Chapter 17
chapter seventeen
mia
He hangs his jacket on the hook by the door, then hesitates with his hand still on it, like he's caught himself doing something automatic and isn't certain it was his to do.
"Sorry," he says. "Habit."
"Don't apologize. It's the only hook. It would have been strange not to use it."
"That's not what I meant." He looks at the jacket, then at me. "I have thirty-seven documents with your name on them. None of them get me through that door." He nods toward the one we just came through. "You did. I'd like to be clear that I know the difference."
Something in my chest goes very still.
"You're saying this is the first room you've ever entered," I say slowly, "that no paperwork gave you a right to."
"Yes."
"That's either the most romantic thing you've said to me," I say, "or the most alarming inventory of your own life choices."
"Both," he says. "In sequence."
I cross the narrow hallway — three steps, no more — and stop in front of him.
"You can stay," I say. "Not because of anything you've signed, arranged, or filed. Because I'm asking you to."
"I know," he says. "That's exactly why I'm still standing here instead of already kissing you."
"Then stop standing there."
His hand finds my jaw, the same way it did in the motorhome, except there's no urgency in it now, no interruption risk, no team fifteen feet away — just his thumb tracing the line of my cheekbone like he's confirming something he already knew.
"Can I," he says, against my mouth, not finishing the sentence, not needing to.
"Yes."
He kisses me properly then, deliberate rather than careful — a different thing entirely — and I feel the shift in him immediately, the leash he's been keeping on himself all evening finally given somewhere safe to go.
We don't make it past the hallway at first. My back finds the wall beside Priya's bicycle, left here from a visit weeks ago, currently doing nothing useful except providing me something to grip when his hand slides under my jumper and finds bare skin.
He kisses down my throat, unhurried, the slight roughness of two days without shaving against the soft skin below my ear, and I make a sound I don't bother to suppress, because there's no one here to hear it but him.
"The kitchen," I manage, eventually, when his hand finds the clasp of my bra through the jumper and I remember, distantly, that I left dishes in the sink and somehow that detail matters to my dignity even now.
"What about the kitchen."
"Nothing. I just remembered the kitchen exists."
"I can make it exist less," he says, and lifts the jumper over my head before I can formulate a response to that, leaving me in jeans and a bra in my own hallway with my own bicycle-adjacent wall at my back and a man looking at me like I am, currently, the only thing in the world worth his complete attention.
In the kitchen, I climb onto the counter myself, his hands at my hips steadying rather than lifting, and the cold of the worktop against the back of my thighs makes me gasp into his mouth.
"Good?" he says.
"Cold. Good. Both."
He smiles against my lips, then sobers slightly, his hand pausing at my waist. "Tell me if anything is uncomfortable. The angle, the height, any of it."
"I will."
"I mean it, Mia."
"I know you do," I say. "That's not new information. Kiss me again."
He does.
I undo his shirt while he works the clasp of my bra, both of us slightly clumsy with want, his fingers finally managing it the same moment I finally get the last button free, and then his shirt is open and his hands are on my bare skin and I forget, briefly and completely, that I was ever embarrassed about anything in this kitchen.
He kisses down from my collarbone, slower now, learning a different geography than the one he learned in Monaco — not better, not worse, just entirely its own — and his mouth finds my breast, and I arch into it, one hand fisting in his hair, the other braced against the counter edge, my heel catching the cutlery drawer and making it rattle once.
Neither of us comments on it. There isn't room left in either of us for commentary.
He undoes my jeans with the unhurried precision of a man who has decided patience is its own kind of pleasure, and I lift my hips to help him work them down, and then I'm bare against the cold counter with him standing between my thighs, his hand sliding down my stomach.
"Still good?" he asks.
"Extremely."
His fingers find exactly where I need them, and I stop being able to formulate complete sentences, and when I finally come undone against his hand, gripping the counter edge, his mouth catches the sound of my voice breaking on his name like something he intends to remember on purpose.
