Chapter 17 Daisy #2
"Threat accepted." His grin is wicked and soft. "Hold the rail. I need leverage."
He takes his time getting there. First he washes the soap from my stomach with his bare hands under the spray, then kisses a path from navel to hipbone, narrating nothing for once, just breathing me in like the steam is optional.
When he finally lifts my other thigh until I'm perched on his shoulders properly, my back braces on tile and his soaked clothes drip onto the bathroom floor in a spreading lake that will definitely become a hazard later.
"Comfortable?" he asks, absurdly polite with his nose an inch from my cunt.
"I am perched on a CEO like a demented fountain statue. Define comfortable."
"Stable enough to come again." He kisses my clit like a punctuation mark. "That's my definition."
He shifts my thigh higher on his shoulder and the spray catches him full in the face. He blinks water out of his eyes, laughs once, and goes back down without complaint, like drowning is an acceptable cost of doing business.
"You're shameless," I pant.
"I'm married." The words vibrate against me. "Shameless is in the vows. Hidden clause. Very fine print."
He eats me like he has a deadline and a devotion: messy, loud, thorough.
His fingers return, crooking against the swollen place inside me while his tongue flatters my clit without mercy.
I babble and threaten. I praise him in broken fragments that would get me banned from my own livestream.
He hums approval into my flesh and the vibration tips me.
The second climax rips through me harder than the first and I almost slip. He catches me. Of course he catches me. He holds me through the shaking, mouth soft now, kissing my thighs, my hip, the trembling lower curve of my belly like each spot needs its own apology and thank-you note.
When he finally lowers me, my legs are jelly. He stays on his knees, panting, mouth shiny, shirt destroyed, looking like a man who won an argument with God.
"A pleasure to pleasure you," he repeats, quieter, almost shy now that the filth has landed. "Every time you'll let me. No ledger, no counting. Just… this."
I don't have words yet. "Okay," he says eventually. "Okay. I can die happy. Or change shirts. Whichever the schedule requires."
I cup his wet jaw. "You're going to the club looking like you lost a fight with a dishwasher."
"I'll change." He kisses the inside of my knee, then my hip, then stands carefully so he doesn't knock me over.
Steam curls between us. "Breakfast reminder: eat the fruit.
You forget when you're humming. And, Daisy, if last night becomes anything you need to talk about, I'll be in the kitchen folding towels wrong until you say otherwise. "
"You'll need dry clothes first," I whisper, dazed.
"I'll find some." He squeezes my hand once, eyes warm. "I'll see you tonight. Try not to haunt yourself with my tongue while you do dishes. Fail anyway. I like knowing I linger."
He leaves dripping footprints down the hall. I slide down the tile until I'm sitting in the tub spray, insane, thoroughly haunted, already aching for a man who just ruined me with his mouth and a ruined borrowed flannel and the softest filthy manners in the world.
When I finally towel off and walk out in clean clothes, he is at the sink with his hands in soapy water, pretending he did not just rewrite my nervous system.
His ruined shirt is gone, he must have found something else in the emergency clothes Nell keeps for wet-dog customers, and his hair is damp in a way that has nothing to do with dishwater.
He doesn't look at me right away. Kind, maybe. Or strategic.
I pick up a dish towel. My knees still feel like steam.
Every time I shift my weight I feel the ghost of his tongue and have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from making a sound unfit for morning chores.
He glances over. The corner of his mouth quirks like he knows exactly where my mind is and has decided, generously, not to comment until I start a fight about linen.
"You fold towels wrong."
Adam looks up from the sink, hands still submerged in soapy water. "Excuse me?"
"Thirds." I hold up the dish towel I've just folded. "You fold them in thirds, like a civilized person."
"I fold them in quarters. It's more efficient."
"It's more wrong."
"There's no objectively correct way to fold a dish towel, Daisy."
"And yet you've found an objectively incorrect one."
He laughs, a real laugh that crinkles the corners of his eyes, and hands me a wet plate. "Your towel-folding opinions have been noted and summarily dismissed."
"Dismissed." I dry the plate with exaggerated precision. "I help save a basement from flooding, and this is the thanks I get."
"You saved several hundred paperbacks. I was collateral beneficiary."
"You were collateral something."
"Ouch."
We move around the tiny kitchen in a rhythm that feels too familiar, muscle memory from a thousand mornings in another life.
