Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Creed
Then . , .
I hear the door.
I assume it is Liv, who’s had a copy of my key since mid-December.
I’m in the bedroom putting socks into a duffel bag because socks are the part of packing where my brain stops working. Five identical pairs of black socks. Two pairs of white. All of them suddenly requiring more thought than a defensive read on a three-man rush.
“Creed, are you home?” I hear her call.
“In the bedroom.”
Her footsteps cross the apartment, then stop at the doorway.
“You’re just packing,” she says.
I look up.
She’s in jeans and a sweater of mine—the navy crewneck I lent her in late November and haven’t asked for back.
Her hair is up in the slip knot I have learned, over four months, to recognize as either academic distress, emotional avoidance, or both.
She has the keys to my apartment in her hand and a tote bag on her shoulder that is empty because she is here to fill it.
The keys catch my attention first.
Not the sweater.
Not her mouth.
The keys.
Small, ordinary metal in her hand, proof that she can come in without asking, proof that I wanted her to be able to.
There is something dangerous about that kind of ordinariness.
It gets under the skin faster than sex. It says, ‘I trust you with my door.’ It says, ‘you belong here enough to interrupt me while I’m losing a war with socks. ’
I have, in the four months I’ve known Livia Sabine Crane, kissed her at her own door on a night a man named Halston Saint Claire walked into our lives.
I kissed her on the roof. I kissed her in the kitchen while the kettle screamed behind us, and neither of us moved to stop it.
I kissed her in a cab two weeks ago when we shared one from the Brewers Table because the snow was too deep to walk in.
Every kiss has taught me something worse.
That restraint is not the absence of wanting.
It is wanting with both hands behind your back.
She puts the tote bag on the bed.
Then she walks to me and rises on her tiptoes, kissing my jaw.
It is not enough.
My body decides that before my head can pretend we’re being reasonable.
I bend slightly and take her into my arms. She comes easily. Too easily. Like she has been waiting for me to make the space and is irritated I took this long. My hand slides to the back of her sweater—my sweater—and I feel the warmth of her through it, the small give of her body as she leans in.
I kiss her.
She inhales against me, and the sound goes straight through whatever discipline I walked in here wearing. Her hands grab the front of my shirt. Not carefully. Not politely. She kisses me back like she has a list of reasons not to and has decided, for once, that lists are for cowards.
There is something eternal in it.
A continuity.
Like the roof led to the bar, and the bar led to Halston, and Halston led us here, and every small almost became this mouth, this room, this hand on my shirt, this girl in my sweater trying to kiss me with the full force of everything she has not said yet.
My arms tighten around her.
Her fingers flex once against my chest.
I think of Halston in the hotel room. His mouth on mine. I think of the three of us, and the way wanting one of them doesn't take me away from the other.
It brings me closer.
Fuck, it brings me closer.
Livia pulls back first, but only because she needs air. Her forehead rests near my chin. Her lips are parted. Her eyes are bright, half-annoyed, half-dazed, like she intends to blame me for what just happened.
I’ll take it.
“I’m happy to see your pretty face,” I say, trying to catch my breath, “but I didn’t expect to find you here.”
Her mouth curves. “That’s your official greeting?”
“It was the first draft.”
“Needs work.”
“I was distracted.”
“By socks?”
“By you in my sweater.”
She looks down at herself as if she has forgotten what she’s wearing, which is ridiculous because Liv never forgets anything she can use against someone later.
“This sweater defected,” she says. “It belongs to me now.”
“I noticed.”
“You didn’t file a complaint.”
“I’m choosing my battles.”
“Smart man.”
Not smart enough.
I’m not sure where we’re taking this—or when.
Hal and I, in his hotel room, didn’t go all the way but we tasted each other.
Enough to know. Enough to change the room every time we’re together now.
And Liv—Liv has been here the whole time, in every decision I have delayed, every line I have refused to cross too fast.
I have wanted more with her.
So much more.
I have wanted her on this bed, in this sweater, saying my name without jokes around it. I have wanted her with Halston watching us from the doorway, or beside us, or between us, because the wanting has stopped arriving in separate rooms.
That is the part that makes me cautious.
Not out of fear.
But care.
For her. For him. For me.
We have to be careful with each other and for each other. No one gets rushed because the room gets hot. No one gets left behind because someone finally gets brave.
“I’m here for a few more things,” she says.
“Okay.”
“I have, by my count, a toothbrush, a hairbrush, two sweaters—three if I’m taking back the one I’m currently wearing, which I'm not—a copy of The Subtle Knife, one earring whose pair I haven’t been able to find, a pen that I think is mine but might be yours, and a pair of socks I forgot I owned until I found them in your laundry. ”
“You went through my laundry?”
“I separated my socks from yours. I didn't go through it.”
“Semantics.”
“Accurate semantics.”
She begins, with the efficiency of a girl who has done this list mentally on the walk from the elevator to retrieve her things.
The hairbrush from the bathroom. The toothbrush from the cup by the sink.
The two sweaters from the chair in the corner where my own things have been migrating for a month.
The Subtle Knife copy on the side table with a bookmark still in it where she left it at three a.m. on a Tuesday in December.
The earring—aha—from the top of my dresser, where I had not noticed it.
The pen, which is, in fact, mine.
She puts all of it in the tote bag.
I watch her move through my room like she belongs to it.
