Chapter 33 Nora
Nora
David hands me a glass of wine and sits beside me on the couch. His knee presses against mine, and the contact feels different tonight. For once, it’s not stolen or careful. It’s just there, out in the open, the way it would be if we’d been doing this for years instead of weeks.
The apartment is quiet. Michaela’s down. Finally.
After an afternoon that started with me signing her out of school—the front-desk staff knowing I’m her father’s girlfriend by the end of it, and Janet dropping a little, “Called it,” when exchanging a look with Margaret that leads me to believe David and I were never covering our feelings well at all.
An afternoon that continued through dinner at the kitchen island, where Michaela presented her formal conditions for the relationship—amended since this morning to include a clause about Halloween costumes requiring group coordination.
An afternoon that ended with The Wild Robot, chapter eighteen, which she fought through with her usual determination before surrendering somewhere around the part where Roz makes a choice about what family means.
David braided her hair. I read the book. Archie supervised, happy as a pig in mud at the foot of her bed.
Now it’s just us. The city through the windows. The wine. And the need to have “the talk.”
“So,” David says.
“So,” I say.
He doesn’t speak right away. Instead, he rolls the glass in his hand, his thumb moving back and forth on the stem. I can tell it’s not going to be a short speech, or an easy one.
I beat him to it. “Is this where we do the ‘define the relationship’ conversation, or the part where you’re very lawyerly and explain there are clauses and subclauses to the rules we made?”
He smiles, small and tired. “I could draw up a term sheet, if that would help.”
I shake my head. “I’d rather just . . . talk.”
He sets the glass down. Turns to face me, so it’s impossible to dodge the warmth and intent in his eyes. “Nora, these last few weeks . . . you know this is more than I planned. I wanted to keep things clean and safe for Michaela. I thought if we just held to the rules, no one would get hurt.”
“Are you hurt?”
The question sounds more flippant than I mean it, so I fill the silence by drinking deeply. The wine is heavier than I expected, smoky—the sort of thing one would choose after reading reviews and cross-referencing the tasting notes. It tastes like wanting to impress.
He shrugs, just one shoulder. “I think maybe I was an idiot to believe I could do this without feeling everything.”
I laugh. “Join the club.”
He reaches for my hand, threading his fingers through mine.
His palm is warm, grounding. Then he takes a slow breath.
“I’m in love with you, Nora. I know you know, but if we’re defining this .
. . I want you to hear me say it. I love you.
I want you here. I want you in our lives, for as long as you’ll have us. ”
“I want that, too,” I say, which is a wholly insufficient way to describe the giant, hot-air balloon of feeling in my chest. So I try again. “I’ve never wanted anything more.”
He looks like he’s about to say something more, but I slide my hands to his jaw and kiss him before he can pivot to logic, because I don’t need logic. I need this man, and the way he feels when he’s holding nothing back.
He kisses me back, slow, then deeper. Our glasses are abandoned. My body is humming.
When I draw away, we’re both breathless and smiling.
“I have a full disclosure,” I say, still cupping his face. “In the interest of fairness and transparency.”
David’s brow lifts with amusement. “Let’s hear it.”
“I’m terrified,” I admit, the words tumbling out faster than I plan.
“Not because of you—I trust you. But I don’t trust the universe not to fuck it up.
Or for me not to fuck it up. Or . . .” I try to laugh but it comes out shaky.
“I guess I don’t trust that anything this good can last. Or that I can genuinely have what it is you’re offering me.
Which is deeply pessimistic, and I hate that about myself, but you said radical honesty, and there it is. ”
“I know.” His hands come up to cover mine. “Me, too.”
“Really?” I ask. “Because you seem very composed, even for you.”
He laughs, a rough, broken exhale. “Do you want the truth, or my best litigation-ready version?”
“Truth.”
“You terrify me. Not because of anything you’ve done—because every time I look at you, or watch you with Michaela, I start to imagine a future I want so badly it makes me feel like a kid again.
