25. Dani
DANI
I drove back up into the hills at three in the afternoon on a Thursday.
I hadn't slept the night before. I'd left Brynn's a little after one with two glasses of wine in me and the thing she'd said on the couch still sitting in my chest, that I wasn't actually angry.
She'd said it the way she said everything, like a fact about my face she'd been reading all night, and I'd lain awake in the guest room until I found out she was right.
I'd walked into a man's kitchen on a Wednesday afternoon believing the man to be a certain shape.
I'd walked out knowing he was a different shape.
The difference wasn't bad. It wasn't even surprising in retrospect.
But it was a thing my body needed a night to absorb.
My body had been operating against a wrong picture for three weeks and was now being asked to recalibrate it.
The recalibration was, it turned out, not the same thing as anger.
I hadn't been angry by the time I drove away. I'd been calibrating.
I'd finished the calibrating at six this morning.
At six fifteen I'd sent him the second text I knew he wasn't expecting. Coming back today. Don't make plans. He'd written back inside of thirty seconds. No plans. The kitchen is yours.
I'd stayed at Brynn's all day on purpose, because I wanted the day apart to be a full day and not a half-day, because I wanted us both to know the day had been a real thing and not a pause.
Brynn made me lunch. We went for a walk around the rooftop garden of her building.
She asked me, at two, whether I was actually going to be okay, and I said yes, and she looked at me long enough to verify the yes was real, and then she told me to go.
I drove.
The Pontiac was in the gravel turnaround when I came up. I parked next to it. I sat in the SUV a long minute with the engine off.
I checked my hair. Checked my face. I'd washed both at Brynn's an hour ago and I hadn't, in the three minutes since I'd pulled in, done anything to either, but I checked them anyway, because I was a woman about to walk back through a door I'd walked out of twenty hours earlier and the checking was a thing my hands wanted to do.
I got out. I went to the front door.
He'd been watching from the kitchen. I knew because the front door opened before I could reach for the handle.
He was standing in the doorway in the same hoodie he'd worn Wednesday night, his hair slightly damp from a shower twenty minutes old.
His face wore the small still expression of a man who'd been waiting in his own kitchen for the door to open, and had decided, when he heard the SUV come up the drive, that he'd be the thing on the other side of the door, not the thing the door opened to find.
"Hartley," he said.
"Sturgill."
"You came back."
"I told you I would."
"I know. I'm acknowledging it."
I had not, until that exact moment, fully understood that I hadn't yet, in the time I'd known him, made him uncertain about whether I was going to come back to a thing.
He'd built his life around handling other people's uncertainty.
He had not, until twenty hours ago at his kitchen island, had to sit alone in a house with the uncertainty of whether the woman he loved was going to walk back through his front door.
And the fact that he was standing in the doorway right now telling me he was acknowledging that I'd told him I was coming back was the quiet tell that he'd spent the day not believing it all the way until I pulled into the driveway.
"Jett."
"Yeah."
"I love you."
"I love you too, Hartley."
"Can I come in."
"Yes."
He stepped back. I came in. He closed the door behind me and flipped the deadbolt, the absent-minded muscle memory of a man who lived alone in a house in the hills and was used to being responsible for locking his own doors.
I stood in the entryway. He stood across from me. He did not move toward me. I did not move toward him.
We stood there and looked at each other for what was probably six seconds and felt like substantially longer, and then he said, very quietly:
"Hartley."
"Yes."
"I'm going to kiss you now."
"Yes."
"I'm telling you because the last time I did it without warning you, I didn't know what to do with the information that you'd let me, and I'm not going to be that man tonight. I'm going to tell you what I'm going to do."
"Okay."
"I'm going to kiss you."
"Okay."
He crossed the three feet between us. He put one hand on the side of my neck. The other came up to the small of my back.
He kissed me.
It was not a slow kiss. It was not the kiss against the door from Thursday three weeks ago, and it was not the kisses of Saturday night, and it was not the deliberate languid kiss before the rug on Tuesday.
