Chapter 17 Daisy
DAISY
I wake up to the smell of coffee and the sound of someone knocking.
He isn't knocking on my door. He's knocking on the wall next to it, like he's announcing his presence without actually demanding entry. The light coming through my window is pale and watery, the storm-washed gray of early morning, and I'm still wearing Adam's shirt.
I sit up slowly, cataloging the various aches and protests from my body: sore muscles from hauling water-logged boxes, a bruise on my hip from when I caught it on a box corner, and underneath all of it, a warm, tender feeling I'm absolutely not ready to examine.
"I know you're awake," Adam's voice says through the door. "I heard you moving."
"Stalker."
"The floorboards gave you away."
I roll out of bed and pad to the door, cracking it open just enough to see the hallway.
He's standing about four feet back, hands in his pockets, looking like he slept in his clothes, which he did, and somehow still annoyingly attractive despite the shadow of stubble along his jaw.
He's found a flannel in Nell's spare-clothes box; the sleeves barely reach his wrists.
There's a paper bag on the floor between us, and two cups of coffee balanced on top of it.
"Where did you even get this?" I ask. "The roads were closed."
"The café on Maple opened at six. I walked."
"It's two miles."
"I'm aware."
I stare at him. He stares back, that careful expression on his face, the one that means he's trying very hard not to push.
"Come in," I say, and step back to let him through.
He sets up breakfast on my tiny kitchen table while I escape to the bathroom, because I need sixty seconds alone to process the fact that my estranged husband is arranging pastries in my apartment while I'm still wearing his shirt and the memory of his hands is written all over my body.
I brush my teeth. Wash my face. Drag a brush through my hair until it's approaching acceptable. I think about getting dressed, but the shirt smells like him and I'm not ready to give that up yet, so I wrap my robe over it instead and call it good enough.
When I come back out, he's arranged everything neatly on the table: croissants, fruit, two cups of coffee with the lids still on. He looks up when I enter and his expression opens (hunger, maybe, or tenderness, or both) but he doesn't move toward me.
"I didn't know what you'd want," he says. "So I got options."
"You got enough for six people."
"I got nervous." The corner of his mouth twitches. "Nervous me overbuys breakfast pastries. It's a character flaw."
"There are worse flaws."
"That's what my therapist says." He pulls out a chair for me, which should feel outdated and patronizing but instead just feels like Adam, like the man I married who always held doors and pulled out chairs and forgot my birthday three years in a row. "Coffee?"
"Please."
We eat in silence for a few minutes, and it's not uncomfortable.
"About last night," he says finally, setting down his coffee cup.
"Which part?"
"All of it." He meets my eyes across the table. "I'm not going to pretend it didn't happen. I'm not going to pretend it doesn't mean anything."
"I told you it doesn't count."
"It counts to me." His voice is steady. "Everything with you counts to me. But I heard what you said, and I'm not—" He pauses, choosing his words carefully. "I'm not using last night as leverage. I'm not going to act like it changes the terms or gives me rights I didn't have before."
My chest unknots. "Okay."
"But if there's anything you need, anything at all, you can ask."
"I don't know what I need yet."
"That's okay too." He reaches across the table, and his fingers brush against mine, just barely, a question rather than a demand. "I'll wait."
After he leaves the table, after I'll wait lands soft between the croissants, I tell him I need a shower.
He nods like that is a reasonable boundary and starts tidying pastry crumbs with the focus of a man grateful for a task.
Chaucer, who somehow appeared on the counter overnight, watches him with the judgment of a cat who knows too much.
I escape into the tiny bathroom before I invent a reason to kiss pastry flakes off Adam's mouth.
I strip his shirt off my body and hang it on the hook like evidence.
The mirror is already fogging from the hot tap.
I look like a woman who had angry unprotected sex in a flooded basement and then slept in stolen cotton: bruise blooming on my hip from a box corner, hair a disaster, eyes too bright.
I step under water hot enough to pretend last night was only weather.
It isn't.
The moment the spray hits my breasts I remember his mouth on my throat in the basement.
The moment I soap between my legs I remember the unprotected slide of him and the way he said yes ma'am like a prayer.
Heat pools low and mean. My forehead tips against the tile.
My hand follows the memory without my permission: two fingers, then three, circling the place he ruined and repaired in the same hour.
I try to stay quiet. I fail. The moan slips out on his name like my body has chosen a side and refused to consult me.
