16. Cali
CALI
I can't sleep.
I've been arguing with myself for two hours that I'm going to crash any minute now, that this is a totally normal night and I am a totally normal woman who did a totally normal thing today, even if, yes, okay, that thing was marry a mob boss at a courthouse with my son as the witness and a caterpillar in a shoebox as backup.
The kids went down easy. Isabella was exhausted, so she passed out without complaint. Hayden asked me if he did a good job being the witness, and I told him he did the best job anyone has ever done. He fell asleep proud.
Ronan is more of an enigma.
He's one door down. It seems sort of cruel, but that was the deal. Paper marriage. Hands to himself. Separate rooms. I wrote the rules. I was very clear about them.
But Daytime Cali has a lot more backbone than Nighttime Cali does.
I blame his vows. He pulled a slick one there, blindsiding me with those.
I'm not a good man, but I'm not taking this, you're giving it.
I said yes, and I meant it, and then I kissed him in front of my children and God and the City of New York and I felt it from the tips of my toes to the roots of my hair.
You can't unfeel a thing like that.
I roll over, then back, punch my pillow, unpunch it. "This is stupid," I tell the dark. "Right? It's dumb. I'm being dumb. I should snort an Ambien and go to sleep before I do something really silly."
I get out of bed. I'm just going to get a glass of water. But when I reach the stairs, I don't go down them.
I go toward his door instead.
I stop in front of it. There's a line of light underneath. He's awake. I'm not surprised. He doesn't sleep, not really; I've figured that much out. He lies flat on his back with his eyes open and he waits for the world to try something.
I stand there in my sleep shorts and one of his shirts, which I have absolutely no explanation for wearing, but I don't knock.
I just stand there.
But then my own house stabs me in the back, because the floorboard under my foot creaks. There's a long silence. Ronan's voice floats through the door.
"You're standing on the creaky one, Ms. Meadows."
Heat floods up my neck. "I'm getting water."
"The kitchen's downstairs."
"I'm actually aware of that. I do live here."
"You do." A pause. "And yet you seem lost."
I press my forehead against the door. The wood is cool. "I couldn't sleep."
"No. Neither could I."
"Because you never sleep?"
"I was busy listening to you, actually."
I fake a shocked gasp. "You heard me the whole time?"
Ronan laughs. "From the moment you left your room."
"You could've said something sooner!"
"Where's the fun in that? I wanted to see how long you'd stand there."
I want to be furious. But there's a laugh caught in my chest and it's got nothing to do with fury.
"This was a mistake," I declare. "I'm going back to bed."
"Okay."
I don't move.
"You're not going back to bed," he accuses a moment later.
"I… might be."
"You haven't moved an inch."
"Maybe I've got very quiet feet."
"You don't. You walk like a bison. It's one of my favorite things about you."
That does it. The laugh sneaks out. I press my hand over my mouth to keep it quiet so I don't wake the kids, and as I do, I hear something on the other side of the door, a shift, the bed maybe. Then his voice is closer, right there, like he's standing on his side of it same as I'm standing on mine.
"Open the door, Calista."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because there are rules. I should know: I'm the one who made them up."
"You did. Beautiful work. Very thorough." A beat. "You know what they didn't cover, though?"
I don't take his bait, but my silence is almost as good as if I'd asked, What?
"They said not a word about whose door gets opened by whom."
I stare at the light under the door.
"You're doing that thing," I whisper, "where you find the loophole and dress it up like it was my idea all along."
"I'm not doing anything. I'm one door down, exactly where you put me, being extremely well-behaved." His voice lowers to a dangerous purr. "You're the one standing in the hall."
He's right. I made all these rules to hold him at arm's length and he honored every one of them, folded up every villain costume I built for him and handed it back, and now, I'm the one out here with my forehead on his door because I can't stand it anymore, because he won't break.
If anything is going to break tonight, it's going to have to be me.
"I still hate you," I warn, even as my hand goes toward the knob.
"You've mentioned."
"You stole my company."
"I gave it back."
"You put a spy in my house."
"She was very well-qualified."
"You took my mirrors."
"They're back, too."
"You bugged my kids' backpacks."
"I'd do it again in a fucking heartbeat, Calista."
"And then you had the balls to say what you said today. You—" I choke up for a second. "You meant it, didn't you? Those vows."
He sighs. "Every. Last. Word."
I rotate the knob half a turn. "If I open this door," I say, "it doesn't mean anything."
"Of course not."
"It's not us getting back together."
"I'd never dream of asking for that."
"It sure as shit isn't love."
"No, I wouldn't presume that far."
I take a breath. "It's just—my body is annoyed with me.
That's all this is. Weeks of you and your glasses and your pancakes and your stupid hands, and my body is upset about it.
I'm going to handle it and then I'm going to go back to bed and in the morning, we are going to pretend this never happened. "
"Understood."
"You have to promise me you'll pretend this never happened."
"I promise nothing," he says. "But I'll do whatever you want."
Well, that's about all the negotiation I can stand. I open the door.
He's standing right there, exactly where I knew he'd be, in nothing but the gray sweatpants. The light is on behind him so he's edged in gold. His eyes rake over me once, the shirt, the bare legs, my one hand still white-knuckled on the doorframe.
"You're wearing my shirt," he says.
"Shut up and kiss me, asshole."
"If that's what you want, wife."
Then he slams me against the wall. It's exactly as hard as I need it to be, just a hint of pain on the edge of an overwhelming surge of thank fucking God it's finally happening. It's grief and rage and eight weeks of him being decent when I needed him to give me a reason not to be.
