Chapter Eleven — Sienna #3
A moment later his grip goes tight, bruising on my hips, and his hips drive up once, hard, burying himself as deep as he can go. I feel him shudder against me, inside me, the hot pulse of him filling me, and his groan is low and wrecked and perfect.
We stay like that. His forehead pressed to my collarbone. My hands in his hair. The city humming below. The silk on the planks.
Eventually he reaches over, his arm stretching past me, and drapes the ivory silk across both of us like a blanket.
The charmeuse settles over our shoulders, cool and impossibly soft against my overheated skin.
The gesture is so unexpectedly tender that I have to look away, my gaze catching on the neon blur of the city below.
"The silk," I say.
"I'll have it cleaned." He settles me against his side, his arm heavy and warm across my hip.
"That's a twelve-hundred-dollar length of ivory charmeuse."
"I know that too."
I let it go.
***
He cooks the way he does everything that matters. Quietly and without ceremony. He stands at his range in a white T-shirt he put on at some point, a pan on the heat, comfortable with the space in the way of a man who actually lives here rather than inhabits it.
I sit on the counter. Because I live here now too, apparently.
"You can cook," I say.
"I can make eggs."
"That's cooking."
"It's the minimum threshold." He slides the eggs. "My mother believed you should be able to make three things from memory without preparation. Eggs. A sauce for pasta. And one thing you could give to someone who was upset."
Evie. Izzy talks about her sometimes, but Adrian never has, not until just now.
"What's the upset thing?"
"Grilled cheese." He glances at me. "Don't laugh."
I'm not laughing. I'm doing something much more embarrassing, which is falling a little more in love with him over grilled cheese.
"She taught you grilled cheese," I say.
"She taught me grilled cheese." He plates both and sets one in front of me. "Said it was the only thing that worked when everything else seemed too big to fix."
"Does it work?"
"On what?"
"Whatever's too big to fix."
"I don't know." He picks up his fork. "I've never let anything get that big before."
He says it like a fact, not a confession, which is somehow worse.
I look at the plate, then look at him.
"Adrian." He looks up, and for a second the words are right there. Something bigger than thank you, bigger than breakfast, bigger than I'm ready to say out loud yet. I hold his gaze for a moment, then look away. "Nothing." I pick up the fork. "Thank you for breakfast."
He sits across from me and we eat. The city moves outside. The chalk box sits on the counter where I left it.
At some point he reaches over and moves it two inches to give the coffee maker room, and then leaves it there, and doesn't say anything about it.
I make a note of that too. The same way I noted the shears.
After breakfast he goes to the study. I go back to the Vionnet biography and the terrace and the ivory silk.
The afternoon slips past without either of us noticing. Coffee. Work. The light changing on the Hudson. A conversation about the gown's underskirt that turns into something else when he pulls his chair around to see the sketch I'm making. Then his mouth is on mine. The sketch ends up on the floor.
By evening I'm sitting on the outdoor sofa, my legs across his lap, a book I'm not reading forgotten in my hand. Neither of us is pretending this is professional. Or temporary. Or anything other than what it clearly is.
He's been scrolling through something on his phone, one hand resting on my ankle, half his attention still somewhere at Kensington Global.
"I want to design it," I say, before I can stop myself.
He looks up.
"The wedding dress." I look at the Hudson. "Mine."
He's quiet for a moment.
Then: "For you?"
"No." I set the book face-down. "For us. The one you asked about." I look at him. "The one I said I'd think about."
I watch something happen in his face. It isn't the guarded version. Nothing about it is guarded.
"You've thought about it," he says.
"I've thought about it."
He reaches over and takes my hand. His thumb moves across my knuckles in a slow line. The same line, the same weight, the gesture that's been his throughout all of this.
"Design it," he says.
He's looking at me with that face.
The unguarded one.
I love you, I think. And then, because the gap between the thought and the saying of it feels, in this moment, smaller than it has ever felt: "I love you."
He says nothing.
For one second the old fear surfaces. The one that knows exactly what silence after those words used to mean, three years ago, in a room I still remember the color of. I feel it rise. I let it pass through instead of letting it take root.
He turns my hand over in his and presses his lips to my palm. Once. Like a promise he isn't ready to say out loud yet.
I don't need the words tonight. I've watched him choose me for six weeks running. The scarf he never should have kept, the password he never changed, a board call he canceled to sit in a fabric aisle at midnight. Actions I've learned to trust more than anything a man has ever told me.
That's enough. For now.