That is the problem.
She does.
Not in a cute way. Not in a temporary-girl-leaves-things way.
It’s deeper than that. She knows which drawer sticks.
She knows where I keep the spare phone charger.
She knows that I stack books by the bed and never finish three at a time, even though I insist I’m “actively reading” all of them.
She knows that my laundry basket is where socks go to create an identity crisis.
And I know her.
I know the way she touches the spine of a book before picking it up.
I know the pause she takes before opening a drawer that isn’t hers, even when it contains her things.
I know the exact expression she makes when she is pretending not to be emotional because she has decided emotion is an administrative burden she can't currently process.
She comes back to the bedroom doorway.
“That’s it,” she says.
“Okay.”
She doesn’t move.
I don’t either.
I am holding a pair of black socks in one hand, and a pair of black and white socks in the other, and the question of which pair to put in the duffel has become, in the last twenty seconds, the least interesting question in the room.
She walks the four steps from the doorway to where I’m standing.
She takes the socks out of my hands.
Both pairs.
She puts them on the bed.
Then she puts her hand on the front of my shirt—flat, palm down, over the place where my ribs end and my stomach begins—and the touch is the touch of a woman who has been waiting to put her hand on a man’s body without ceremony for longer than she has admitted to herself.
“Creed.”
“Yeah.”
“We have time.”
I look at her.
She holds my eyes the way she held them on the roof in October when she told me what His Dark Materials was about.
The way she held them at the Brewers Table when she introduced me to Halston.
The way she has held them every time she is about to give me a piece of herself in exchange for one of mine, and doesn’t know how to ask without making a joke first.
I know what she means.
I know what she might mean.
Those are not the same thing.
My hand covers hers on my shirt. I don’t move it higher. I don’t move it lower. I just hold it there, against me, because if I start wanting with my hands right now, I need to know we are both saying the same word.
“Time before what?” I ask.
Her lips part.
For once, she doesn't answer immediately.
That scares me more than a yes would have.
Then she looks at my duffel. At the socks on the bed. The things she has packed into her tote. Her toothbrush. Her book. Her missing earring. All the small evidence of her life crossing into mine without permission from either of us.
My thumb moves over the back of her hand.
She looks down at it.
Then back at me.
“Before I lose my nerve,” she adds.
The air in the room changes. The apartment seems to go quiet around us, the city beyond the windows dimmed by winter light and glass. Somewhere outside, a horn sounds on Columbus. Inside, there is only her hand under mine, and my name still sitting between us.
I want her.
I want Halston here too.
I want both truths without apology.
“Liv,” I say.
“I know.” Her voice is soft but not uncertain. “We’re careful. We’re very careful. We are so careful we could win awards in carefulness from a committee of emotionally repressed people.”
Despite myself, I almost smile.
She presses her palm more firmly against my shirt.
“I’m not asking you to stop being careful,” she says. “I’m asking you not to hide behind it.”
That lands.
Clean.
Fair.
A little brutal.
My hand tightens over hers.
She feels it.
Of course she does.
“Does Hal know?” I ask.
Her face changes, not with guilt, but with tenderness.
“No,” she says. “Not that I was coming here. Not this exact minute. But he knows me. He knows you. He knows what this is.”
“What is this?”
Her eyes search mine.
There are a hundred answers she could give. Desire. Timing. A mistake we will pretend was inevitable. A kiss that becomes another line and then another.
She gives me the answer that matters.
“Us,” she says.
The word is quiet.
It still fills the room.
I bend my head until my forehead almost touches hers.
“Baby,” I say, “if we do this, I need you to know it doesn’t take you or me away from him.”
Her breath leaves in a small rush.
“I don’t want it to.”
“And it doesn’t take me away from you.”
“I know.”
“You sure?”
She lifts her chin, offended and gorgeous. “I am overprepared, not confused.”
“There she is.”
“Don’t flirt with me when I’m trying to be emotionally mature.”
“That’s when you’re most gorgeous—and dangerous.”
Her mouth curves. Then the smile fades, not gone, just set aside. Her fingers curl into my shirt.
“I want you,” she says.
Simple.
No ornament.
No place for me to hide.
The want that goes through me is not clean. It is heat, hunger, care, fear, and something so close to devotion I refuse to name it yet. Naming it would rush it. Naming it would ask too much of the room.
So I kiss her instead.
Slow first.
A question.
She answers by rising into me.
The second kiss is not slow.
I back her toward the bed without meaning to, or maybe I mean to and only admit it when her legs hit the mattress. She gasps into my mouth, and I stop immediately, hands at her waist, breath coming hard.
“Too fast?”
“No.” She shakes her head. “No. I just—”
Her eyes move over my face.
I press my forehead to hers.
“We have time,” I remind her.
Her hand slides to my jaw.
She smiles then, small and brave.
“Then stop wasting it, Lafontaine.”
That does it.
The last of my restraint doesn't break.
It chooses.
I kiss her again, and this time, when she pulls me down with her, I go.
“You sure,” I say.
“I’m sure?”
“Liv.”
“I’m sure,” she says again. “I have been sure for some time. I am, in fact, exhausted by being sure without doing anything about it.”
I put my hand over her sweater.
Her breath leaves her in one small audible release, and I realize, with a small humbling rearrangement of every previous theory I have ever held about her, that she had been afraid I would say no.