33. Sophia
— ? —
Sophia
I caught him in the shower on a Tuesday morning.
It wasn’t intentional, exactly. I’d come into the bathroom to grab my hairbrush, and the glass door of the shower was fogged just enough to be interesting but not enough to actually hide anything.
Alexander was facing away from me, water streaming down his back, completely unaware that I’d stopped dead in the doorway with my hairbrush forgotten in my hand.
I stayed longer than strictly necessary.
The tattoo on his forearm was still healing, the new lines I’d drawn now permanently inked alongside the old ones.
Seeing them there, my design extended into our future, sent a warm, possessive ache through my chest. He’d made it permanent.
He’d chosen to carry what we were building the same way he’d carried what we’d lost.
Also, his shoulders were ridiculous, and I was only human.
“Are you going to stand there all morning, or are you going to say hello?”
I jumped. Alexander had turned around, water dripping down his face, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. He hadn’t bothered to cover himself, which I appreciated for reasons that had nothing to do with artistic admiration.
“I was getting my hairbrush,” I said with as much dignity as I could muster.
“Your hairbrush is on the counter. You’ve been watching me for at least two minutes.”
“I was not.”
“You absolutely were.” He pushed the wet hair back from his forehead. “Not that I mind. Feel free anytime.”
“Don’t be smug. It’s unattractive.”
“You find everything I do attractive. You just told me so with your eyes.”
I grabbed my hairbrush and turned to leave, but his voice stopped me.
“You could join me, you know. Instead of lurking in doorways like a voyeur.”
I considered it. The steam, the water, the promise of his hands on my skin. It was tempting. Extremely tempting.
Instead, I crossed to the shower door, leaned in, and kissed him quickly on the mouth.
Then I walked away.
“Are you serious right now?” His voice followed me out of the bathroom. “You came in here to stare at me and leave?”
“Apparently.”
“That’s cruel, Sophia.”
“Consider it payback for the forehead-kissing incident.” I paused in the doorway, looking back over my shoulder. “You made me blush in front of your entire company. This is revenge.”
“That was months ago.”
“I have a long memory.”
I made it as far as the bedroom before I heard the shower turn off. The bathroom door opened behind me, and I turned to find Alexander standing there with a towel around his waist and water still dripping down his chest.
I should have kept walking. I’d made my point; the victory was mine; a smarter woman would have taken it and gone.
Instead I stood there and let my eyes do the thing they always did with him, the thing I’d never fully trained them out of.
Down the line of his throat. The water tracking over his collarbone and the flat plane of his chest, catching in the trail of hair below his navel, disappearing under the towel that was slung indecently low across his hips.
His forearms. God, his forearms, still braced on the doorframe, and the memory of exactly what those hands were capable of hit me low and hot and unhelpful.
My thighs pressed together on their own. My mouth had gone dry. Three years, a divorce, and an entire reconstructed life, and the man could still turn me stupid just by being wet in a doorway.
“You’re getting my floor wet,” I said.
“You’re getting my patience thin.”
“Is that supposed to sound threatening? Because it mostly sounds like you’re describing fabric.”
He crossed the room in three steps and caught my waist, pulling me against him. The towel was soaked, and now so was my shirt, but I couldn’t bring myself to care because his mouth was on my neck and his hands were sliding under my hem.
“I thought you were busy,” I managed.
“I’m never too busy for this.”
“That’s not what you said last week when I tried to seduce you during your conference call.”
“That was work. This is a Tuesday.” He found the sensitive spot below my ear that always made me shiver. “I have different standards for Tuesdays.”
“What are your standards for Tuesdays?”
“Flexible.” His hands found my bra clasp. “Extremely flexible.”
We didn’t make it back to the shower.
We didn’t make it to the bed either, at first. Alexander lifted me onto the dresser, and I wrapped my legs around his waist while he pulled my shirt over my head.
The mirror behind me was cold against my back, and I could see our reflection in it, the tangle of limbs and the hungry way he was looking at me.
“You’re beautiful,” he said.
“You’re wet.”
“Those two things are not mutually exclusive.”
I laughed, and he kissed me through it, swallowing the sound.
