13. Emma #4
He watches my face the entire time, like he’s daring me to look away first. I don’t.
I can’t. His hand finds mine on the sheet and laces our fingers together, and something about that small, ordinary gesture undoes me faster than anything else he’s done tonight.
My spine arches off the mattress when he shifts deeper, and he catches the sound I make with his mouth, swallowing it like he wants to keep it for himself.
“Look at me,” he says, low, almost pleading, nothing like the man who negotiates board seats for a living. “Don’t close your eyes. I want to watch you.”
I don’t close them. I watch him instead, the way his jaw tightens, the way his own composure comes apart piece by piece the closer he gets, until the man staring down at me looks less like Alexander Hartley and more like the twenty-two-year-old boy who used to whisper my name like it was something sacred.
My whole body tightens around him, helpless, traitorous, and he groans my name into my throat like it’s being pulled out of him by force.
Afterward, neither of us moves for a long moment, both of us breathing like we ran here instead of simply falling apart together in his bed. He presses his mouth to my temple, then my jaw, then the corner of my mouth, unhurried now, like he has nowhere else in the world he needs to be.
I feel more exposed lying still beneath him than I did the entire time he was moving.
Alex collapses beside me after, one arm sliding beneath me before I’ve decided whether I’m staying or retreating to my own room out of habit. His breathing takes longer to even out than mine does, like some part of him is fighting sleep on principle.
I roll onto my side to study him, and he pulls me back against his chest before I can commit to the movement.
“Alex.”
“Don’t.”
I go still. His eyes stay closed. “Don’t what?”
“Move.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were thinking about it.”
“You can hear thoughts now?”
“Yours are loud.”
A ghost of a smile, there and gone, and then his hand starts moving slowly along my spine, once, twice, a third time, until the rhythm stops mid-stroke and his breathing changes into something deeper and steadier than I’ve heard from him in this apartment before.
Alex is asleep. This isn’t the restless half-sleep that usually twists through his features, the kind that leaves a line between his brows even at rest. He’s gone completely under, his face softer than I’ve seen it since we were both young enough to believe the future belonged to us.
The hard set around his mouth has vanished.
The line between his brows has smoothed out entirely.
He looks younger, not twenty-two exactly, but close enough that some reckless part of my heart remembers him anyway.
I trace the scar through his eyebrow without letting my fingers actually touch it. His arm tightens around me anyway, even asleep, like some part of him stands guard against the possibility of waking to an empty bed. The thought lodges somewhere under my sternum and refuses to leave.
I should sleep. I don’t. Instead, I memorize him. The gray just starting at one temple that I never noticed before tonight. The faint line beside his mouth that wasn’t there ten years ago. The dark sweep of his lashes against his cheek, still, finally, at rest.
Ten years lived without me. Proof of it everywhere I look.
His lips move. I lean closer, certain for a moment that he’s waking, and then he murmurs against my hair, barely more than breath shaped into words.
“I’ve missed you so much.”
The room disappears. My throat closes so completely that no sound comes out at all, not even the broken kind.
Alex doesn’t wake. He has no idea what he just said, no idea that ten years of silence just slipped out of him in his sleep and landed directly on the one part of me I’ve spent this entire time trying to protect.
I press my face against his chest so I don’t have to look at him while I fall apart quietly.
“I missed you too,” I whisper, so soft it barely disturbs the air between us.
He sleeps through the answer.
Maybe that’s safer, for both of us.
It becomes a pattern, one that isn’t good and isn’t sane, but somehow, impossibly, feels like ours.
Alex still leaves before I wake most mornings, and I’ve started listening for the elevator anyway, some pathetic, hopeful part of me convinced that one morning he’ll still be there when my eyes open.
He still comes home some nights carrying the whole outside world in the set of his shoulders, silent through dinner, distant enough that I second-guess every soft thing that happened between us the night before.
And then there are the days when one glance across a room is enough to erase every ounce of that distance in a single breath.
A kiss in the kitchen becomes my back against the pantry door, his hand fisted in my hair, both of us pretending we came in here for something other than each other.
