24. Stephanie
— ? —
Stephanie
Three years. Three years of pretending I didn’t want this, didn’t need this, didn’t ache for this man in ways that kept me up at night. And now his hands were in my hair and his tongue was tangled with mine and I couldn’t remember why I’d ever walked away.
The fundraiser was still going on out front.
I could hear it through the half-built walls of the clinic, the low hum of donors and their wine glasses, a string quartet sawing gamely through Vivaldi, the occasional bright peal of a laugh.
Twenty feet of drywall and a supply closet separated us from every important person on the island, and Kevin’s belt was cold under my knuckles.
I pushed him backward toward the patient bed.
He went willingly, sitting down hard on the edge, his hands sliding to my hips to pull me between his legs.
I looked down at him, at his flushed face and swollen lips and the desperate hunger in his eyes.
His hair was a wreck. I’d done that. His shirt had come untucked on one side and the top two buttons had lost their fight, and the strip of throat they exposed was dangerous to my resolve.
I watched him swallow. I watched the tendons in his forearms flex where he gripped me, the sleeves shoved up to the elbow the way he wore them when he worked, and I thought, distantly, that I had spent thirty-six months hating those forearms in my memory.
“Steph,” he breathed. “Are you sure?”
“Shut up.”
I climbed onto his lap.
His groan vibrated through my entire body.
I could feel him hard beneath me, straining against his pants, and the knowledge that I’d reduced him to this, him of all people, went to my head like the champagne out front.
He wasn’t the composed man from the gala photographs, the one who cut ribbons and shook hands and never once returned my calls.
He was undone. By me. My hips settled against his and his whole frame went taut, and a breath left him that sounded closer to pain than pleasure.
“We should probably,” he started, but I silenced him with another kiss.
I didn’t want to talk or think. I just wanted to feel him, after all this time, after all this pain.
Talking was where the ruin lived. Talking was hospital corridors and a phone that went to voicemail eleven times and a small dark word the doctor had used that I still couldn’t say out loud.
So I kissed him instead, hard enough to bruise, and let the noise of the party blur into nothing.
My hands found his belt. Fumbled with the buckle. He helped, lifting his hips so I could shove his pants down just enough to free him.
He was thick and hard and already leaking at the tip.
I stroked him once, twice, watched his head fall back and his eyes flutter closed. His throat worked. A muscle jumped in his jaw. I remembered this, the way he came apart quiet at first and then all at once, and my body clenched around nothing at the memory.
“Fuck,” he groaned. “Steph, I’m not going to last if you keep-”
“Good.”
I lifted up, yanking my own pants and underwear down just enough. He helped, his hands shaking, and then I was sinking onto him and we both moaned at the feeling.
He filled me completely. Stretched me in a way I’d forgotten, in a way no one else ever had.
I stayed still for a moment, adjusting, savoring, feeling my body remember what it was like to have him inside me.
My thighs trembled against his. Somewhere out front the quartet hit a high, sweet note, and I bit down on my own lip to keep from making a sound the wrong person might hear.
My body knew him. No one warned you about this, the part that made leaving so much harder than staying.
You could pack up a house and change your name back and drive across a bridge in the dark, and still your own skin would keep a map of one man and refuse to redraw it.
I’d tried. God, I’d tried. And here I was anyway, learning the same terrain over again, and it fit the way it had always fit, and I hated how much I didn’t hate it.
“You feel so good,” he whispered. “So fucking good. I forgot. I didn’t forget. I couldn’t forget. But this is better than any memory.”
He sat up suddenly, one arm wrapping around my back to pull me flush against his chest. The movement shifted him inside me and I gasped, my nails digging into his shoulders.
His heart slammed against my breastbone, fast and uneven, and I pressed my palm flat over it, over the place where I knew our names were inked into his skin under his shirt.
The heat of him was everywhere. I could smell him, cedar and antiseptic and the champagne he’d sipped for the cameras and hadn’t finished.