"Adam—" It slips out broken, half a moan, half a curse. "God, Adam—"
A knock sounds at the bathroom door. "Daisy? Did you call me?"
"Come in," I say, and draw the curtain aside myself.
I go still, water plastering hair to my cheeks. Adam stands in the bathroom doorway with an empty coffee tray in one hand and an expression like he's been shot with wanting. His borrowed flannel is creased from the couch, his jeans still storm-wrecked. His eyes are dark enough to drink the steam.
"Don't stop on my behalf," he says, voice sandpaper. "I heard my name. If you only wanted a towel, tell me—"
"Stay." The word surprises us both. "Or… don't just stand there like a Victorian. If you're going to watch, earn the ticket."
He sets the tray on the sink with exaggerated care. "Tell me the rules."
"Knees. Clothes on if you want. Mouth on me. No heroics about joining me in the tub. This shower is the size of a filing cabinet."
"Consent received." He steps in close enough that the spray dots his shirt, then sinks to his knees at the edge of the tub like the linoleum is marble.
Water darkens the fabric over his shoulders.
He looks up through wet lashes, absurdly formal for a man about to eat his estranged wife out at 8 a.m. "May I? "
"You may." My laugh shakes. "Please. I was already failing at being alone with the memory of you."
"Then let me replace the memory with the real thing.
" He pushes the curtain wider so steam billows around his shoulders, and for a second he just looks: water running down my breasts, my hand still glistening, the bruise on my hip from the box.
His throat works. "Beautiful. Unfair. Mine to kneel for, if you'll have the kneeling. "
"I'll have it."
He lifts one of my thighs over his shoulder, soaked sleeve and all, and drags the flat of his tongue up the whole length of me, slow and merciless.
The sound he makes is indecent, half groan, half thank-you.
"Fuck. You taste like storm and soap and every bad decision I want to repeat.
Salt and heat. I could write quarterly poetry about this and get fired and it would be worth it. "
"Please never write quarterly poetry."
"Too late. Drafting in my head. Section one: the way you grab my hair. Section two: the way you try not to moan and fail." He demonstrates why I fail, tongue flat and filthy, and my free hand slaps the tile. "Section three forthcoming."
"Adam—"
"Repeat my name." His mouth closes on the swollen peak and draws hard with focused hunger. "I walked two miles for croissants. I will crawl across glass for this."
My head thumps the tile. Water sheets down my breasts and over his forehead as he works: tongue circling, lips tugging, one big hand splayed on my belly to keep me from slipping.
He is fully dressed and drowning for it.
The sight alone could finish me: six-five of CEO on his knees in my ugly bathroom, flannel plastered to his chest, collar open and cuffs shoved to his elbows.
"You're… soaked—" I manage.
"Collateral damage." He speaks into me, vibrations punching a gasp out of my throat.
Water darkens his collar to black. "A pleasure to pleasure you.
Deeply, filthily. Consider this customer service for the woman who let me stay on a couch I didn't deserve.
Five-star review pending. Tip jar is my ego. "
"Your ego is… ah… already enormous."
"And yet I am on my knees. Curious, that." He sucks lightly, then harder, adjusting when my hips buck. "Tell me what you need. Faster or slower? Two fingers or three? I take direction better when I'm this hard and this ignored."
"Two. Curl. Don't… stop the tongue—"
"Copy." He obeys like the shower is a negotiation and I hold every vote that counts.
"Don't… be charming—"
"I'm not charming. I'm starving." He slides two fingers into me and curls them while his tongue keeps working, and my standing leg threatens mutiny.
"I've thought about this since I left the basement.
Thought about putting you on my tongue until you forgot how to say doesn't count.
Thought about breakfast afterward like a civilized husband. I'm doing both."
"Shut… ah… up—"
"Make me. Come on my face. Drown me properly. I've already ruined the shirt."
I come with a broken cry that echoes off the cheap tiles, thighs clamping around his ears, fingers yanking his wet hair. He doesn't pull away. He laps at me through the aftershocks like the orgasm is a meal he paid for in advance, gentling only when I whimper from oversensitivity.
"Good girl," he rasps, then grimaces. "Sorry, was that… too much? I can retract the praise. File an amendment."
"Don't retract." I'm laughing and shaking. "Do it again. If you stop at one I will revoke your pastry privileges."