Chapter 19
It was almost midnight by the time Marisa finally plopped her exhausted ass into bed, though not before creeping around her living room like a teenager who was afraid of getting caught out after curfew.
It wasn’t that she was afraid of getting caught, per se, but more so shamed.
By her once again neglected menorah.
It was the fourth night of Hanukkah, and there she was, thirty years old, coming home from a double shift and speed walking in the dark past the only relic of her own damn holiday that, despite the inanimateness of the menorah’s silver-pedigreed existence, seemed to judge her more than her family.
For a microsecond, she thought about making a cup of Earl Grey tea and lighting the candles just to show some belated form of solidarity, that she hadn’t forgotten about Hanukkah entirely, that she was, hand to God, still Jewish—though perhaps with a bit more emphasis on the ish part.
But she just didn’t have it in her to fight sleep long enough for the things to burn down on their own.
Maybe she could plug in a night-light in the outlet next to the mantle? Would that qualify enough to be considered conciliatory?
Likely not.
In the end, bed won out, which sucked on multiple fronts because, up until then, she’d been relying on her supreme exhaustion to keep Alec and the events of the morning from her mind and focus on what she was being paid to do.
However, once she was finally alone with her racing thoughts, there was nothing to prevent her from simply plugging her phone into the charger, opening up her texts, and typing out the bare minimum of a message.
Except it was late. Like, so so so late. Nearly-the-next-day kind of late. And bothering someone during what she considered emergency hours with a nonurgent thumbs-up emoji was the epitome of rude in her book.
But he was expecting to hear from her.
Her thumbs, locking up with indecision, hovered above the keys, while she took out the sweet memory of Alec’s departing kiss and replayed that reel for the umpteenth time.
The smoky, scratchy insistence in his voice when he demanded she text him after she got home.
The way her skin prickled beneath his regard, which had nothing to do with the snow or cold.
The entire lungfuls of breath he’d stolen when he’d snuggly tucked her back into her hat and thieved a kiss, which all happened right before her nerves said to hell with ground rules and she almost started shimmying up and down his body like Santa short on time and long on chimneys.
“Fuck a giant Christmas duck. What the hell am I doing?” Marisa fell back onto her pillow, flung her arm over her eyes, and waited. And waited. And waited for the excuses to come, for the reasons why she shouldn’t do what she wanted, what he’d freaking asked of her, and just text him.
And they were there, the reasons. There was the whole he’s not your real boyfriend one, followed by the he’s leaving after the holidays one, and rounded out by the ever-popular besides, wherever he winds up, it’ll be on a literal other continent, and whatever you might think of Phoebe, you can’t fault her for her reasoning on long-distance relationships and wanting to settle down when Alec couldn’t.
Plus, your passport’s expired. And you hate flying.
Her body, however, was having none of that. Despite her exhaustion, the damn thing still thrummed with a distracting vibrancy, so much so that she knew she wasn’t getting to bed anytime soon.
Marisa sighed and rested her hand over her runaway heart, letting her fingers fall in the valley between her breasts and her mind wander where it would.
But all that did was remind her that she was feeling a whole lot of heated flesh right now and that she was supposed to be talking to Alec.
And she sure as hell wasn’t supposed to be thinking about those two things together. But then her thoughts drifted again, along with her fingers, and well, willpower just seemed like the most uninteresting thing to prop up at the moment.
Maybe restraint wasn’t what she needed.
Maybe she needed a bit of indulgence, something to take the edge off the past several grueling hours and acknowledge the sweet fantasy of the morning.
A fantasy that was exactly that, but one she wouldn’t mind living in a bit longer.
Marisa dragged her fingers down her belly and began to slide them beneath the waistband of her shorts—
Her phone blared through her quiet bedroom, scaring the ever-loving shit out of her and nearly causing claw marks that would be mortifying to explain to any emergency department triage nurse working the night shift.
She jolted out of bed and reached for her phone, which was still plugged into the charger. Any restraint she may have fancied flew out the window as Alec’s name appeared on her screen.
“Uh, hi! Hi there. Sorry I didn’t—”
“You’re home.” Alec’s words definitely weren’t a question, nor were they filled with the smooth confidence she’d always known him to command. He almost sounded . . .