He washes, I dry. He hands me things at the right height, automatically adjusting for the fact that I'm shorter.
I stack the clean plates on the counter where he can reach the cabinet.
It's strange. It's uncomfortable. It's also, somehow, easy in a way nothing has been easy for months.
I fold another towel (thirds, properly) and set it on the pile. The rain has stopped, finally. Weak sunlight filters through the window, catching the soap bubbles on his wrists.
"This is surreal," I say.
"Doing dishes?"
"Doing dishes with you. Here. After—" I wave my own hand vaguely. "Everything."
He rinses the last mug and sets it on the drying rack, turning to face me. Water drips down his forearms onto the floor. "Good weird or bad weird?"
"I don't know yet."
"Fair enough."
He reaches for the towel I'm holding, not to take it, just to dry his hands. His fingers brush mine and neither of us pulls away immediately. I step back first.
"I should go change," he says, glancing at his rumpled clothes. "I have a meeting this afternoon, and I can't exactly show up looking like I slept on a bookstore couch."
"You did sleep on a bookstore couch."
"My board doesn't need to know that."
He's standing by the door now, one hand on the frame, looking at me with that expression again, the one that makes me feel seen in a way I'm not sure I'm ready for.
"Thank you," I say. "For last night. For—" I gesture vaguely at the breakfast remnants. "All of it."
"You don't have to thank me."
"I know. I'm doing it anyway."
He smiles, soft and private, and I cross the room without letting myself think about it. When I kiss him, it's brief (just a press of lips, a reminder, a promise I'm not entirely sure I'm making) and he makes a sound against my mouth that goes straight through me.
"Tonight," he says when I pull back. "Book club, rescheduled from the flood. Will you be there?"
"I'm always there."
"I know." He opens the door, steps through, pauses. "I'll see you tonight, Daisy."
And then he's gone, and I'm standing in my apartment in clean jeans and a soft T-shirt, and I don't know what any of this means, but for the first time in a long time, I want to find out.
FRIDAY, 6:47 PM
The rescheduled club night draws a bigger crowd than usual, apparently near-disaster is good for attendance, and I spend the first hour helping Nell rearrange the reading corner to accommodate extra chairs.
"You're in a good mood," Nell observes, handing me a stack of discussion questions.
"I'm in a normal mood."
"You're humming."
"I don't hum."
"You're literally humming right now. You've been humming all day." She fixes me with a look that says she knows exactly why I'm humming and she's choosing not to push. "The shelves look good, by the way. Adam did nice work."
"He did."
"Very thorough."
"Nell."
"What? I'm just saying." She grins and escapes before I can throw something at her.
I'm putting out the refreshments when I notice something on Kendra's Instagram story.
She reposted a photo earlier tonight: her hands on the counter at The Margin, the edge of someone else's hands visible at the corner of the frame, the caption coy and suggestive: Good things happening at book club tonight followed by a heart emoji and a winking face.
The hands in the frame could be anyone's. But she's cropped it carefully, angled it just so, and the implication is clear: she wants people to think those other hands belong to someone specific. Someone whose wedding ring matches the glint of metal just barely visible in the shot.
I stare at the picture for a long moment, dread settling in my chest. The hands aren't Adam's. I know his hands, the shape of his fingers, the width of his palms, but the cropping makes it impossible to tell that from the photo alone.
"Priya," I call across the room. "Can you come here for a second?"
Priya brings receipts.
"I've been keeping track," she says, pulling up screenshots on her phone. "Since the viral photo dropped, I started paying attention to all of it. And I found something."
"What kind of something?" I keep my voice low, but Kendra's across the room refilling her wine, not paying attention.
"There's this account. @romance_truth_teller." Priya hands me her phone. "Three days after the photo went viral, they posted something defending Kendra. Standard stuff. But then they made a mistake."
I look at the screen. It's a selfie, quickly deleted but screenshotted: a woman taking a photo in what looks like an office break room, coffee mug visible, ID badge half-showing.
"That’s Meridian," Priya says quietly. "That's Kendra's floor. And the text with it, before she deleted it? First person. 'I can't believe people are attacking me for having lunch with a friend.'"
"She forgot which account she was on."
Priya swipes to the next screenshot. "And look at this one. This morning. She posted the uncropped version on the fake account, then deleted it, but I caught it."