21. Skye
— ? —
Skye
The Foundation event is a triumph.
I stand at the podium in the Beverly Hilton ballroom, thanking donors, announcing the new scholarship initiatives, watching Maria from Juilliard give a speech that makes half the room cry.
The chandeliers cast everything in gold.
The crowd is full of people who matter - industry executives, philanthropists, the kind of people who write checks with enough zeros to change lives.
This is what I built. This is what Adriana tried to destroy. And here it is, thriving - alive in a way that has nothing to do with anyone’s last name.
Jayden is in the back of the room.
Not at the head table - I’d asked him not to sit there. This is my thing, I’d told him. I need to do it without being Mrs. Rowland.
He’d understood. He’d bought a regular ticket. Sat in the back. Clapped louder than anyone.
I feel him anyway. All night. A low, constant awareness at the edge of my vision, like heat from a lamp I refuse to look at directly.
Every time I glance toward the rear tables, he’s already watching me.
Not possessively. Not like he used to, as if I were an accessory he’d misplaced and finally found.
Like a man who has been starving and is trying, very hard, not to show it.
When the event ends, he finds me near the exit.
“You were incredible.”
“I know.” I grin. “I’m trying this new thing where I acknowledge my own accomplishments instead of deflecting.”
“Dr. Reeves would be proud.”
“Dr. Reeves would tell you to stop using my emotional growth as a deflection from your own.”
“She would. She did. Last Tuesday.” He offers his arm. “Can I walk you out?”
I take it.
His sleeve is warm under my fingers. Wool, expensive, familiar. The muscle beneath it flexes once, then stills, as if he’s reminding himself not to pull me closer. I should let go. I don’t.
The lobby is still crowded with donors and board members, so we slip through a side door toward the service elevators.
Quieter. More private. The corridor smells like industrial cleaner and leftover perfume.
My heels click too loudly on the tile. His hand rests at the small of my back - barely there, a suggestion more than a touch - and I feel it anyway, a bright point of heat through silk.
The elevator doors open. Empty.
We step inside. Jayden presses the button for the parking garage.
The doors close.
And suddenly the space feels very small.
I’m hyper-aware of everything - the hum of the machinery, the faint smell of his cologne, the heat radiating off his body three inches from mine.
We’re alone. Actually alone. For the first time all night.
For the first time in months that hasn’t been a scheduled conversation or a careful public appearance.
My pulse is doing something stupid.
I can see our reflections in the brushed steel: me in the black dress that makes me look like I belong at podiums, him in the charcoal suit I used to unbutton with my eyes closed. We look like a couple. We look like people who have already decided something.
We haven’t.
“You’re standing too close,” I say without looking at him.
“There’s nowhere else to stand.”
“There’s an entire elevator, Jayden.”
“I know.” A beat, rough at the edges. “I’m choosing not to use it.”
I make the mistake of turning my head.
He’s looking at me like he used to. Before.
When I was still the center of his universe and not just a satellite orbiting his career.
His gaze drops - mouth, throat, the hollow at the base of my neck - then drags back up like it costs him.
His jaw is tight. His hands are in his pockets, fisted, as if that’s the only thing keeping them there.
The air between us thickens. I can feel my own breathing change, shallower, traitorously loud in the quiet.
Don’t, I tell myself. Not here. Not like this. Not until you’re sure your body isn’t going to betray you halfway through wanting him.
My body is not listening.
“Jayden.”
“Yeah?”
His voice has dropped. I know that register. I used to live in it.
“We’re in an elevator.”
“I’m aware.”
“There are cameras.”
“I’m aware of that too.”
“So whatever you’re thinking about doing-”
“I’m thinking about kissing you.” His voice is low, rough, scraped down to something honest. “I’ve been thinking about it all night.
Watching you up there, owning that room, being the woman I forgot you were.
” He steps closer. The three inches become two.
Become one. His cologne is warmer this close, mixed with the faint salt of his skin.
“I’m thinking about pressing you against that wall and kissing you until you forget every bad thing I ever did. ”
My breath catches. Heat floods low in my stomach, sharp and immediate, so vivid it’s almost humiliating. I can picture it too easily - my back against the panel, his mouth on mine, his hands where they used to go without asking because they already knew the map of me.
I want it. God, I want it. That’s the problem.
“That’s… very specific.”
“I’ve had time to think about it.”
