Chapter 25 #3
The first kiss was careful—tender enough to ache, as if the memory of their intimacy might shatter if handled with ordinary force.
Miranda felt the instinct of the years in the way his lips moved against hers, but instead of the old reflexive hunger, there was a halting deference: every pause an opportunity for her to withdraw, every movement calibrated to the possibility of refusal.
She placed her hand against his chest, steadying herself with the heartbeat thumping fiercely beneath the fabric.
His whole body seemed to tremble with the effort of letting her decide the next step.
Garrett drew back first, though only by a breath. “Are you all right?” he asked.
Miranda resisted the impulse to make a joke. Instead, she looked him dead in the eye and said, “I don’t want you asking every ten seconds.”
He laughed, the sound startled and soft, and said, “Right.”
“You asked once.”
“Yes.”
“That is enough unless I tell you otherwise.”
She watched the words sink in, saw the flicker of something warmer in his face—desire, not as a counterpoint to grief, but as something layered within it. Miranda felt an answering surge inside her, a physicality so sudden and intense it nearly knocked the breath from her body.
She kissed him again, this time with deliberate intent.
Garrett’s hands came up to her waist, hovering for a moment before he made contact, his palms mapping the new coat and then following its contours around to her back.
Miranda knew the moment he registered softness where there had been none before, the curve of her hips altered by a year of changed metabolism and the slow accrual of postpartum weight that had never quite receded.
He did not hesitate. If anything, she felt the grip deepen in its certainty, as if he needed to reassure her that no further translation was required.
The kiss deepened, and Miranda let herself fall into the unfamiliarity of it, the way their bodies negotiated new topographies.
Weeks of anger did not disappear beneath desire. They remained inside it, threaded through the way Miranda pulled him closer and then held him away long enough to breathe.
At first Miranda thought her body would betray her, that she would stand shivering in this beautiful, strange hotel room and, when faced with the first real possibility of wanting, find herself without the language or the nerve to continue.
She heard the phrase—You are beautiful—so softly, with such concentration, that it was a full second before she realized the sound belonged to Garrett and not merely to the ambient hum of the city outside.
Garrett stood so close that the lamplight caught in his hair, making him look younger and more breakable than Miranda had ever remembered.
He did not say it again. He let the words stand as they were: fact, not flattery.
His forehead rested against hers, and Miranda thought about the number of times they had occupied this space—breaths shared, eyelids momentarily closed, the world outside going dark and then light again around the unmoving pivot of their joined heads.
She tried to read his face, to locate in it the reassurance she still needed, some echo of former certainty. But the only thing visible was want, so raw it bordered on the impolite.
She wondered if her own desire looked the same, if the years of carefulness had done anything to sand down the hunger that was now making itself known in every unguarded glance.
The feeling was not electric, not the cinematic rush she’d expected, but something slower: a heat radiating from deep in her body, a readiness that had simply gone untested for too long.
Miranda found her hands at her own throat, fingers working at the buttons of the new coat with less grace than she’d intended. She felt the unfamiliar fabric yield along the seams as she slipped it over her shoulders, and then Garrett was there, easing it the rest of the way down her arms.
He took the coat and folded it with fussy precision, setting it across the back of the chair. The gesture was so quintessentially him—a small act of reverence toward objects, toward order itself—that Miranda laughed involuntarily, a little hiccup of sound that startled her as much as him.
He looked up. “What?”
She shook her head. “You’re still afraid of wrinkling expensive things.”
Garrett glanced down at the coat, then back at her, and Miranda saw the flicker of irony in his eyes. “I am afraid of wrinkling that coat,” he said, then, after a beat, added, “but I’m more afraid of doing the wrong thing right now. You can tell me if?—”
Miranda reached for his face, flattening her palm against his cheek. The day’s stubble rasped against her hand, and she let the physicality of it ground her. “Good,” she said.