Then he was kissing me again, deep and consuming, and his hips were moving beneath me, and I was riding him on a patient bed in a half-finished clinic while the fundraiser continued outside.
We were loud. Too loud. Someone could walk in at any moment. I didn’t care. Let them come. Let them see what he’d thrown away and what he was getting back. The recklessness of it was a drug in my blood, and I chased it, rolling my hips down into his and swallowing his groan with my mouth.
“There she is,” he breathed against my mouth. “Use me. Take whatever you need and don’t be polite about it.”
I moved faster. Harder. Chasing the feeling that had been building since the first moment I saw him rise up out of a bank of hydrangeas with a fistful of balloons, ridiculous and hopeful and mine.
It had been building for weeks. Longer. It had been building, I understood now, since the day I’d loaded a suitcase into my car and driven off this island swearing I’d never come back to him.
He’d looked so absurd on that patio, a man in a two-thousand-dollar suit with leaves in his hair and a bouquet of grocery-store balloons held over his head.
He hadn’t planned it. That was what had undone the first brick in the wall.
The Kevin I’d married always planned everything, and here he was face-planting into a hedge because he didn’t know how else to reach me, and I’d sat on that chair laughing until I cried and felt the wall shift.
I was thinking about it now, with him buried inside me and the party still going twenty feet away, and it made me clench around him hard enough to make him swear.
His forehead dropped to my collarbone. His breath scalded my skin. I felt his rhythm start to come apart, felt him fighting to hold on, and it undid me.
“I’m close,” I gasped. “Kevin, I’m-”
“I know. I can feel you already. Let go, gorgeous, I’ve got you.”
His hand slid between us, his thumb finding my clit, and I came apart, clenching around him so hard he swore into my hair.
The force of it stole my breath. I felt him pulse inside me as he followed me over the edge.
“Fuck.” His voice was wrecked. “Stephanie. I love you. I love you. I love you.”
He came with my name on his lips, his arms crushing me against his chest, his whole body shaking with the force of it. He said the words into my hair, over and over, a chant, a prayer, and I let myself hear them for once instead of flinching away.
We held there, wrung out and unwilling to let go.
Breathing hard. Foreheads pressed together.
Still connected. His thumb moved in slow circles at the small of my back, gentling me, and I felt the sweat cooling between us and the strange, terrifying peace of being held by the one person on earth who’d broken me.
“Okay,” I finally managed. “We need to go.”
“Yeah.” He didn’t move. “Probably.”
I started to lift off him, my legs shaky, my whole body still trembling from aftershocks. His hands came to my hips to help steady me.
Then his palms slid down to cup my ass.
And squeezed.
I moaned. I couldn’t help it. The sound escaped before I could stop it.
He captured that moan with his mouth, kissing me hard, and I felt him growing hard again inside me. Of course he was. This man had never known when to stop, and neither, it turned out, had I.
“Kevin,” I breathed. “We can’t. Someone’s going to find us.”
“Let them find us.”
“We’re in a medical facility.”
“I’m a doctor. This is practically my natural habitat.”
I laughed against his mouth, and he swallowed the laugh too, and then he was lifting me off his lap and spinning me around, pressing my hands against the wall.
I heard him stand, felt his chest against my back, felt his cock nudging against my entrance.
The wall was cool against my palms. His breath was hot against my nape. Every nerve I owned lit up at once.
“Tell me to stop,” he said against my ear.
“Don’t you dare stop.”
He pushed inside me in one smooth thrust.
I cried out, bracing myself against the wall as he set a punishing rhythm.
One hand came around to squeeze my breast through my shirt.
The other slid down to circle my clit. He’d folded himself around me, chest to my spine, mouth at the curve where my neck met my shoulder, and I could feel every inch of him working, the flex of his thighs against the backs of mine, the tremor in the hand that held me.
“You’re so wet,” he groaned. “So wet and tight. I forgot how perfect you feel. How perfect you are.”
“Harder,” I gasped. “Please.”
