25. Hannah #2
“Friday nights,” Griffin says. “Date nights. Just us. We can trade off planning them.”
“Nothing fancy. I don’t need fancy.”
“I know. That’s not what this is about.” He smiles. “I want to woo you. The right way this time.”
“Did you just say woo?”
“I’m bringing it back.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“You love it.”
I do. God help me, I do.
When the diner finally starts giving us looks, since we’ve been nursing cold coffee for two hours, we pay the bill and walk out into the cool night air.
Griffin’s car is still at the hotel. We walked here, apparently, though I don’t remember the journey.
“I should get home,” I say. “Relieve the babysitter.”
“I’ll walk with you. My car’s that way anyway.”
We walk in comfortable silence, close enough that our shoulders brush. The city is quiet at this hour, just streetlights and distant traffic and the sound of our footsteps.
“Hannah.”
“Yeah?”
“I love you.”
I stop walking. Turn to face him.
“I’m going to keep saying it,” he continues. “Every chance I get. Not to pressure you. I don’t expect you to say it back until you’re ready. But I spent too many years not saying it enough, and I’m done with that.”
I look at him in the streetlight. This man I’ve known for almost a decade. This man I married and divorced and found my way back to against every odd I set.
“I’m not ready to say it,” I admit. “Not yet. There’s still a part of me that’s scared.”
“I know.”
“But Griffin?”
“Yeah?”
I reach up and pull his face down to mine.
The kiss is soft at first. Tentative. Two people relearning each other. But then his arms come around me and mine go around his neck and the kiss deepens, and I feel something I thought I’d never feel again.
Home.
When we break apart, we’re both breathing hard.
“That was…” He stops. Swallows. “Was that okay?”
“It was okay.”
“Can I do it again?”
I answer by pulling him back down.
This kiss is longer. Deeper. His hands slide into my hair and mine curl into the front of his jacket and the street disappears, the city disappears, there’s nothing but this, his mouth and mine, finally finding each other again.
When we finally separate, I’m dizzy, and neither of us lets go.
“I should go,” I whisper, and I don’t move either.
“Yeah.” His hands stay at my waist. “You should.”
I look up at him, at this man standing under a streetlight in a suit that cost more than a car, holding me like I’m the only solid thing in the city, and I take inventory of myself.
My heart is pounding. My hands are steady.
And the fear that has run my life for over a year is still there, but it’s small now, and it’s not driving.
“I said no skipping steps,” I say slowly.
“You did. We won’t.”
“This isn’t skipping.” I fist my hands in his lapels. “This is the step.”
He goes very still. “Hannah. Be sure. Because I can wait, I’m prepared to wait years, and if we do this and you regret it in the morning…”
“I texted my neighbor from the diner bathroom an hour ago.” My face is burning, and I hold his eyes anyway. “Eliza’s down for the night. She has my key and her shows and strict instructions.”
He stares at me.
“An hour ago,” he repeats.
“I’m a planner. It’s a whole thing about me.”
The sound he makes isn’t quite a laugh. It’s lower than that, rougher, and his forehead drops to mine, and when he speaks his voice is wrecked.
“My place is four blocks from here.”
“I know. I checked that too.”
We don’t run the four blocks, but only because running would mean letting go of each other, and neither of us can manage it.
His arm stays locked around me the whole way, my hand fisted in the back of his jacket, the two of us moving through the sleeping city like one clumsy animal, stopping twice in the dark between streetlights because he pulls me in and kisses me until I forget which block we’re on.
By the time we reach his lobby, I’m shaking, and it isn’t from the cold.
The elevator is mirrored, and I watch us rise, his mouth at my temple, my face flushed, his hand spread at my waist like he’s holding a live wire. Twenty-two floors have never taken longer in the history of vertical transportation.
At his door, with the key already in the lock, he stops.
“Hannah.” His voice is barely holding shape, and his forehead drops to mine. “Once we’re through this door, I’m going to fall apart on you. So if any part of you isn’t sure…”
I answer by taking his tie in my fist and pulling him through the door.
He catches me before my back hits the wall, one hand cradling my head, a gentleman even mid-collision, and then his mouth is on mine and there’s nothing gentlemanly left in him at all.
He kisses me like a starving man, like an apology, like a vow, and I shove his jacket off his shoulders and let it fall wherever expensive jackets fall, and when his hands slide under my sweater and spread across my bare back, we both make a sound that the neighbors can keep.
“Tell me what you want.” He breathes it against my throat. “Tonight you tell me, and I do it. That’s the whole arrangement.”
“Off.” I pull at his shirt, and buttons test the limits of their stitching, and then my sweater is gone too, and he steps back half an inch to look at me in the low light like a man getting his sight back after a long time without it.
That’s when he finds the chain.
His gaze snags at my sternum, and he goes completely still, and with one finger he lifts his wedding band from where it’s been lying against my heart all night. For a second he doesn’t breathe at all.
“You’re wearing it.”
“I tried it on my finger this afternoon.” My voice comes out unsteady. “It didn’t feel decided yet. This felt honest.”
He bends his head and presses his mouth to the ring, and then to the skin beneath it, right over my heartbeat, and the sound he makes against me is half prayer and half surrender, and whatever was left of slow dies right there in his entryway.