2. Greer #2
"You said hit for a living and not injured at work. People who work outside the sport say injured."
"You know hockey."
"I know hockey," he agrees, gravely, like a man being polite about the size of an iceberg, and I laugh again — laugh , not the polite three-syllable thing, the actual sound — and he watches me the way a man watches the first snow of a season he has been waiting for.
"What about you?" I say. "What do you do?"
He looks at me over the rim of his glass. His thumb runs along the bottom edge. He takes a slow breath in and lets it out and decides, in front of me, not to answer.
"I'd like to be fixed," he says, instead.
That sentence sits on the credenza next to the bourbon. The lamp keeps making its small, soft circle. My pulse is so loud in my ears I am almost embarrassed.
"That's not how that works," I say, carefully.
"No," he says. "I imagine it is not."
"It would require an appointment."
"Mm."
"And paperwork."
"I have a lot of paperwork in my life, Greer."
He looks at me.
I look at him.
He sets the glass down very deliberately, on a coaster, like a man who has been raised correctly.
He puts both forearms on his knees. His hair is almost dry now and the silver at his temples is brighter than it was when he walked out of the bathroom, and the clarity that drops on me is the kind drunk people rarely get: he is not going to be the one who moves first.
He is not going to move first because if he does, he is the man who invited a strange woman into his hotel suite at midnight and then put his hands on her. He has decided, somewhere in the last twenty minutes, that he is not that man.
Which means if anything happens here, it has to be me who makes it happen.
I think about Brennan. About the dog. About the fact that I am twenty-six years old and I have spent the last three years of my life being responsible for everything in every room I have walked into.
I set my glass down.
I stand up.
Three steps across the suite carpet take me to the chair he is sitting in, and I stop in front of him, close enough that my knees touch the inside of his.
"Tell me to stop," I say, "and I will."
He looks up at me. Slow. His eyes are blue and steady, and he does not say a word.
He puts both hands, palms flat, on the outside of my thighs over the borrowed Versace, and he just — holds. He does not pull. He does not move. He holds me like he is making sure I am real, like he is giving me one more clean exit, like he is asking me a question without using any of his words.
I lean down and kiss him.
His mouth is patient. He does not rush me. The first thing his tongue does to mine is ask permission, and the second thing it does is take it, and somewhere between the two of those a small sound comes out of me that I have not heard out of myself in a long time.
His hands move slowly up the outside of my thighs to my hips, then to my waist, then he stops there. He pulls his mouth half an inch off mine and just looks at me.
"Are you sure?" he says.
"Yes."
"Say it again."
"Yes."
"Good girl."
On principle, I am not a woman who responds to good girl. But tonight, I respond to good girl. My thighs press together. He sees it happen. His mouth moves at the corner.
"Come here," he says, and pulls me down onto his lap, sideways, my dress riding up over my knees, my mouth on his again before I have decided to put it there.
He kisses me until I have lost the thread of where my hands are. His hand goes up the back of my dress and finds the zipper, and he runs his fingertip down it without pulling, just — testing.
He pulls the zipper down. The dress slides off my shoulders, then off my arms, then he eases me up off his lap long enough to let the whole thing pool around my feet on the suite carpet, and now I am standing in front of him in nothing but a strapless bra and the underwear Indie made me buy four hours ago because you cannot wear granny panties under this dress, Greer.
He looks at me for a long moment.
"Jesus Christ, Greer," he says.
It is the first time he has used my name in a sentence.
He pulls me forward by my hips until I'm between his knees, and then he just leans his forehead against my stomach for a beat.
Eyes closed. Breathing in. Both my hands go into his damp hair without my deciding, and his shoulders move on a long exhale, and he kisses the soft skin below my navel slowly, almost reverent and that is the moment my throat closes.
Two seconds of him being tender and I am about to cry. I have been pretending for months that I am fine.
"Hey," he says, looking up at me. His thumb moves along the inside of my hipbone. He tilts his head as if he is going to ask me something, but he does not. He runs his thumb up the line of my jaw, slow, and pulls my face down to his, and he kisses me instead.
What he does not ask sits in the small space between our mouths.
"Bed?" he asks, against my lips.
I nod.
He stands, one arm under my thighs, the other under my back, and he lifts me clean off the floor as if I weigh nothing. He carries me into the bedroom and sets me down on the bed and pulls his shirt off over his head in one motion, and there is, briefly, no useful thought in my brain.
Of course he looks like that. Of course he does.
There is an old scar low on his left side. He sees me see it. He does not look down.
He kneels at the foot of the bed and pulls me to the edge by the back of my thighs.
"Tell me what you like, Greer."
"I don't know," I hear myself say.
He pauses.
"You don't know?"
