Chapter 17 #3
He braced one hand on the headboard and drove into her, and the angle shifted, and everything shifted with it.
The pleasure tightened like a fist. She clutched his shoulders, her nails leaving marks she'd see in the morning, and he groaned into her neck — a low, unguarded sound she'd learned to trust over the past year, because he made it only when he stopped thinking.
"Look at me," she said.
He lifted his head. His eyes were dark, blown wide, his jaw tight.
She held his gaze and rolled her hips and watched him come undone — watched the control slip, watched the mask dissolve, watched him become the man underneath all the performance.
This was what she'd wanted. Not the billionaire.
Not the name. This. The man who looked at her like she was the only real thing in the room.
The second orgasm caught her by surprise.
It built fast, triggered by the angle and the depth and the way he was looking at her, and when it hit, it was a wave — full-body, uncontainable.
She arched against him and he followed, his hips stuttering, a sound torn from his throat that was half her name and half something wordless.
They held on to each other. That was the thing. Through all of it, they held on.
#
Afterward, he traced patterns on her shoulder. His heart was slowing under her ear. The room smelled like salt air and sex and the hydrangeas Miriam had put on the dresser.
"I should tell you something," Annabel said.
His hand stilled. The old fear flickered through him — the momentary tension — then passed. He breathed. "Okay."
"Nkechi offered me the gallery."
Silence. His hand resumed its motion on her shoulder.
"She wants to retire in two years," Annabel said. "She asked if I want to take over the lease. Run the space. My own programming, my own roster."
"What did you say?"
"I said I needed to think about it." She lifted her head to look at him. "I'm going to say yes."
His face did nothing complicated. He just smiled. "Good."
"It means Brooklyn three or four days a week. It means I'm not available for Foundation galas whenever — "
"Annabel." He tucked her hair behind her ear. "I said good. I meant good."
She searched his face. Found nothing but the truth. Laid her head back down on his chest.
"I love you," she said. Not for the second time today. For the thousandth. But it still felt like a choice, every time she said it. A door she walked through on purpose.
"I love you," he said. "I love you and I'm not going to ruin it."
"You might."
"I might. And you'll tell me, and we'll fix it."
She smiled against his skin. "That's the most romantic thing you've ever said to me."
"I know."
#
Later — much later, when the sky was full dark and the stars were sharp above the water — they went out to the terrace.
She wore his shirt, unbuttoned, over nothing. He wore sweatpants and bare feet. They were not the picture of a billionaire couple renewing their vows. They were two people who had broken something and built something better from the wreckage, standing on a terrace in the dark, watching the ocean.
He sat in the wide teak chair and she settled between his legs, her back against his chest. His arms came around her. His chin rested on the top of her head.
The water was black and silver under the stars. The air smelled like September — salt and turning leaves and the last warmth of summer giving way to something new.
"We should go in," he said. "It's getting cold."
"Not yet."
His arms tightened. She put her hands over his, lacing their fingers together.
His thumb brushed the back of her hand. Somewhere inside the house, a light was on — the kitchen, probably, where Miriam had left the dishes and Annabel would wash them in the morning because this was her house now, not a house she visited.
She thought about the woman who had driven east on Montauk Highway a year and a half ago with grandmother's earrings and a watch she'd bought herself and nothing else.
That woman had been shaking. That woman had been certain the marriage was over.
That woman had been right — the old marriage was over.
But the new one, the one they'd built from honesty and anger and the stubborn refusal to let a good thing die without a fight, was here.
Was real. Was the chair beneath her and the arms around her and the heartbeat steady against her spine.
She was thirty-four years old. She was three months pregnant.
She had a studio full of bad paintings and a gallery waiting for her in Brooklyn and a husband who had learned, painfully and imperfectly, how to be known.
She had earned every piece of this happiness, and she was not going to hold it at arm's length.
The light on the water shifted. A boat somewhere out in the dark. Alistair's breath was warm against her hair.
"I'm ready to go in," she said. Not because she was cold. Because the house was theirs, and the life inside it was theirs, and she wanted to walk into it.
They went in together. The door closed behind them, and the terrace was quiet, and the ocean kept moving, and the future — steady, imperfect, theirs — stretched out ahead of them like light across the water.