The elevator passes floor three. Then floor two. Each number a small, ticking betrayal. I should step back. I should say his name like a warning instead of a plea.
I don’t step back.
“We shouldn’t,” I whisper.
“Probably not.”
His eyes are on my mouth. I can feel it like a touch.
“Someone could see.”
“They could.”
Floor one. The display ticks toward G. The hum of the cables sounds like a countdown. My fingers twitch at my sides. If I reach for him, if I so much as lean-
“Jayden-”
He kisses me.
It is not gentle. It is not tentative. It is months of wanting compressed into a single point of contact, and it hits me like a door swinging open in a house I thought I’d locked.
My back hits the elevator wall. The metal is cold through my dress; his mouth is not.
His hands are in my hair, tilting my head, deepening the angle with a hunger that has nothing polite left in it.
I fist his lapels and pull him closer, closer, until there’s no space left between us, until the hard line of his body is flush against mine and I can feel exactly how much he’s been thinking about this.
He makes a sound against my mouth - something between a groan and a prayer - and I feel it everywhere. In my throat. In my knees. In the place low in my belly that has been quiet for months and is suddenly, viciously awake.
My hands slide under his jacket, over the heat of his shirt, the ridged muscle of his back.
His drop to my waist, then lower, gripping my hips hard enough to leave fingerprints, hauling me against him like he’s afraid I’ll vanish if he doesn’t.
I gasp and he swallows the sound, kisses me deeper, slower now, devastatingly thorough - like he’s trying to memorize me, or apologize with his mouth, or both.
I taste mint and champagne and him. My thoughts scatter. For a handful of seconds there is no gala, no cameras, no history. There is only the wet heat of his mouth, the grind of his hip against mine, the way my body opens toward him like it never got the memo that we were supposed to be careful.
“I want you,” he breathes against my lips, wrecked. “God, Skye, I want you so much it’s killing me.”
“I know.” I’m shaking. “I want you too.”
His forehead drops to mine. His breath is ragged.
One of his thumbs is stroking the seam of my dress at my hip, a tiny, mindless motion that is going to undo me if the elevator doesn’t.
I could let him. I could hitch my thigh and let his hand slide and forget, for five more floors, that forgetting has a cost.
“But?”
“But-”
The elevator dings.
G.
The doors slide open.
Two valets are standing in the parking garage, waiting for the elevator, deep in conversation about someone’s Lakers tickets.
Jayden and I spring apart like teenagers caught by parents.
The loss of him is physical - cold air rushing into the space his body occupied, my mouth still wet, my pulse still trying to climb out of my throat.
I smooth my dress. He adjusts his jacket.
Both of us are breathing hard, flushed, absolutely wrecked.
I can feel where his hands were. I can still taste him.
The valets step into the elevator, still talking, barely glancing at us.
“-I’m telling you, courtside is overrated. You spend the whole game worried about getting hit by a sweaty millionaire-”
Jayden and I slip out into the parking garage. The doors close behind them.
Silence.
Then I start laughing. I can’t help it. The absurdity of it - two adults, hiding in a parking garage, disheveled and desperate like they’re sneaking around at prom.
My lipstick is almost certainly destroyed.
My body is still humming, still leaning toward a man who is standing three feet away now, looking at me like he’s in pain.
“That was-” I gasp.
“Yeah.”
“We almost-”
“I know.”
“In an elevator.”
“With cameras.”
“Oh God, there were cameras.” I press my hands to my face. “I’m going to end up on TMZ. ‘Disgraced Charity Wife Makes Out in Elevator.’ My mother will see it.”
“Your mother doesn’t watch TMZ.”
“My mother has Google alerts set up for my name. She will absolutely see it.”
He’s laughing now too. Both of us leaning against the concrete wall of the parking garage, shaking with the kind of laughter that comes from released tension - and from the other kind, the kind that didn’t get to finish.
I can still feel the ghost of his grip on my hips.
I cross my arms so I won’t reach for him again.
“For what it’s worth,” he says when he can breathe again, “I regret nothing.”
“You’re going to regret it when the footage leaks.”
“Worth it.”
The laughter fades. The parking garage is cold and echoey and smells like exhaust. Not exactly romantic.
But neither of us moves to leave.
Want is still sitting in my chest like a live wire. Under it, something else - not fear, exactly. The body remembering a different hallway. A different night. A husband who chose damage control over her.
