Chapter 20 #2
I kissed her. Walked her backward until her shoulders met the brick wall. She gasped at the contact—cold brick, warm body—and I pressed into her, one hand braced beside her head, the other sliding under her flannel to find skin. Her stomach. Her rib cage. The curve of her waist.
She yanked at my shirt. I pulled it over my head, and her hands were on me—palms flat against my abdomen, fingers tracing, relearning the territory she'd mapped over weeks and lost in three days.
"Here?" she asked. "On the floor of my future coffee shop?"
"If you want."
"I want." She pulled at my belt. "I want you. Right now. Right here."
The floor was hardwood and dusty and I didn't care. I shrugged out of my jacket, spread it on the ground behind her—not chivalry, instinct, the last functioning part of my brain trying to protect her from the grime while the rest of me was already gone.
She sank down onto it. Pulled me with her. I settled over her, braced on my forearms, and kissed her throat, her collarbone, the spot below her ear that made her arch.
"Callum." My name in her mouth. The only sound I needed.
I unbuttoned her flannel. She wore a plain cotton bra underneath—white, simple, Willow's complete indifference to lingerie being one of the most erotic things about her. I pushed the fabric aside and kissed between her breasts. She threaded her fingers through my hair, holding me there.
"I missed you," she said. "Three days and I missed you so much I made your coffee on autopilot this morning. Poured it down the sink."
"I noticed your shampoo in my shower every time I closed my eyes."
"The cheap stuff?"
"The cheap stuff."
She laughed, and the laugh turned into a gasp when I took her nipple in my mouth. I sucked, circled with my tongue, and she rocked beneath me—her hips pressing up, seeking friction, the patience evaporating from both of us.
I unzipped her jeans. She lifted her hips and I pulled them down her legs, taking her underwear with them. She lay on my jacket on the floor of 343 Elm Street—bare from the waist down, flannel open, her body golden in the afternoon sun that streamed through the arched windows.
I'd designed buildings. Whole buildings. Glass and steel and stone. None of them came close to the architecture of this woman, laid out beneath me, trusting me with everything after I'd given her every reason not to.
"Stop looking at me like that," she said.
"Can't."
"Like what?"
"Like you're the most important thing I've ever built."
"Oh, God." She covered her face. "You can't say things like that while I'm naked."
"I'll say it when you're clothed too."
She pulled me down. Kissed me hard. Her hand went to my belt, unfastened it, shoved my pants down with the impatient touch of a woman who knew what she wanted and was done waiting for it.
I kicked free. She wrapped her hand around me and I groaned—a raw, choked sound that echoed off the brick walls and stamped tin ceiling.
"Condom," she said.
"Wallet. Back pocket."
She reached, found it, tore the packet. I rolled it on with hands that shook for the second time in my life with this woman. The tremor meant the same thing now that it had meant then: I wanted this so much it was dismantling me.
I positioned myself between her thighs. She wrapped her legs around my hips. Our eyes met.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi."
"Come home, Callum."
I pushed inside her.
The sound she made—a low, shuddering exhale that carried my name in it—cracked open the last locked room inside me.
I buried myself deep and held still, forehead pressed to hers, letting us both adjust to the fullness, the closeness, the intimacy of being inside the person you love in the building you built for her.
Then I moved.
Not the frantic pace of our earlier nights. Deeper. Slower. Each thrust deliberate—a conversation in the only language I'd ever been fluent in, where every movement said the things I'd choked on in parking lots and swallowed during dinners and scrawled on drafting paper when my voice failed.
I love you. I thrust into her and she gasped. I'm sorry. I pulled back, pushed deeper, and she moaned. I'm here. Her nails scored my shoulders. I'm staying.
She met me stroke for stroke. Her hips rose to match mine, her hands pulling me closer, deeper, her mouth finding my neck, my jaw, the spot below my ear.
"Harder," she breathed. "I need—"
I gave her harder. Snapped my hips forward and she cried out, back arching off the jacket, her body clenching around me in a way that nearly finished me.
"Touch yourself," I rasped. "I want to watch."
Her hand slid between us. Her fingers found her clit and she worked herself while I fucked her, and the sight of it—Willow Monroe, undone and uninhibited on the floor of her future coffee shop, chasing her own pleasure while I moved inside her—was the most beautiful thing I'd ever witnessed.
More beautiful than any building. More important than any blueprint.
Her breathing changed. Faster, shallower, her body tightening around me.
"Callum—I'm—"
"I know. Let go."
She came with a sound that filled the empty room—my name, fractured and gorgeous, echoing off the brick and the tin and the bare floors.
Her body pulsed around me and I followed her over, burying myself deep and shuddering through an orgasm that felt less like a release and more like a total tear-down—every wall, every excuse, every carefully constructed barrier I'd ever maintained collapsing into rubble and dust.
We lay on the floor afterward. My jacket beneath her. The hardwood cold under my knees. Her legs still wrapped around me, neither of us willing to separate.
I adjusted to keep from crushing her. She pulled me back.
"Stay," she said. "Don't move yet."
I stayed.
The afternoon sun had shifted. The rectangles of light on the hardwood were longer now, stretching toward the wall where the community board would hang. Dust motes drifted in the golden air. The building held us the way a good building should—solid, patient, unconcerned with the mess on its floors.
"I have conditions," Willow said.
"Of course you do."
"Three."
"I'm listening."
She held up a finger. "You show up. Not perfectly. Not without screwing up. But you show up. Every day. Even the days you want to run."
"Done."
Second finger. "You choose me. Not over your career—alongside it. I'm not competing with Riverside or any other project. I just need to know I'm in the blueprint."
"You are the blueprint."
"That's—" She closed her eyes. "That's annoyingly smooth and I'm accepting it. Third." She held up the last finger. "You never stop arguing with me. Our fights are the best part of my day and I refuse to date a man who agrees with everything I say."
I laughed. A real laugh. The kind that came from the part of me that Willow had excavated from beneath twenty years of rubble. "You have my word. I will critique your foam art until I die."
"It was a heart."
"It was a sheep."
"It was a heart, you pretentious, beautiful man."
She kissed me. Slow and warm and tasting of coffee and salt and the start of everything.
We got dressed in the fading sun. She buttoned her flannel. I shrugged on my jacket, dusty and wrinkled and carrying the imprint of her body like a blueprint I'd keep forever.
She stood in the center of 343 Elm Street. Turned in a slow circle. Looked at every wall, every window, every corner where a room existed that she couldn't see yet but I could, and I'd make sure she saw it too.
"Brew and Bloom," she said.
"What?"
"The name. When this place opens." She looked at me. "Brew and Bloom. Coffee and flowers. Growing things."
"I'll design the sign."
"You'll design everything." She crossed to me. Took my hand. Held it the way she held everything—tightly, with no intention of letting go. "We're doing this?"
"We're doing this."
She looked around the room one more time. The brick, the tin, the hardwood, the sun.
"It's a good building, Callum."
"It's your building."
"Ours," she corrected. "It's ours."
I'd spent forty years designing spaces for other people. Cold, beautiful, soulless monuments to permanence and control. Not one of them had ever felt like this—warm and unfinished and full of a future I hadn't planned for and didn't want to live without.
Willow Monroe stood in a building I'd bought for her, holding my hand, naming a coffee shop that didn't exist yet, and I understood, with the clarity of a man who'd spent his life getting it wrong, that the only structure worth building was the one you built with someone else inside it.