"Now," I say, when I can speak again, "you."
He undoes his own belt while I reach into the kitchen drawer for the practical thing I keep there for exactly this kind of emergency.
"I'm an event planner," I say, at his raised eyebrow. "I plan for contingencies."
"Noted. Gratefully."
He guides himself to me, watching my face for the moment of entry the way he watches everything, careful in the way that matters and not at all careful in the way that doesn't, and when he's fully inside me I feel it everywhere — the counter cold against my thighs, his hands gripping my hips, the unhurried fullness of him filling a space that has been waiting, apparently, for exactly this kind of ordinary room.
"Okay?" he asks.
"More than."
He moves slowly at first, finding the rhythm the kitchen allows, his hands sliding under me to take some of my weight without lifting me bodily off the counter, careful in a way I notice and don't comment on because commenting would make it a thing instead of simply who he is now.
I wrap my legs around him, drawing him deeper, and the sound he makes against my throat is rougher than anything I've heard from him before — less controlled, simply present.
"Faster," I say, and he obliges, the rhythm building, one hand finding my clit again to match the new pace, and I feel the second wave building faster and sharper than the first.
"Mia." My name, wrecked.
"I know. Together."
He holds the angle, the pace, until I come apart around him with a cry I don't bother to muffle, and he follows almost immediately, burying his face against my throat, his whole body shuddering through it with a rawness that feels, in this small ordinary kitchen, entirely unlike anything that happened in a hidden Monaco suite — not better, not lesser. Simply ours.
He helps me down from the counter — proper care taken, his hand steady under my elbow, a small unremarkable kindness I find myself grateful for in a way that has nothing to do with fragility and everything to do with attention — and we collect our scattered clothes between the hallway and the kitchen with the easy, slightly absurd domesticity of two people who have just done something neither of them fully planned.
I put the kettle on, because some habits don't yield even to extraordinary evenings.
He sits at my kitchen table — my actual table, mismatched chairs, a stack of unopened post he doesn't touch — and watches me move around my own kitchen with an expression I haven't fully catalogued yet myself.
"You're doing the thing," I say, handing him a mug.
"What thing."
"The staring."
"I'm allowed to look at my surroundings."
"You said that line already tonight."
"It's a good line. I'm recycling it." He wraps his hands around the mug, and I notice, properly, the careful way he still holds his neck even now, even after everything, the discipline of an injury that hasn't actually gone anywhere just because the evening got complicated.
"Does it hurt," I ask. "Honestly."
"A little. It's manageable."
"You should have said something during?—"
"I would have said something if it mattered," he says. "It didn't. I know the difference between discomfort and damage. I've had considerable professional practice."
I sit across from him, both of us still mostly undressed, tea going cold between us, the rain starting up again faintly against the window.
"My phone's been buzzing," I say, glancing at it on the counter, the screen lit twice in the last few minutes. "I'm not looking at it."
"Farrow."
"Possibly. Possibly Priya wanting a debrief. Possibly the article has grown another headline." I look at him instead of the phone. "I find I don't currently care which."
"That's new for you."
"Everything this month has been new for me." I wrap my hands around my own mug. "You should know I haven't decided anything. About tomorrow. About what this is supposed to become once it isn't just tonight."
"I know."
"I'm not deciding it tonight either."
"I'm not asking you to," he says. "I told you. I want the Tuesday version. Tuesdays don't usually come with five-year plans attached."
"No," I agree. "They don't."
We sit with that for a while, the rain finding its rhythm against the glass, the kettle ticking as it cools, neither of us reaching for the phone or the future or anything beyond the small, specific, entirely unglamorous fact of being exactly where we are.
"Stay," I say, eventually. "Tonight. Not as an arrangement. Just — stay."
He looks at me for a long moment.
"Ask me properly," he says, something careful and hopeful underneath it. "I find I like hearing it."
"Will you stay."
"Yes," he says. "No documents required."