And then I remember all the ways families can break, and I start running end-of-the-world scenarios in my head, and it makes me want to lock us all in this apartment and never let anyone leave. ”
He’s not quite joking, which is why I love him so much.
“That sounds only medium-unhealthy,” I say, and his smile, when it comes, is private and unguarded.
“I haven’t been tempted by a woman in seven years.”
The sentence arrives in the quiet apartment like something that’s been waiting to be said for a very long time.
“Since the divorce,” he continues. “Since Kelsie. I made a decision to just . . . turn it off. The part of me that wanted that. Partnership. Intimacy. Someone in my bed at the end of the day. I decided Michaela needed a father who was fully present, and I couldn’t be fully present if I was distracted by wanting something for myself. So I stopped wanting it.”
He says this like it was easy. Like flipping a switch. But I hear the cost in the spaces between the words—seven years of deliberate emptiness, seven years of redirecting every human need for connection into fatherhood and work.
“I was good at it,” he says. “I thought I was good at it. And then you were just there. On the sidewalk in front of the school. I walked Michaela to the door, and I crouched to tie her shoelace. And when I stood up, you were right there. Looking right at me in your skirt suit, your hair in that twist. And I thought—”
He stops. Runs a hand over his jaw. The gesture of a man embarrassed by his own origin story.
“You thought what?” I ask, because I need to hear it.
“I thought, I would like to ruin this woman and watch her come undone.”
It shocks a laugh out of me—a wild, delighted thing that feels dangerous in my chest. He joins me, both of us bent around the flush of embarrassment and how abruptly it pivots us out of the heaviness.
“You know, I haven’t spent a lot of my life imagining myself as the kind of woman men have those thoughts about.” I brush my thumb over the sharp angle of his cheekbone. “But apparently I should’ve adjusted my self-concept sooner.”
David’s expression changes. The laughter softens out of it, leaving something more serious behind.
“Nora,” he says, almost a reprimand. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Make yourself smaller right after I tell you the truth.”
The words land with uncomfortable accuracy.
I open my mouth to make a joke out of it, because that’s what I do when something tender gets too close to bone.
Years of being a woman in this world. Knowing my body doesn’t match the one society decided was worth wanting.
Solid. Stocky. Big. It’s hard to go against that programming and think of oneself as desirable enough to break one man’s seven-year dry spell.
But here we are. He’s being honest, and my first instinct is to joke and deflect.
But he’s already leaning in, one hand sliding to the back of my neck, his thumb resting just under my ear.
“I noticed you,” he says quietly. “Immediately. The way you walked. The way you took up space.”
He must see the skepticism flinch across my face, because he tightens his grip—just enough to hold me still, to make me hear the rest. “Not just the way you look, though you know that’s part of it. The way you looked at me like you saw something noteworthy. I also liked your mouth.”
“I’m sorry, what?” I can’t help grinning even as I say it, but the words catch somewhere on the jagged edge of what it means to be seen, after all these years.
“You have an expressive mouth, Nora.” His eyes drop to it, then back to mine, heat and desire making my face burn. “You frown a lot, but it’s the thinking kind of frown. The kind I wanted to make move. Kissing you was like—”
Another pause. He’s not embarrassed, exactly, but the truth of it seems to rattle him.
“You changed my baseline,” he says.
My heart is a wild, dangerous thing in my chest. I don’t know what to do with all this wanting.
“That’s funny,” I say. “Because I don’t remember a time I wasn’t wanting you.”
I mean to make that sound sexy, funny, or casual, but what comes out is quieter. A private confession that feels like a set of keys sitting in the palm, waiting for someone to take them.
“See, it turns out that’s my favorite part. Watching you want me. Watching you do what you want. I could die happy just being the one person in the world who gets to watch you come apart.”
The heat behind my ribs turns molten. “I think you’re underestimating what you do to me.”
He lifts a shoulder. “Is that so?”