His hands were everywhere at once, one splayed hot across the small of my back to hold me against him, the other dragging up my ribs to close over my breast, his thumb rolling my nipple until I gasped into his mouth.
He knew exactly where to touch me. Three years hadn’t cost him a single piece of the map.
“Tell me what you want,” he murmured against my throat.
“I want you to stop teasing.”
“But the teasing is the best part.”
“The teasing is the frustrating part.”
“Same thing.” His mouth traced down my sternum. “You started this when you walked away from my shower. I’m just returning the favor.”
“I’m beginning to regret that decision.”
“Good. Regret builds character.”
He dropped to his knees in front of the dresser, hooked my thighs over his shoulders, and licked into me like he had a point to prove.
I stopped being capable of forming sentences.
His tongue worked my clit while two fingers curled inside me, and I gripped the edge of the wood hard enough to make my knuckles white.
He took his time, the smug bastard, licking and sucking until my legs were shaking around his ears.
He was infuriatingly slow, bringing me close and then backing off just when I thought I might shatter.
“Alex,” I gasped.
“Hmm?”
“If you don’t make me come in the next thirty seconds, I’m going to kill you.”
“So violent.” He sucked my clit hard and slid a third finger in, and that was it, I came against his mouth with his name on my lips and his hands pinning my thighs open, riding his face through every filthy pulse of it.
He stood up, looking entirely too pleased with himself. I grabbed the front of his towel and pulled him closer.
“My turn,” I said.
“You don’t have to…”
“I want to.” I slid off the dresser and pushed him back toward the bed. “Lie down.”
He did, and I climbed over him, taking my time the way he’d taken his, wrapping my hand around his cock and stroking him slow until his hips chased my fist. Then I sank down onto him inch by inch, watching his eyes roll back as I took him all the way in.
“Eyes on me,” I whispered.
He opened his eyes.
“I love you,” I told him, starting to move. “Even when you tease me. Even when you drip water all over my floor. Even when you’re insufferably smug about how much I want you.”
“I love you too.” His hands found my hips, guiding but not controlling. “Even when you torture me with your shower voyeurism. Even when you’re impossibly stubborn. Even when you walk away just to make a point.”
“I always make excellent points.”
“You make terrible points. Your points are revenge-based and cruel.”
“And yet you love me anyway.”
“Against my better judgment.”
I laughed again, and this time he laughed with me, even as I rode him harder, grinding my clit against him on every downstroke, chasing it.
It was different from the desperate urgency of our first time after three years apart, different from the grief-raw tenderness of the night we’d learned to let each other be hurt.
This was playful. Easy. The intimacy that came from knowing someone so well you could laugh in the middle of making love.
“Fuck, you feel good wrapped around me,” he groaned.
“Flattery will get you everywhere.”
“I’m counting on it.”
I rode him until we were both close, until his grip on my hips tightened and his breathing went ragged. Then I slowed down, deliberately, making him groan.
“Payback,” I reminded him.
“You’re evil.”
“You love it.”
“I really do.”
When I finally came it hit me in a hot rush, my cunt clenching down around his cock so hard he groaned and gripped my hips and followed me right over, spilling into me while I ground down and rode out every last pulse.
It was his hands in my hair and my forehead pressed to his and our eyes locked the whole time, and then I collapsed against his chest, breathing hard, completely satisfied.
“That was worth getting my floor wet,” I admitted.
“High praise indeed.”
We lay tangled together for a while, neither of us in a hurry to move. His fingers traced patterns on my back, idle and affectionate.
“What time is your flight?” I asked.
“This afternoon. I should probably pack.”
“Probably.”
Neither of us moved.
“I hate this part,” I said quietly.
“What part?”
“The part where you leave. The part where we go back to phone calls and video chats and the stretch of empty days until the next visit.”
Alexander’s hand stilled on my back. “I hate it too.”
“I know long distance is working. I know we’ve figured out how to make it sustainable. But sometimes I just want you here. Not for a weekend, not for a visit. Just here.”
“So do I.”
I propped myself up on my elbow to look at him. “What would that look like? You being here more permanently?”
