5. Chapter Five
Chapter Five
Jagger
She called at six, while I was deciding which restaurant to take her to.
“I don’t want to go out,” she said before I could finish saying hello. “I want to come to yours. If that’s all right.”
Three restaurants and a half-made reservation vanished from my mind in a heartbeat.
“It’s more than all right.”
“You went quiet.”
“I’m rearranging my entire evening in my head. Give me a second.”
She laughed, low and a little relieved. I could hear the nerves she had worked up to ask, and the way they melted once I said yes. It did dangerous things to my chest.
“I’ll be there in an hour,” she said. “I have to change and feed my plant.”
“Bring the plant. It can live here.”
“Goodbye, Jagger.”
She hung up before I could push.
I used the hour well. I lit the fireplace I rarely touched, the one installed eighteen months ago and used exactly twice.
The apartment felt warmer with the flames going, and I wanted her to walk into comfort.
I pulled out manchego, prosciutto, ripe pears, and a sourdough loaf I butchered while slicing.
I opened the bottle of white that Lola had mentioned was Willa’s favorite earlier in the week.
I had bought it the next day and never said a word to anyone.
Then I stood in my hallway like a damn teenager, listening for the elevator.
She stepped off the elevator in black jeans and a soft gray sweater, hair down, with just enough makeup to tell me she had put it on for me. She paused outside my door for half a second, like she was deciding something important.
“Hi,” she said.
I took her coat and hung it up. I poured her the wine and watched her eyes flick to the label before she chose not to comment. She wandered into the living room and stopped in front of the fire.
“You have a fireplace.”
“I have two. Don’t start.”
“You lit one for me.”
“It’s November. You took the subway. I figured you’d be cold.” She turned toward me, amusement mixed with something softer. I crossed the room, took the wineglass from her hand, and backed her up until her shoulders met the wall beside the fire. Her breath caught.
“I had a whole plan,” I murmured. “Dinner. Patience. Taking things slow.”
“And now?”
“Now you’re in my apartment in that sweater and most of the plan is gone.”
I kissed her, and this time I didn’t hold back.
She gasped when I deepened it, her fingers twisting in my shirt. I pressed her into the wall, one hand in her hair, the other slipping under her sweater to find warm skin. When my thumb stroked her lower back she shivered hard against me.
I lifted her. She wrapped her legs around my waist. I carried her to the sofa and sat with her straddling my lap, letting her kiss me with her hands buried in my hair while the fire crackled beside us.
Then I gripped her waist and held her still.
“Wait.”
She pulled back, breathing hard, eyes dark.
“Why?”
“Because I want to look at you. I’ve spent all week watching you across that kitchen. Now you’re in my lap, and I’m taking my time.”
She let me look, flushed and trusting, and it hit me harder than any tease could have.
I slid my hands under her sweater and slowly peeled it off, then her bra.
I took my time learning her with my mouth and hands, kissing down her throat, tasting her until she arched and made those perfect broken sounds.
Her hips rocked against me. I dragged her closer, reading every gasp and tremble.
When I laid her back on the sofa and knelt between her legs, I went slow, giving her exactly what she needed.
She came hard with my name on her lips, loud and unguarded.
I held her afterward, wrapped her in the throw, and let her catch her breath against my chest.
“All right?” I asked.
“Mm. Give me a minute.”
We stayed like that until she lifted her head and glanced down at the obvious situation in my lap.
“I want to take care of you,” she said.
“No.”
“Jagger, I can feel how hard you are—”
“I’m not pretending I don’t want you. The answer is still no.” I brushed her hair back. “I want you to go home tonight, lie in your bed, and think about the fact that I didn’t let you. Then come back tomorrow knowing exactly what you want to do about it. Anticipation is good for you, darling.”
She narrowed her eyes, but a breathless laugh escaped. “That’s the most arrogant thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“It’s not arrogance. It’s patience. You’ll thank me later.”
She shook her head, still smiling, and pulled her sweater back on but left the jeans on the floor. I brought the cheese board over and set it on the coffee table. She immediately reached across and stole the best piece of manchego from my side.
“That’s my side,” I said.
“There aren’t sides on a cheese board, Jagger.”
“There are absolutely sides. I assembled it. I get the half closest to me.”
“You sliced this bread like you were mad at it.” She held up an uneven piece, thick on one end and paper-thin on the other. “What happened here?”
“I don’t slice bread often.”
“You don’t slice bread ever. This is the bread of a man who has never made his own lunch in his life.”
“I told you I can’t cook.”
