she tastes like, knowing the sound she made when my mouth found her throat, knowing that I could turn around and she would let me back into that doorway and the night would go somewhere neither of us would recover from.
I keep walking. Because the thing I want from Lucy Anderson isn't a night in a doorway.
It's everything. And everything requires her to come to me.
Not from manipulation or engineering or the careful architecture of surveillance and donation.
From choice. Her choice. Made with her eyes open and her clinical mind fully engaged, and her body remembering what just happened and choosing it anyway.
I haven't decided yet.
She has now. She just doesn't know it.
I can still taste her when I reach the car. Can still feel the pressure of her fists in my coat. Can still hear the sound—that small, sharp, involuntary sound—that she made when I kissed her.
I sit in the car and I don't start the engine.
I press my fingers to my mouth the way she pressed hers, and I breathe, and the November dark is thick around me, and somewhere behind me a woman is standing in a doorway with her back against cold stone and the architecture of her professional life in ruins.
I left her wanting. I know this. I could feel it—the way her body leaned toward mine when I stepped back, the involuntary reach, the protest that her mouth wouldn't form but her body couldn't suppress.
She wants more. She'll come for it. Not because I've manipulated her into it—the manipulation got me to the street, got me to the hallway, got me to the texts. But the kiss was real. The want was real. What happens next will be real, too.
And it will be hers.
I start the engine. Pull away from the curb. Drive south.
The taste of her stays all the way to Gowanus.