"I haven't — my ex, Brennan, didn't —"
I stop. My face goes hot. He sets his chin on the inside of my knee.
"Brennan is the worst person who has ever lived," he says, mildly.
"He took the dog."
"He didn't —"
"Greer." His thumb runs along the seam of my underwear, just once, light enough that it is barely there. "I am going to figure out what you like. You and I are going to find out together. Stop me if anything feels wrong."
"Okay."
"Okay what?"
"Okay, Kieran."
He smiles for the first time. Properly. It is a genuine smile, and it does something to my chest I do not have a name for.
He hooks both thumbs in my underwear and pulls them off slowly. Drops them on the carpet. Bends his head between my thighs.
The first time his mouth lands on my clit, a sound comes out of me.
The second time his tongue moves, he says my name against me, and the third time I am already gone.
He keeps going. He keeps going with one of my hands tangled in his hair and the other twisted in the duvet, and when I come the first time it is humiliating, how fast, and the noise that gets out of me is not anything I have heard out of my body before.
He works me through it like a man who has time. When I have stopped shaking, he wipes his mouth on the inside of my thigh and looks up at me from between my legs, and I look down at him, and we are both, suddenly, smiling.
"I take it back," he says. "You know what you like."
"Shut up."
"Mm. Try again."
"Get up here."
He stands. He reaches for the bag at the foot of the bed and comes back with a condom from the inside pocket of his wallet. He looks at me as he tears the foil.
"Yes?" he says.
"Yes."
He rolls it on, kneels back between my thighs, and leans over me with one elbow on the pillow beside my head, and kisses me with my own taste still on his mouth.
"Tell me you're sure," he says. One more time. Looking at me.
"I'm sure."
"Say it again."
"Kieran. I'm sure."
He pushes in slowly. A sound presses out of me against his shoulder. He stops, halfway, and breathes hard through his nose. His forehead drops to mine.
"Greer," he says. Just that.
"I'm okay."
"I know."
"Don't stop."
"I'm not stopping."
He moves slowly, then less slowly, then he loses the rhythm for a beat and laughs against my mouth as if he has been caught at something.
One hand goes around the back of my neck.
He talks to me — quiet, dirty, almost-tender — through all of it.
He tells me what I am doing to him. He tells me what I feel like.
He tells me, once, you are killing me, Greer, do you know that.
When I come the second time, it is slower. Deeper. My mouth presses into his shoulder and I cry a little, which is not anything I had prepared for tonight.
He comes after me with my name in his mouth and his hand still flat against the back of my neck.
He does not let go.
He stays.
His weight is on his forearms above me, his mouth at my temple, his heartbeat going through his chest into mine. The thought that drops on me is the dangerous one, the one I should not be having: oh.
He rolls onto his side eventually, and pulls me with him. He drags a hand down my spine and back up. He kisses the top of my head.
"Greer," he says. Quiet.
"Mm."
"Stay until morning."
"Okay, Kieran."
He laughs, just once, into my hair.
I close my eyes and I fall asleep without meaning to.
***
I wake at 4:38 in the morning with his arm heavy across my ribcage.
A long minute passes before I move. The room is very dark. His breathing is slow and deep beside me. Somewhere in the building an ice machine drops a load of cubes.
Every reason to stay sorts itself in my head.
Every reason not to sorts itself next to those.
What I have, in the end, is the muscle memory of a woman who has been leaving rooms quietly her whole adult life.
I lift his arm and slide out from under it.
The borrowed Versace is puddled at the foot of the chair in the living room.
One shoe near it, the other under the coffee table.
My clutch on the credenza next to the bourbon glass.
The key card on the side table where I dropped it.
His coat is still on the couch where it was when I walked in.
I do not look at it. I do not let myself check the breast pocket for a wallet, a name, a single piece of evidence that this man I have just spent six hours having the best night of my life with is more than a first name and a hand at the back of my neck.
A different person would do this differently. I am not that person.
I close the suite door behind me slowly, so I do not have to hear the click.
The hallway is empty. The wall sconces are dim. My legs carry me to the elevator on their own, and I stand under the small red glow of the down arrow with my clutch in both hands.
My phone says 4:47 AM.
It also says I have eleven texts from Indie.
omg where ARE you?? lost you like an hour into the gala, got worried. assuming you are alive. tell me EVERYTHING tomorrow. love you.
I type back, with shaking fingers: alive. talk later.
I send it.
The elevator dings.
I step in.
In the last six hours, I have done the only thing I have ever done in my adult life that I did not overthink first. The good news, I tell myself in the silver mirror at the back of the elevator car, is that nobody is ever going to know.
The doors close.
For several seconds, I find myself unable to take a breath.