Chapter Twenty
After almost kissing and walking back from it, Hallie was certain she should have been keeping her distance from Audrey, but she didn’t want to.
They only had so much time together and, inexplicably, Audrey was feeling the exact same way she was.
Sure, she’d had some inkling that Audrey liked her—she wouldn’t have even gotten close to kissing her otherwise—but she hadn’t really expected it to be so…
identical. She’d thought, perhaps, that Audrey had a little physical crush on her.
Given all the ways she’d been vulnerable with Hallie, perhaps that had been silly.
Of course she wouldn’t have been so intimate with someone she just had a slight crush on, but it was still hard to comprehend someone like Audrey wanting her so much in spite of their circumstances.
It wasn’t as though Hallie didn’t think herself worthy or desirable.
It was that Audrey was… so much bigger than her life felt.
She’d been through so much and gotten so far.
She was holding and surviving things Hallie couldn’t fully comprehend, things she worried she’d never be able to survive herself, but there was Audrey doing it with grace, being so strong and human through it all.
Falling for someone so beautifully real made sense.
Being wanted by her in return was a little baffling.
And a little heartbreaking when she was about to be so far away.
Surely, the only course of action was to have as much of each other as they could while they were here?
She understood the hesitation, though. In three days, did they try to switch to being long-distance friends?
Try to ignore what had happened between them?
Could she be Audrey’s friend as she dated other people after knowing what it was like to kiss her?
She would try, but it wouldn’t be like other breakups.
They wouldn’t have run their course. It would be so much harder to leave behind.
Could she handle a long-distance relationship?
Plenty of people did, but their jobs didn't contain the freedom people suggested you needed to make them work. Plus, Audrey’s complicated feelings around Michigan needed factoring in.
A relationship wouldn’t work if Audrey coming to visit her was always triggering her trauma. Hallie didn’t want to do that to her.
But she really wanted to kiss her.
They walked past a stall selling Christmas cards, and Hallie noticed Audrey didn’t have her gloves on. She’d definitely had them on before and it hadn’t gotten warmer.
She almost asked, but, when she glanced around for her mother and spotted her heading off to a different stall, one with artistic prints that Isaac liked, she both realized they had a moment alone and that Audrey only had one glove off.
The one closest to Hallie. That had to be an invitation, right?
Without slowing or speaking or showing any other outward sign that anything was happening, Hallie slipped one of her gloves off and stuffed it into her pocket.
Her heart hammered as she stepped closer to Audrey and, painfully slowly, she reached her fingers out until they found Audrey’s hand.
It was cold compared to Hallie’s, and Audrey jumped at the connection, but it was perfect too.
Over the last twenty-four hours, she’d touched Audrey’s hands a lot. She’d wanted to care for Audrey, to help her, but she’d also just wanted to touch her. Now, she was doing exactly that—touching her simply because she wanted to. And it was perfect.
She saw the way Audrey bit down on a smile, burrowing her chin further into her scarf, but, most of all, she felt Audrey’s hand flex, welcoming Hallie’s fingers between her own. They were cold but beautiful. Slender, long, and incredibly soft.
In recent years, Hallie hadn’t been much for holding hands.
She did it, but it hadn’t felt electric or special, not like this did.
Holding Audrey’s hand reminded her of being young, of falling in love for the first time, where every touch felt enormous and revolutionary. It felt like discovering life again.
Audrey caught her eye shyly and smiled. Hallie’s chest felt like it was exploding.
From that first conversation over balsamic vinegar, there had been a spark in Audrey that she’d been unable to resist. While being her cousin’s fake girlfriend undoubtedly complicated things a little, she couldn’t find it in herself to be sorry.
If they’d simply been two people crossing paths at Horrocks, they’d never have had this.
And maybe that was the only way to look at things.
They had such little time together, but it had been more than she’d dreamed when she’d watched a woman she’d never met sipping balsamic vinegar in a store she’d never been to before.
Audrey had commented that this place felt like the perfect snow globe moment.
Hallie couldn’t have agreed more. If she could hold this moment in an orb forever, she would—snow dotting Audrey’s clothes and hair, catching in her eyelashes, the festive bustle around them, and the glowing warmth that seemed to emanate from the place their hands were wound together.
It was more perfect than any other snow globe moment she’d ever seen.
“Do you want a drink?” she asked, catching the scent of hot apple cider in the air.
Audrey breathed a laugh, clearly from Hallie breaking the delicious, aching tension that had been building in the quiet between them. “Absolutely.”
The entire time they waited in line and claimed their drinks and moved over to a standing bar, they kept their hands locked together. Hallie was ready to burst from the feeling of being with Audrey. To the rest of the world, they looked like a couple. Hallie wanted them to be a couple.
But she didn’t know if they’d even get a kiss.
They squeezed together at the bar and her eyes found Audrey’s lips again. They were darker than her own, soft, blissful, and desperately kissable.
Audrey laughed, pressing them together. “It is very hard not to kiss you when you look at me like that.”
Hallie put her cup down, worried it would shake in her giddy hand. “I’d love to tell you not to resist, but I don’t think that’s what you need.”
Audrey shot her a look she could have basked in for years. Something similar to the one in the car, something intriguing and exciting and more than a little teasing. “You’d be surprised how well I handle being told what to do.”
She almost choked. How did she even begin to reply to that? “Uh… huh.”
Probably not like that.
Audrey grinned and sank her teeth into her bottom lip, and that wasn’t helping anything. All Hallie wanted in the world was to kiss that lip, to nip and suck it.