I lean in, catch the edge of his mouth between my teeth. “You have seven years of self-denial to make up for. You should probably get on that.”
His hands circle my waist, and he tugs me into his lap with an uncharacteristic lack of restraint, my body sliding across his thighs until I’m straddling him fully and the only thing between us is the thin line of my dress and his shirt.
There’s no hesitation, none of the caution that used to live in his touch.
Only want—clear and urgent—his hand mapping the line of my back, his mouth trailing heat up my throat and into my hairline.
I want him constantly. With the sort of reckless, greedy energy I barely recognize in myself—the kind that feels both impossible and inevitable. Everything I’ve suppressed for decades is alive and insistent. And for the first time, it doesn’t scare me.
“Bedroom?” he murmurs, breath warm at my temple, his hands already mapping my hips.
“Yes,” I say, not even pretending to resist. “Now.”
He lifts me in his arms with an ease I still haven’t adjusted to—especially since I’m accustomed to being the one who hauls groceries, moves furniture, carries the weight of whatever’s needed.
With David, being carried is easy.
Effortless.
He kisses me as he brings me down the hall, then deposits me gently on the bed. His room is dark except for the city through the window—the skyline he sees every night from the bed he’s slept in alone for seven years.
I’m the first woman in this room since, and that thought alone is both terrifying and sacred.
“David.”
He pulls me up to sitting, kissing the side of my throat while his fingers work the zipper at the back of my dress.
The dress slips off, pooling at my waist. His hands are all over me—hot, deliberate. He trails his mouth lower and lower, stoking my nerves.
“Nora.”
He doesn’t say anything filthy or even particularly sweet.
He just whispers my name and worships my body with a reverence so direct and so unembarrassed that I forget, entirely, how I once hated mirrors.
It’s the look in his eyes—the hunger, the delight.
Like every curve and imperfection is a newly discovered country he gets to map, a world he refuses to be exiled from again.
I shiver as he slips his hands down my ribcage, as if he’s confirming my shape. My skin feels like it’s being rewritten. When his mouth closes over my nipple it’s almost too much, and when he slides those long, careful fingers between my legs, any capacity I once had for small talk evaporates.
“Fuck. I love how wet you are for me.”
“David.”
I thrust up into his hand, and he responds with a groan, the sound vibrating straight through the core of me.
There’s something intoxicating about how he wants me.
About how easy it is now—no fear, no rules, no performance, just the rush of pleasure and the certainty that he won’t let go.
His fingers curl inside me, hitting that spot that makes my vision blur at the edges, and I can’t help the broken moan that escapes, my hips chasing the rhythm he’s setting.
He watches me with dark, focused eyes, cataloging every gasp, every tremble, committing it to some internal case file labeled Nora’s Undoing.
It’s filthy and tender all at once, the way he touches me—not rushing, but not holding back either, as if he’s finally allowing himself to feel after all those years of denial.
“God, you’re perfect,” he murmurs against my skin, his voice rough, frayed at the edges.
He shifts lower, replacing his fingers with his mouth, and the first sweep of his tongue has me arching off the bed, my hands fisting in the sheets because if I don’t hold on to something, I might fly apart right here.
He groans again, the vibration sending sparks up my spine, and I feel his free hand grip my thigh, spreading me wider, like he can’t get enough.
I thread my fingers through his hair, anchoring myself to him as the pleasure builds, coiling tighter with every lick, every suck.
My breath comes in sharp bursts, and I whisper his name, because I’m close, so close, teetering on that edge where everything narrows to this—to him, to us, to the way he makes me feel seen, wanted, utterly alive.
“Fuck! Yes, David. Just like that!”
He doesn’t let up, his tongue circling and sucking until the orgasm crashes over me, wave after blinding wave, as I cry out, thighs trembling around his shoulders.
David stays with me through it, drawing it out until I’m a shaking, boneless mess, and when he finally lifts his head—his lips glistening, eyes hooded with satisfaction—I pull him up to me, desperate for more.
“Inside me,” I gasp.