“Slicing bread isn’t cooking. It’s the warm-up act.” She layered the manchego on the crooked slice and took a bite, looking far too pleased with herself. “What do you actually eat when I’m not around feeding you scraps from a sheet pan?”
“Delivery service. They stock the fridge with meals and I reheat them.”
“Every day?”
“Every day.”
“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s efficient.”
“It’s a very nice fridge full of someone else’s food that you eat alone.” She tore off a piece of bread and offered it to me. “You know what I had for dinner on Tuesday? A sleeve of crackers at eleven at night while I fought with a recipe. So I’m not judging. We’re both a little tragic.”
I laughed and accepted the bread. “You had a whole emotional relationship with crackers?”
“A very productive one, yes.” She grinned and stole another piece of cheese. “Tell me something. How did you get into all this? The finance world. Did you come out of the womb wearing a tiny suit?”
“Pretty much. My father was in finance. His father was in finance. It was never really presented as a choice, but I didn’t mind. It fit.”
“And the charm? Was that part of the family business too?”
I considered the question. She was watching me with real curiosity, the kind that made me want to answer honestly.
“My mother,” I said. “She could walk into any room and have everyone eating out of her hand in ten minutes. Waiters, CEOs, strangers on the street. She made every person feel like they were the most important one there. I learned it from her the way kids pick up accents.”
“That’s a useful skill.”
“It is. It’s gotten me almost everything I have.” I paused. “But there’s a downside. When you can make anyone feel special, it’s hard for them to know if they actually are. Including you, sometimes. After a while it starts to feel like performance instead of connection.”
She was quiet for a moment, then reached over and stole the last slice of prosciutto from my side of the board. “You’re not performing with me,” she said softly.
“No. I’m not. It doesn’t work on you anyway. You saw through it the first night.”
She smiled and curled closer, legs across my lap, head resting against my shoulder. “Good. I like this version better.”
“Can I ask you something that’s none of my business?” she said.
“Those are the good ones.”
“Earlier you said two years. The bad one.” She was picking at the label on the wine bottle, peeling a corner of it loose, not looking at me.
“His name was Dwayne. Dwayne Evans. He’s a chef too — that’s how we met, same line at a place in midtown. He was good. He is good. But he needed everyone in the room to know it every second of the day.”
I didn’t say anything. I’d already learned her silences filled themselves if I left them alone, and I wanted all of it.
“He used to take my recipes. Not all at once. At first it was ‘let me help you tighten this,’ and then the dish would turn up on his menu with his name on it. My brown-butter thing. The whole dessert section at the second place we worked — mine, every plate of it, and he ran it under his name and let people tell him how clever he was, and I stood there and let him.” She lifted one shoulder, like it was small, which it clearly wasn’t.
“Two years of that. By the end I couldn’t have told you which ideas started with me.
He put his hands on all of them until the line went blurry. ”
She looked over at me.
“That’s the part that messed me up. Not the cheating — the cheating just made me sad. The other thing made me stop trusting what I knew.”
I kept my face exactly where it was, which took more than it usually does. The easy thing I wear in every room, the thing my mother handed down to me, went somewhere else for a second, and underneath it I was very still and doing arithmetic I had no intention of showing her.
“What’s his name again?” I said. Light. Like I was half listening.
“Dwayne Evans. Why?”
“No reason.” I topped up her wine to give my hand something to do that wasn’t closing into a fist. “Filing him under people I don’t like. Tell me about your grandmother's bakery instead — you said there was a guava thing.”
She let me change the subject. But not before I watched her catch it: the half-second where the charm dropped and something colder showed through, and then the small, deliberate decision to let it go, because she wanted it to be nothing.
It wasn’t nothing. I’d taken the name and put it somewhere I wouldn’t lose it.
We sat like that for a while, the fire dying down, picking at the board and trading pieces.
She told me more about growing up in her grandmother’s bakery in Queens, the guava pastries people traveled for, and the early mornings she secretly loved.
I told her about my mother’s effortless warmth and how I had turned it into a tool that sometimes left me lonely.
She listened like she always did, seeing the parts I didn’t usually show.
At eleven I called her a car.
“You’re sending me home again,” she said.
“You’ve got a tasting menu to perfect and months of bad sleep to catch up on. Go home. Sleep.”
“You’re unbearable.”
“I’m consistent.”
I kissed her at the door, long and deep, then watched her leave. I sat in front of the dying fire with the last of my bourbon and realized there was no one else. Just her.
I didn’t text. I made myself wait.
Anticipation, as I had told her, was good for both of us.