But this time, when I look at him in the fluorescent light, I don’t see that man. I see the one who stopped the second I pulled away in the car. The one who’s standing three feet away right now, hands in his pockets, waiting to see what I need.
“I meant what I said,” Jayden says quietly. “In there. I want you. I’ve wanted you every day since you left.”
“I know.”
“But?”
I’m quiet for a moment. Trying to find the words. My mouth still feels kissed. That makes this harder, not easier.
“In the elevator, when you kissed me, it was perfect. For about ten seconds, it was everything I’ve been missing.
” I pause. Feel the truth arrive, unwelcome and necessary.
“And then part of me went somewhere else. Part of me was standing in that service hallway at the gala, and you were telling me to let Legal handle it, and I was wondering if my husband even knew me at all.”
His face falls.
“I’m not saying that to hurt you,” I add quickly. “I’m saying it because I need you to understand. My body doesn’t always trust you yet. Even when my head does. Even when my heart wants to.” I swallow hard. “Wanting you isn’t the same as being ready for you. I need you to hear that.”
“What do you need?”
The same question he asked before. The question the old Jayden never would have asked. It lands in me like warmth and grief at the same time.
“Time. More time than I thought.” I reach out and take his hand.
His fingers close around mine immediately, carefully, like he’s afraid of holding too hard after what just happened.
“And maybe not elevators. Elevators apparently trigger some kind of ‘we might get caught’ panic that does not mix well with trauma recovery.”
“Noted. No elevators.” He squeezes my hand. A spark jumps anyway - ridiculous, given what we just did. “What about stairwells?”
“Jayden.”
“Closets? Coat rooms? The back seat of my car, which is, I should mention, parked approximately forty feet from here?”
I laugh again - softer this time, fonder. The wanting doesn’t leave. It just sits down beside the laugh and waits.
“You’re impossible.”
“I’m patient. For you, I’m endlessly patient.” He lifts my hand to his lips. Kisses my knuckles. Slow. Reverent. The opposite of the elevator, and somehow just as dangerous. “When you’re ready. If you’re ever ready. I’ll be here.”
“Even if it takes months?”
“Even if it takes years.”
I look at him. Really look. Searching for the cracks. The performance. The angle.
I don’t find it. I find a man with a kiss-bruised mouth and patience in his eyes and a hunger he’s choosing not to use against me. That, more than the kiss, is what makes my throat tight.
“Take me home,” I say. “Not to your place. To Ellen’s.”
“Okay.”
No argument. No bargaining. I almost wish he’d push, just so I could be angry instead of this - this aching, unfinished tenderness.
“And maybe… maybe next time, we can try dinner. Somewhere with tablecloths and no security cameras.”
“I can do tablecloths.” He pulls out his keys. “I can do anything, as long as there’s a next time.”
“There’s a next time.”
He smiles. The real one. The one I’ve been chasing since this whole mess started. It does something to me that the kiss also did, quieter and worse.
“Then that’s enough for tonight.”
It isn’t. We both know it isn’t. It’s what we can have.
The drive to Ellen’s is quiet. Comfortable. His hand rests on the center console; halfway there, I put mine on top of it. His thumb strokes once across my knuckles, a question he doesn’t ask out loud. I leave my hand there anyway.
Neither of us speaks.
My body is still catching up. Still replaying the wall, the sound he made, the way he’d said I want you like it was the only true sentence left in him.
I watch the city slide past the window and think about tablecloths.
About years. About the fact that I stopped the night and still feel like I didn’t stop anything at all.
At Ellen’s building, he doesn’t try to come up. Doesn’t push. Just kisses my forehead - soft, devastatingly careful after the violence of his mouth in the elevator - and says, “Thank you for letting me be there tonight. Watching you own that room was the best thing I’ve seen in years.”
I get out. Watch him drive away. The place on my forehead burns. The place on my mouth burns worse.
My phone buzzes.
Jayden: For the record, that elevator kiss is going to sustain me for approximately the next six weeks. Take all the time you need. I’ll be over here, replaying it on loop.
Skye: You’re ridiculous.
Jayden: I’m in love. Same thing.
I’m smiling when I walk inside.
Ellen takes one look at my face and says, “Something happened.”
“Nothing happened.”
“Your lipstick is smeared and you look like you ran a marathon. Something definitely happened.”
I sit on the couch. Consider lying. Consider saying we almost didn’t stop and then deciding that some truths are still only mine.
“We made out in an elevator.”
Ellen drops her wine glass.