Chapter 23 – Milo #2
Something crosses his face. A brightness that holds itself still, the way he goes when he wants something to be true and is checking whether it is.
He crosses the kitchen in the way of an eight-year-old who has decided that running would be too obvious but is moving at close to running speed anyway. He stops just short of her.
Looks up at her.
Says her name like a question.
Elena crouches down to his level. "Yes," she says. "I'm here."
I turn back to the stove. My face is doing something I'd prefer not to account for, and the pasta is a reasonable place to look.
"I have a new book," Liam says. "I need to tell you about it."
"I want to hear everything."
"Do you actually want to hear, or are you just being polite?"
A beat of silence. "I have never once said I wanted to hear about a book and not meant it."
Another pause. I know this pause, it's the one where he's deciding whether a piece of information is credible, and then he starts talking. I keep my back to the room and adjust the heat on the pasta and let them have the moment.
Dinner is easy in the way that real things are easy when the pressure is finally off. Liam talks without stopping. Elena follows every thread. She asks follow-up questions that send him off in new directions. Twice she catches my eye across the table.
The expression isn't forgiveness exactly. It's something in the same direction. Something that hasn't finished resolving but isn't closed.
After dinner Liam takes her to his room and shows her three things from the new school. She looks at each one with the same full attention she gave the crayon drawing.
I get him to bed at quarter past eight. He asks me in the same conversational tone he uses for everything whether Elena will be there in the morning.
"I don't know," I tell him.
"You could ask."
"I could."
He considers this with the gravity of someone filing important operational data. "She likes the good coffee," he says. "Not the decaf."
"I know."
"Just so you know."
"Goodnight, Liam."
He accepts this with dignified patience and closes his eyes, and I stand in his doorway for a moment in the dark before I pull the door to.
The penthouse is quiet when I come back out.
Elena is in the kitchen with her jacket off, running water over the dishes. Doing it without being asked and without making anything of it. Just doing it because they're there. I stand in the kitchen doorway and watch her.
She turns when she hears me and leans back against the counter and looks at me with the expression she uses when she has something to say and is deciding how to say it.
I wait.
"I trusted you," she says. "That's what I keep coming back to.
Not the report itself. I understood the logic of it eventually, the timeline, why it made sense to you at the start.
What I couldn't get past was that I had already decided to trust you.
I'd made that choice consciously, which is not something I do easily, and I'd handed you the one thing I don't hand people, and you already knew. "
She sets the dish towel down. "You let me be vulnerable with you and you already had the file. That's what I've been sitting with for two weeks."
"Yes," I say. There's nothing to add to that.
"I don't do that. I have spent a significant amount of my life making sure I don't do that, and with you I did it anyway.
" She looks at me. "And I held things back from you too.
I held Marcus back longer than I needed to.
I want you to know I'm aware of that. I'm not asking for honesty I'm not prepared to offer. "
"I know you are. That's not the same thing as what I did."
"No. It isn't." She holds my gaze. "Which is why I need to know that won't be who you are with me. That when something concerns you, about me, about us, about anything that touches both of us, you come to me. Not after. Not when it's already resolved. At the time."
"Yes."
"I mean it, Milo. I'm not asking for perfect. I'm asking for honest. Even when honest is difficult. Especially then."
"I know." I stay where I am, across the kitchen from her, because she's not finished and I won't crowd the space.
"I won't tell you it won't happen again because that's a thing people say when they want the conversation to end.
What I can tell you is that it was a failure I understand now, which is different from before.
I knew in the abstract that I withheld things.
I didn't understand what that cost until I watched you walk out. "
I look at her. "I don't want to manage you. I never actually wanted that. I just didn't know how to operate any other way and you were the first person who made the cost of it clear to me."
She's quiet for a moment.
"I was angry," she says. "I want you to know how angry I was. Not hurt, angry. Because I'd made a choice, a real one, and you'd let me make it without the information I needed to make it properly."
"You had every right to be."
"I know I did." The edge of her mouth moves. "I'm not asking for your permission to have been angry."
Something in my chest loosens. "No. I know."
She looks at me for a long moment, and the expression is doing the thing it does where it isn't quite closed anymore, where something behind it is making a decision.
"What I felt for you was real," she says quietly. "Before I left and after and during all of it. I need you to know that, that it wasn't something I was confused about. I was angry at the specific thing you did. Not at what we were."
"I know," I say. And then, because she deserves the same: "What I feel for you has been real for longer than I knew what to do with it. That's not a justification for anything. It's just true."
She nods once. Small, like she's filing it.
"Okay," she says. "Then we do this properly. We do it honestly. We do it without either of us managing the other, and if something's wrong we say so."
"Yes."
"And if you ever run a background report on me again I will leave and not come back."
"Understood."
The corner of her mouth moves again, more this time. Not quite a smile but the architecture of one.
She reaches for me.
Her hands find my face and she kisses me with the quality of someone who has been deciding whether to do this for two weeks and is done deciding.
I pull her in with both hands at her waist and hold her against me and she makes a sound low in her throat that I feel against my mouth, and whatever has been carefully managed between us is finished being managed.
We separate a fraction. Her hands stay at my jaw, thumbs at my cheekbones.
"Okay," she says quietly. It isn't an answer to anything. It's a door opening.
I kiss her again, harder this time, my hand sliding up her back and into her hair, and her fingers curl into the front of my shirt and pull.
She's already working my buttons with a focused efficiency that makes me want to laugh and makes me want her with an urgency I stopped pretending I could categorize weeks ago.
I get three buttons before she loses patience and pulls the shirt open the rest of the way, and her palms press flat against my chest and she leans up and puts her mouth against my throat, open and warm, and I press her back against the counter.
I pull back just far enough to look at her, no deflection, no management, just her eyes on mine.
I put my hands on her, the line of her ribs, the curve of her waist, the warm skin at the small of her back.
Then I put my mouth to her collarbone, her sternum, and when I take her breast into my mouth she makes a low sound and her fingers curl into my hair.
I take my time, tongue and teeth, slow and deliberate, and she tips her head back against the cabinet and her hips press toward me. She says my name once in the low rough way that means she means it.
I move to the other side and she gasps, her grip tightening, and I bring one hand up and use both at once. She moans "God" and then something that isn't a word at all, her whole chest rising and falling, her knuckles white on the counter edge. I keep going until she's pulling at my shoulders.
"Milo. Counter. Now."
Her hands drop to my belt. She undoes it with the same purposeful efficiency she brings to everything and gets my trousers open and pushes them off my hips and I return the favor with her jeans, zipper, waistband, down.
We're standing in the kitchen in the low light with the city outside the windows and nothing between us.
I lift her onto the counter. She moves to wrap her legs around me and I step back, just enough, and look at her.
Her hair is already a wreck and her lips are parted and she looks at me with those dark eyes and I think I could stand here for the rest of my life and not be finished with the fact of her.
Then I drop to my knees.
She makes a sharp sound above me, surprise and want in equal measure, and her hands find my hair and grip hard.
I take my time. Long, slow strokes with the flat of my tongue first, learning the geography of her, and then focused and deliberate where she needs it, and she stops trying to be quiet almost immediately.
Her thighs tremble against my shoulders.
She says my name twice, three times, says please once in a voice I have never heard from her before and intend to hear again.
I reach up without breaking the rhythm and find her breast with one hand, thumb circling, pressing, and she gasps so hard she loses the thread of whatever she was about to say.
"Don't stop," she manages. "Don't you dare—"