He gave me what I asked for. Drove into me with enough force to make the wall shake, his fingers working my clit in tight circles, his mouth hot against my neck.
A framed anatomical print rattled on its hook beside my head.
I fixed my eyes on it, on the neat red-and-blue diagram of a human heart, and thought wildly that mine had no business behaving the way it was.
“Come for me again,” he demanded. “I want to feel you come on my cock.”
There was a version of me, the sensible one who’d survived the divorce, standing off to the side, reminding me that this was exactly how it always went with him.
That he was good at this precisely because he’d learned my body before he learned to neglect it.
I heard her. I did. And then he angled his hips and drove into the place that turned my knees to water and she stopped talking, and I gave up pretending I was the kind of woman who could take him or leave him.
I did. Screaming into my arm to muffle the sound, my whole body convulsing, pleasure crashing through me in waves.
He followed seconds later, groaning my name, spilling inside me for the second time.
I melted against the wall. He melted against me. We were a sweaty, trembling mess, half-dressed and thoroughly debauched. His forehead rested between my shoulder blades. I could feel him breathing me in.
“Take me back to the cottage,” I whispered.
“Yeah.” He pressed a kiss to my shoulder. “Okay.”
He helped me dress properly this time. Tucked himself away.
Ran his fingers through his hair, trying to look like he hadn’t just been fucking his ex-wife against a wall.
It didn’t work. He looked exactly as debauched as he was, color high on his cheekbones, mouth kiss-swollen, and the sight of it made my chest ache with a want I didn’t have a safe name for yet.
His phone buzzed. He typed out a quick message.
“Telling the team to handle cleanup,” he explained. “Everyone’s getting a bonus.”
“That’s one way to buy their silence.”
“I prefer to think of it as investing in their discretion.”
We snuck out the back door and across the parking lot.
His car was parked in the far corner, away from the crowd.
Cold air came off the harbor and I could taste salt in it.
Fairy lights glowed in the tent behind us, and someone’s laughter carried thin across the lot, and none of it was for us.
He opened my door for me, waited until I was settled, then jogged around to the driver’s side.
The drive to my rental cottage took fifteen minutes.
His hand rested on my thigh the entire time, warm and possessive.
My hand rested on top of his. Neither of us spoke.
The headlights caught scrub oak and shingled fences and the pale ribbon of road, and I watched his profile in the dashboard glow, the strong line of his throat when he swallowed, and I thought about how easy this was and how much that terrified me.
Easy was the trap. Easy was how I’d ended up married at twenty-three, blinking at my own reflection in a borrowed veil, so sure of him that I’d never once imagined a version of my life where he wasn’t the safest place in it.
Easy had cost me three years and a grief I still couldn’t name in a doctor’s office.
I knew better now. I was supposed to know better.
And still my hand stayed on top of his, and still I let his thumb draw slow circles against my leg the whole way home, and I told myself I could stop this whenever I wanted, which was the same lie I’d told myself the last time.
The restless energy between us filled the car.
Anticipation. Tension. The knowledge that we weren’t nearly finished with each other.
Under my palm his fingers tightened on my leg every time he had to slow for a turn, and I understood he resented anything that stole even a second of his attention from me.
He parked outside my cottage. Killed the engine. Turned to look at me. In the sudden dark his eyes found mine and held, and the whole car went quiet enough that I could hear my own pulse.
“Come inside?” I asked.
He chuckled, low and dark. “That’s my favorite thing to do.”
I groaned. “That was terrible.”
“You loved it.”
“I really didn’t.”
“Your smile says otherwise.”
He was right. I was smiling. I couldn’t stop, this stupid helpless grin I hadn’t worn in three years, and the worst part was I didn’t even want to.
I grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the door.
I told myself, one more time, that I could stop this whenever I wanted. I was still telling myself that as the door shut behind us, and under it, cold and clean, ran the certainty that I’d already handed this man the power to destroy me a second time. And I’d done it gift-wrapped.