This was the kiss of a man who'd spent twenty hours alone in a house thinking about whether he was ever going to kiss this particular woman again and had now been given the answer, and the answer was yes, and it landed in the kiss with the force of twenty hours of not-knowing released all at once.
My back was against the door before I knew the door was behind me.
His hands were on either side of my face.
His knee was between my thighs. I'd reached up at some point and gripped both his wrists, not to stop him, to hold them where they were, the way you hold a thing in place when the thing is the only thing keeping the rest of you upright.
"Hartley," he muttered against my mouth.
"Yes."
"Tell me to stop."
"What."
"Tell me to stop. So I'll stop."
"Why."
"Because you're going to have to tell me to if you want me to. Because tonight I'm not going to figure out the no on my own. I'm going to need you to say it. I'm not going to be the man who keeps reading the room. I'm going to be the man who's told what to do, by you, in words, so we're clear."
I pulled back from the kiss. I looked up at him.
His face was the careful flat thing it had been on Friday night with the photograph on the counter. The controlled thing. Except this time the thing being controlled was the wanting.
I had not understood, until I was looking at him with my back against his front door, that there was a version of Jett Sturgill that wanted things and didn't let me see how much, and that the version had been operating, in some quiet way, every time we'd been in a room together over the last twenty days.
He'd been calibrating his wanting against mine.
He hadn't, until I walked out of the house on Wednesday night with the LLCs on my laptop, lost the calibration.
He was telling me, in the entryway, that he wasn't going to make any more guesses tonight.
"Don't stop," I said.
"Say more than that."
"Don't stop. I came back here to be in a room with you, Jett.
I came back to be on the inside of your house.
I came back to take off my coat. I came back to be told the size of you in every single way you are.
Do not stop tonight. I am not telling you to stop tonight.
I'll tell you to stop if I need to stop. Tonight, do not."
"Okay."
"Tell me you understand."
"I understand."
I let go of his wrists.
He kissed me again. This kiss was different.
This was the kiss of a man who'd been given the permission he'd been asking for, and the permission unlocked something in him I hadn't yet been in a room with.
The version of him that had been waiting under all the other versions.
The version that had been waiting for me to give him the word.
He picked me up. I wrapped my legs around his waist. My jeans against his sweatpants. My hands in his hair.
He carried me from the door into the living room. He set me down on the back of the long low couch that faced the wall of glass and the deck and the valley beyond.
He stepped back to look at me, and his eyes went down my body, where they'd gone in the entryway with the towel two nights ago, and I watched them do it.
"Take off your sweater," he said.
I took off my sweater.
"Take off your shirt."
I took off my shirt.
He stepped forward. His hands came around behind me.
The bra came undone in one smooth motion that I had not, before this exact moment, fully appreciated was a thing a man could do with the kind of competence he was doing it with.
The straps slid down my shoulders. He drew the bra off and tossed it onto the cushion of the couch.
He put his thumb in my mouth. He put his thumb in my mouth and pressed it against the inside of my cheek, and his eyes were on mine, and he said, very quietly:
"You're mine tonight."
"Yes."
"Mine to have. Mine to hold. Mine to fuck."
"Yes."
"This is your last chance to say no, Hartley."
I closed my lips around his thumb. I sucked.
He almost broke right there. I watched it happen. The control he'd been holding all night cracked along a hairline and I saw it happen and he saw me see it, and the small registering on his face was the first time I'd been able to crack him with my body alone.
"All right," he said. "If that's what you want."
He pulled his thumb out of my mouth. He pulled me off the back of the couch and down onto my knees on the plush rug that ran the length of the living room floor, the rug I'd walked across barefoot on Sunday morning without paying any attention to.
I went down soft. I looked up at him. He looked down at me. His face had on it the look it had had at the table in the conference room that first afternoon, except inside out, except now I was the one who knew what I was for, and the knowing was the gift, and I was giving it.
He pulled the waistband of his sweats down.
I took him in my mouth.
He gripped my hair. Both hands. He let me set the pace for the first thirty seconds and then he took over, his hands twisting in my hair the way they had on Saturday night, the way they had on Tuesday on the rug at the foot of his bed, the way they were now in a different room with the same intent but a different charge underneath.