“Were you worried?”
His pause was brief but noticeable, and she imagined him casting his eyes up, as if asking for someone to save him from intuitive women. “I hadn’t heard from you. Wanted to make sure you got home okay.”
“Because you were worried for me,” she needled, smiling.
“Because I asked you to text me when you got home.”
“So you wouldn’t worry.”
The long-suffering sigh he gave was delicious. “So I wouldn’t hunt down your felonious friends and see whether they were throwing a party you went to without me. And also,” he added, infusing his words with what she suspected was a mollifying smile, “so I wouldn’t worry.”
The earlier tingle she’d abandoned fluttered to life again, except this time, she hardly knew what to do with it, so she just snuggled down into the comforter and gripped the phone tighter to her ear. “That’s got to be the cutest, coziest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
He snorted. “Not sure I’ve heard that before, but I’m in no place to argue with a woman who knows her mind.”
“Oh, please. I don’t know my mind so much as I am a slave to it. Besides, if I were certain about half the things I should be, I’m pretty sure you and I wouldn’t be using deception and a pet adoption event as a battle strategy when it comes to figuring out our lives.”
“I wouldn’t say that. You seemed pretty sure of yourself this morning, in all the ways. It looked quite bonny on you, that self-confidence. I’ve noticed it a few times now, the glow you get when you’ve settled into your own skin. It’s a different sort of radiance.”
Radiance. Whoa. She had no idea what to make of that or what the late hour was doing to her inhibitions, because she most definitely wasn’t the sort of woman who would ever ask—
“Alec, can I ask you a question?”
“Anything. So long as it’s not what side of the bed Hugh likes to sleep on, because I’ll go to my grave before I admit to being the little spoon with that arsehole.”
She laughed, and man, it felt so good, in the way things could only feel when one’s brain was too exhausted to care about woulds and shoulds and, instead, just happily floated among the maybes, only firing the neurons it needed to, if it needed to.
No alternate mode. No safe topics. No eggshells. Just . . . joy.
“I like the way that sounds,” Alec added. “Your laugh. I wish I were there to see it.”
“See what? Me laughing? It’s not as glamorous as you might think. Spoiler alert: I snort more often than I don’t. I’m practically a farm animal at times. My mother couldn’t take me anywhere when I was a kid.”
But despite her attempt at humor, her mouth still had gone dry waiting on his next word, while her brain, ever the A student, sprinkled in all the extra credit tidbits the rest of her body sure as hell never forgot.
Like the exact heat his large hand gave off when he gripped her lower back, or the way his scar scraped ever so slightly against her upper lip when he kissed her, making her nipples harden.
His gruff voice pulled her back to the present. “To see what genuine humor looks like on you, without all the fluff of trying to be funny or laughing so others will like you. It’s so bloody tiring, the game we’re playing, isn’t it?”
Marisa’s throat had tightened to the point where she wasn’t even sure she could still push out the words she’d wanted to ask.
God, he sounded just as exhausted as she felt, yet he still spoke to her like she’d not only hung the moon but the entire freaking galaxy.
So what even were words at this point, when the only comfort her mind could wrap around came in the form of imagining Alec as he was, not as their arrangement presented him to be?
“Alec,” she rushed out over a swallow.
“You had a question for me,” he said heatedly, as if he knew exactly what she was about to pose. Was expecting it, hoping for it, even.
Then her fingers returned to where she’d left off before he called. “What if we played a different game? One where we didn’t have to pretend?” She took a deep, sobering breath, then added, “The one we started in the woods?”
No force on earth could slow Alec’s racing heart.
It had flown off the runway and was veering toward whatever words Marisa chose to grace his senses with.
And he’d fucking take all of them, even though he had earned none of them.
Hell, she could curse him out in Gaelic, which he spoke not a word of, and he’d happily set her melodic profanities as his bloody ringtone.
He was in trouble. Big fucking trouble.
But the decision had already been made when he’d claimed her in front of the most influential people in town, and then again in front of his ex-girlfriend, and then again in front of her parents, random social media followers, his fucking brother’s dog.
So, what did it matter if he claimed her in this small way as well? For him and him alone? The way his body had been longing to?
And even more terrifying, what if she let him?