A conversation in the hallway about nothing important ends with his hands sliding beneath my shirt before either of us finishes the sentence.
Once I walk into his office to ask whether he wants dinner and end up sitting on the edge of his desk with his mouth between my thighs while whatever I was cooking burns on the stove two rooms away.
He eats the blackened chicken afterward without a single complaint, cutting into it as if it’s the finest meal he’s had all week.
“You don’t have to eat that,” I tell him, watching him chew through what is objectively an insult to the chicken that gave its life for this.
“It’s fine.”
“It is barely recognizable.”
“I’ve eaten worse.”
“When?”
“Your first attempt at lasagna.”
I stare at him across the table. “That was ten years ago.”
“Some things scar a man for life.” He says it without looking up from his plate, and the corner of his mouth twitches, not quite a smile, but close enough to count.
I kick his shin under the table. Bee jumps into the empty chair between us and meows with outrage at being ignored.
Alex looks at her. “No.”
She stares back, unmoved.
“No,” he says again, with more authority this time, the same tone he probably uses to end board meetings.
Bee places one paw on the table.
“Don’t.”
The second paw follows without hesitation.
He turns to me. “Your cat has no respect for authority.”
“She knows you’re bluffing.”
“She’s on my table.”
“She slept in your office chair all last week.”
“That explains why it’s covered in cat hair.”
“You noticed?”
“I own eyes.” He moves his paperwork out of the way instead of moving the cat, which tells me everything I need to know about who actually wins this particular negotiation, and I laugh until my stomach hurts.
There is this thing nobody warned me about.
The intimacy isn’t only in the bedroom. Some nights he comes home too tired for anything except me climbing into bed beside him, and he says nothing at all, just lifts the blanket and waits until I’m under it before his hand finds my waist and pulls me back against him like it’s the easiest decision he’s made all day.
I wake once with my spine pressed to his chest and his face buried in my hair, and I lie there memorizing the weight of his arm across me instead of going back to sleep, greedy for every second I’m allowed to keep it.
Another night he sits at the opposite end of the sofa reviewing documents while I read, Bee sprawled between us like a furry demilitarized zone, offended by the lack of attention from either direction until she finally marches straight across his lap and deposits herself directly on top of his file.
Alex reaches over without even glancing up and scratches beneath her chin. She starts purring loud enough that I lose my place twice.
“You hate cats,” I say.
“I never said that.”
“You called her a menace, the day we met her.”
“She is a menace.”
Bee leans harder into his hand, utterly shameless.
“You’re petting the menace.”
“I’m trying to make her stop making that sound.”
“By making her purr louder?”
He looks at me over the top of the page, warmth unguarded in his eyes for exactly as long as it takes him to notice I’ve caught him at it. “Read your book, Belle.”
I smile down at the page instead of answering, because this, somehow, is worse than the sex.
Sex I can call hunger and bottle it somewhere separate from the rest of this mess.
This feels like something we lost a long time ago and are finding pieces of again.
This feels like the life that might have existed if I’d never climbed into a government car ten years ago and let it drive me out of his.
The hardest part is the leaving. Every morning he goes, and my whole body tuned to the absence of him like a limb gone numb.
I catch myself checking the clock against the time he usually texts, counting down the hours until the elevator chimes again, hating how completely I’ve handed that power over to a man who still doesn’t trust me.
By the time I hear the doors open in the evening, my pulse is already climbing; some helpless, ten-years-starved part of me lighting up before I’ve even decided whether today is a good day or a bad one.
Sometimes I catch him looking at me from across a room in the space between one thought and the next, and for half a second there’s no suspicion in his face at all, only that old, impossible softness I used to take for granted when I was twenty and thought we had all the time in the world.
Then something reminds him. Mark. Thomas.
The lies stacked up between us like a wall neither of us built alone.
It closes again, fast, like a door slamming somewhere behind his eyes, and every single time I feel the loss of it physically, a small, ache right under my ribs where hope had just started to unclench.