She forced her eyes back up to Audrey’s. “I was hoping for a more eloquent reply there, sorry.”
Audrey laughed. “I probably should be, but I’m not sorry at getting to catch you off guard.”
“You definitely shouldn’t. Feel free to do that any time you want.”
Something flickered across Audrey’s face, something Hallie didn’t like. The fact that, in a few days, such offers were, by necessity, going to be off the table. Audrey rallied, however, shaking the thought off and trying to focus on the moment. “Good to know.”
“Not nearly as good as knowing you like taking orders.”
Heat flashed in Audrey’s eyes and Hallie was ready to melt into a puddle. And it only got worse when Audrey shot her a seductive look and said, “I’m probably not supposed to want to know if you like giving them…”
“Oh, no, you definitely are.” She sipped her apple cider, still a little too hot, her hands a little too shaky, but what did that matter when she was talking about what Audrey liked in bed?
“Right…” She bit her lip again and Hallie’s body strained with need. “So…?”
“I’m good with orders.”
“Yeah?”
“Absolutely. What kind, hypothetically, are we saying you like?”
For the first time, Audrey blushed furiously and looked deeply embarrassed. Whatever it was that bothered her, as far as Hallie was concerned, it didn’t need to. Audrey could say whatever the hell she wanted and Hallie would be a receptive audience.
“Uh, well,” she said eventually, not quite meeting Hallie’s gaze, “I actually haven’t had a lot of… sex. Of any kind. I don’t do a lot of dating because… Well, it doesn’t matter. Or, maybe it does, actually, given what I… Maybe we don’t even need to talk about it—”
“Audrey,” Hallie said soothingly, her thumb caressing the back of Audrey’s hand. “Whatever it is, I promise you, I want to know. Even if we decide not to do anything, I want to have it to think about.”
Audrey laughed and groaned. “That’s not going to help with my resolve.”
“Sorry. Not very sorry, but sorry a little bit. I wouldn’t want you to do anything you don’t want to.”
“I want to.” The words hung in the air between them. They’d already known, but hearing it out loud, so plainly stated, felt like it was igniting the whole market.
“Tell me what you think you’d like, Dr. Bee,” Hallie said, her voice darker, deeper, more seductive than it had ever been when she’d called Audrey that before.
Audrey’s breath caught, but she cleared her throat, sipped her drink, and looked back at Hallie, bold and resolute.
“It’s another area where my family has… shame, I suppose.
It’s a functional thing, not for pleasure.
So, I guess, I just want to not have to make decisions, not have to think about whether I’m in charge of that. ”
“You want someone to tell you exactly what they’re going to do to you and be responsible for all your pleasure.”
“Yes,” she whispered, her pupils blown.
Hallie had, in the past, had plenty of conversations about sex, but this was her favorite one ever, the one that set her alight and made her want. “Where?”
“Oh, uh, wherever you—they’d want.”
Hallie smirked. They both knew this wasn’t a conversation about hypothetical people but she appreciated Audrey’s efforts. “Bed?”
“Yes.”
“Living room?”
“Yes.”
“Shower?”
Her eyes went wide as though she’d never considered that before but she absolutely was considering it now. “Yes,” she said eventually, emphatically.
Hallie knew that, a lot of the time, shower sex turned out less sexy than you imagined. However, she was suddenly very aware of the shower at her mom’s place with its massive head and coverage area. It could probably keep them both warm and wet…
Audrey cleared her throat. “This is not an appropriate conversation to be having here.”
Hallie laughed and glanced around. “Fair point. It’s a great conversation, though. I thoroughly enjoyed it.”
“Me too.”
She nodded slowly, sucking in a breath. “How in the world am I supposed to just walk away from you?”
Audrey’s brow furrowed, solemn and steady. “I don’t know. Maybe think about my family every time I pop into your head. Remember that, by not being with me, you at least get to avoid them.”
“I’d put up with them for you. Well, actually, I’d probably end up screaming at them for not treating you well.”
“Right. And you shouldn’t have to do that.”
Hallie didn’t know how to explain that it would be worth it, that standing up for Audrey was no difficult task.
That wasn’t generally an appropriate thing to say to someone you’d only just met.
But there was something about the situations they’d been through together this week that told her it was worth it, that the two of them would be worth taking that shot on.
When she’d been younger, she’d talked about wanting to move to California. They’d visited on vacation and she’d loved the sun and the fun, but she’d been eleven and that was before life set in, before work and rent and she’d discovered how expensive it was to live there.
Audrey’s whole life was there. She had the kind of job that could afford California.
Hallie never felt like Audrey was judging her job, but it was simply a fact that she didn’t make enough to move to California.
And Audrey wouldn’t want to move back to Michigan.
She’d moved far away on purpose, she’d talked about the bug populations in California, she had to be there.
And you didn’t take on the family of someone you’d just met.
She just wanted to care for Audrey, wanted Audrey to see and know that she deserved to have someone be on her side, to tell her family off for how they treated her.
She wanted to be by Audrey’s side as she figured out how to walk away from them herself, to tell them off alone, if that was what she wanted.
They both knew she wasn’t there yet, but the desire was simmering under everything Audrey said about them.
She wanted to figure out how to exist without her need for their approval, and Hallie had all the patience in the world for that.
She wished she had all the time for it too.
Instead, she stared up into Audrey’s eyes, trying desperately to convey everything she was feeling, and she wished for the only thing she reasonably could: that they would get that one kiss.