“I’ve thought about it,” he admitted. “I could work remotely most of the time. Whitmore Maison has survived my reduced involvement. Henri could handle day-to-day operations, and I could fly to Paris when I need to be there in person.”
“But?”
“But Florence is your city. Your atelier. Your life. I don’t want you to feel like I’m invading the space you built for yourself.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I know.” He sat up, the sheets pooling around his waist. “I want to be here, Sophia. I’ve wanted it for months. But every time I think about asking, I wonder if you’re ready for that. If having me here full-time would start to feel like giving up the independence you worked so hard to create.”
“I don’t want to give up my independence.”
“I know.”
“But I also don’t want to keep building our relationship around flights and weekends.” I sat up too, facing him. “I want more. I’m just scared of what more might cost.”
“What are you scared of, specifically?”
“That you’ll eventually resent being here. That Florence will stop feeling like a choice and start feeling like a sacrifice. That ten years from now, you’ll wake up and realize loving me cost you your life in Paris, and you’ll blame me for it.”
Alexander’s expression shifted. Hurt flickered across his face before he could bury it.
“You still think I’m going to wake up one morning and decide loving you cost me my life?” he asked.
“Part of me does. I’m sorry, Alex. I know you’ve changed. I know you’ve proved over and over that you choose me. But part of me is still waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
“And what would convince you? What evidence would be enough to prove I’m not going to become the man who resents you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe I just need to learn to live with the uncertainty.”
“I can’t promise I’ll never be frustrated,” Alexander said carefully.
“I can’t promise our future will always be easy or that I’ll never miss Paris or that I won’t have moments where I wish things were simpler.
But I can promise I’ll tell you the moment this stops working.
I can promise I won’t let resentment quietly become our relationship again. ”
“That’s not certainty.”
“No. It’s not.” He took my hand. “I can promise I love you. I can promise what I choose today. But I can’t give you evidence from a future we haven’t lived yet.”
“And ten years from now?”
“Ten years from now, I’ll still be choosing you. But you won’t believe that until we’ve actually lived it.” He squeezed my fingers. “The only way to find out if our future works is to build it. I can’t prove it in advance. I can only show you, day by day, that I mean what I say.”
I wanted to argue, to demand certainty, a guarantee, a promise written in stone that this would work out.
But certainty wasn’t what our first marriage had lacked.
We’d been certain we loved each other. We’d been certain we’d figure it out.
What we’d lacked was the willingness to be honest when things hurt, the ability to speak before resentment had time to fester.
And I was different now. I knew I’d speak when anything felt wrong, that I’d protect the life I’d built. I knew I’d leave before I ever made myself smaller just to keep him.
That had to be enough. Not certainty about him. Certainty about myself.
“I’m still scared,” I said.
“I know.”
“I’m scared that wanting this will make me someone I don’t want to be.”
“I know that too.”
“But I also know that I trust myself now. I trust myself to speak up, to set boundaries, to choose myself if I have to.” I took a breath. “And I trust you to listen when I do.”
“I will. I swear I will.”
“Then move in.” The words came out before I could overthink them. “Move in anyway. Even though I’m scared. Even though we can’t predict how it will turn out.”
Alexander stared at me like he was waiting for the catch. “You mean that.”
“I mean it. I’d rather risk being wrong than spend the rest of my life wondering what we could have built.” I leaned forward and kissed him. “Move in, Alex. Come home.”
His arms came around me, pulling me close, and I felt him exhale like he’d been holding his breath for months.
“I’ll talk to Henri tomorrow,” he said against my hair. “Start figuring out the logistics.”
“Good.”
“This is really happening?”
“This is really happening.”
He pulled back to look at my face, and his eyes were bright with emotion I’d rarely seen him show.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you too.” I smiled. “Now go pack. You have a flight to catch.”
“I’m suddenly very motivated to miss it.”
“Absolutely not. We just decided you’re moving here permanently. You can survive one more trip to Paris.”
“The cruelty never ends with you.”
“Consider it preparation for living with me full-time.”
He laughed, and I laughed with him, and the future we’d been afraid to imagine suddenly felt possible.
Terrifying, but possible.
That was going to have to carry us.