His hands come up and frame my face. Then they slide down my neck, over the shirt, and he walks me backward into the room and kicks the door shut behind us with his heel. He guides me until the backs of my knees hit the guest bed and I fall down hard.
He looks down at me. "You'll have to be quiet," he murmurs. "The kids are down the hall." His mouth tips sinfully. "I'm going to make that very difficult for you, though."
"You're insufferable."
"And yet you married me anyway."
He drops to his knees.
I clap a hand over my mouth. He wasn't kidding—this is going to be a problem.
He's got that look on his face that says he means business.
He pushes the shirt up over my hips and hooks his fingers in the waistband of my shorts and looks up at me, one eyebrow raised, asking, because he always asks, and I nod so hard my neck cracks.
"Say it," he says.
"Yes."
"Say it right."
"Yes, Ronan, God, yes, take them off before I—"
He takes them off.
And then his mouth is on me and every clever thing I was ever going to say dies in my throat. I fall back onto my elbows and bite down on my own wrist. He holds my hips still with those scarred hands, patient and merciless, as he parts my lips and licks my entire seam.
"You taste," he says against me, "like every night I've been lying awake one door down."
I fist my hand in his hair, but I just hold on, because I'm losing, I've been losing all night, I lost the second I stood on the creaky board. He devours me right to the edge and then he stops. I nearly kill him, until he laughs, quiet, wicked, and does it again.
He builds me back up slow. His tongue works me in flat, wide strokes, then narrows to my clit. His hands are so strong that I can't do anything but take it.
The more I whine, the more he hums against me. The hums add to the contractions, and then his fingers join the party, curling just below his hungry lips. He sets a rhythm, his fingers and his tongue moving together, and I lose track of everything else.
I bite down harder on my wrist. It feels like I'm conceding something embarrassing if I moan.
"Let go," he says against me, not stopping. "Be quiet, but let go. You're safe with me."
I can't hold it back. It rolls up through me, and I come apart with his name muffled against my own arm, my thighs shaking around his head, one hand still fisted in his thick hair.
By the time he lets me finish twitching, I've got the pillow he handed me stuffed against my mouth. I've got tears in my eyes from the sheer effort of staying silent.
He crawls up over me. His forehead comes down to mine. He shoves the sweatpants down and I get my hands on him, all of his endless thickness. I pull him toward me, and he catches my wrist.
"There's a condom in the—"
"I don't care."
"Calista."
"We didn't at the lake."
He goes still. His eyes search mine. "That was different," he says. "That was—"
"I know what it was." I push up and kiss him, softer this time, tasting myself on his lips.
"This is just this. Okay? I need it. But I don't want—" I hesitate, knowing even as I say it how harsh it is.
"I don't want anything between us. It has to stay this way.
I can't bear it if I tried the real thing again. "
He looks at me for a long moment.
"Okay," he says.
And then he's inside me, slow and huge, I have to bite the pillow again so I don't scream. He keeps one hand cradling the back of my head and the other braced beside my shoulder, and he moves, careful, then not so careful, then not careful at all.
"Look at me," he orders. "Not God. Not the ceiling. Me."
"You're so—" I gasp as he hits a deep spot. "—arrogant."
"Because you, my queen, make me feel like a fucking king. Now, be quiet and take my cock."
I take it. I take all of it, and I keep my eyes open the whole time even though it would be easier to close them, because he wants me looking at him and I'm too far gone to deny him anything.
When I come the second time, it's with his name in my mouth, muffled against his shoulder.
He follows me over a few seconds later with mine tangled up in the Russian, the kotyonok he swears he'd stop calling me.
When it's all over, the hate fuck to end all hate fucks, we lie cuddling like there's nothing hateful about it at all. Down the hall, a small foot hits the floor and pads to a bathroom and pads back. We both freeze, listening, until the door clicks and the house goes quiet again.
I sit up and find my shorts, feeling woozy and limp. The shirt somehow ended up over the lamp, so I shrug that back on.
"So," I say, all business, though it comes out ruined and thick. "New terms."
He props himself up on one elbow. Even like this, wrecked and half in the dark, he looks like he's the one in charge. "I'm listening."
"This was—" I gesture between us. "This is a physical thing. That's all. My body had a complaint and we resolved the complaint."
"Very thoroughly resolved."
"So if it comes up again—"
"When it comes up again."
"If." I glare at him. "If it comes up again, it stays physical. It's not us. It doesn't happen during the daytime. It's—" I search for it. "It's night stuff. Only night. In the dark. And in the morning, we go back to hands-to-yourself and separate rooms and everything exactly the way it was."
"Strictly platonic," he says slowly, "except for the part where it isn't platonic at all."
"You know what I mean."
"I do." His mouth does the thing. "You want to be able to hate me all day and then knock on my door at two in the morning to bang out your feelings."
"If you'll recall, I didn't knock." I scowl at him. "Now, do we have a deal or not?"
He watches me, then smirks. "We have a deal, Ms. Meadows," he says.
"Good." I pull his shirt on over my head, because I'm not giving it back, I've decided. It's mine now, a spoil of war. "This never happened."
I go to the door. I don't look back, because if I do, I'll see him lying there in the golden light like a man who just got everything he wanted and would still give it all back for me.
I can't afford to see that. Not tonight.
Not in the dark, where I just made a deal I already know I'm going to break.
"For the record," he says from behind me, "you never got that water you needed."
I pause in the doorway. "Guess I wasn't thirsty after all."
I'm very careful to step over the board on my way out.