Chapter 26 Nora
Nora
Michaela requests I read more of The Wild Robot to her before I go. This is now our second read-through.
“Chapter fourteen,” she says, already in bed, the stuffed elephant wedged into position against her side. “Roz is about to do something extremely logical and also emotional, which is the best combination.”
“Do you think Roz is often logical and emotional at the same time?”
“Yes. That’s the point of Roz.”
She’s in pajamas now. An I OBJECT shirt and flannel pants printed with tiny gavels that I’m choosing to believe are a coincidence rather than her protest to today’s proceedings in pajama form.
Her room is everything I expected. Ocean bedding.
The bookshelf organized by genre, then by spine color within genre.
Gerald the blue-ringed octopus on the wall: BEAUTIFUL.
DEADLY. MISUNDERSTOOD. A LEGO courthouse on her desk, complete with rooftop aquarium and a tiny room she told me earlier is “for feelings.”
Every courthouse should have one.
I sit on the edge of the bed. David leans against the doorframe, arms crossed, watching. He’s changed into jeans and a gray T-shirt, and the tension from the courtroom has loosened. He looks good.
He looks like I want him to be mine.
I’m not sure if I’m allowed that yet.
I open the book. Find the page. Begin reading.
The Wild Robot is one of those stories that works differently depending on how old you are when you encounter it.
At eight, it’s about a robot learning to survive on an island and accidentally becoming a mother to a gosling.
At thirty-eight, it’s about a person who was never supposed to be a parent discovering that love isn’t something you’re built for—it’s something you grow into, one clumsy, terrifying choice at a time.
Michaela lasts eleven minutes. Her eyes get heavy by paragraph three, but she fights it—blinking hard, resettling against the elephant, tracking the words through sheer determination.
By the middle of the chapter, her breathing has changed, gone slow and even, and her hand has slipped off the blanket to rest palm-up on the mattress.
I finish the chapter anyway. For her. For the rhythm of the words in the quiet room. For David, standing in the doorway, listening.
I close the book. Set it on the nightstand and pull the blanket up to Michaela’s shoulders.
Smooth it once. The gesture is so automatic, so deeply worn into my hands from years of other people’s children, that I almost don’t notice the difference.
But this time my hands linger. This time the smoothing isn’t professional.
It’s the thing I practiced for a baby who never came, finally finding somewhere to land.
“Good night, sweetheart,” I whisper, trying desperately to ignore the size and shape of the longing inside my chest.
Her breathing deepens. Her face goes slack. Peaceful.
I stand and cross the room carefully, stepping over a pair of sparkly shoes that have already migrated from the shopping bag to the floor.
David is still in the doorway. His expression as I approach him is tender, raw, grateful, undone.
He steps back to let me pass. We walk the hallway in silence. The apartment is dark except for the kitchen light and the glow from the city through the living room windows.
At the front door, I reach for my bag.
David’s hand finds mine. When he threads his fingers through, the contact after hours of careful distance sends a current through me that pools low in my belly.
“Stay,” he whispers.
“I can’t. We can’t. Not yet.”
“I know.” He doesn’t let go. “I still don’t want you to go.”
I look at our hands. His thumb traces the path it always traces—across my knuckles, slow, deliberate—the gesture that started as an accident and has become the most intimate thing anyone has ever done to me with their clothes on.
“I don’t want to go, either,” I say. “But today isn’t the day for—”
“I know.” He steps closer. “You’re right.”
“We need time,” I whisper. “Real time. Not just these stolen moments. You were right to put your rules in place, David. Michaela can’t know until we’re sure. It would—”
“I agree,” he murmurs. But even as the words leave his mouth, his free hand slides to my waist, pulling me closer, and before I can draw another breath, his lips crash into mine.
It’s not gentle. All that pent-up tension from the day pours out in a rush of heat and need.
I gasp against him, my fingers digging into his shirt, and he deepens the kiss, his tongue sweeping in with a hunger that makes my knees buckle.
We’re all teeth and desperation, until my back hits the wall by the door, his body pressing flush against mine like he can’t bear an inch of space between us.
“Nora.”
His hands are everywhere—trailing down my sides, bunching my skirt in fistfuls as he hikes it up my thighs.
The cool air hits my skin, but it’s nothing compared to the fire building inside me.
I arch into him, my breath coming in sharp bursts, and then he’s sinking down, his mouth leaving a trail of kisses along my collarbone, my stomach, until he’s on his knees in front of me.
One strong hand hooks behind my knee, lifting it over his shoulder, exposing me. I bite my lip to stifle a moan, my head falling back against the wall as his breath ghosts over my most sensitive spot.
“David,” I whisper—half plea, half warning—but he doesn’t hesitate. He tugs my panties aside and his mouth closes over me, tongue circling once, and every coherent thought I have disintegrates.
My hand flies to his hair. The sound I make is small, broken, and absolutely not quiet enough for the apartment we’re standing in, with a child asleep down the hall and every sane instinct in my body screaming that this is nuts.
“David,” I gasp again, and he makes a rough, affirmative sound against me like he heard the warning and chose violence anyway.
He knows exactly what he’s doing. Of course he does. Measured, deliberate David Kingsley, who approaches everything like it deserves strategy and precision, is between my thighs using that same terrifying focus on my body, and I’m not built to survive it.
His grip tightens on the back of my leg, anchoring me. His other hand spreads over my hip, steadying me as I shake.
I bite down hard on my lip. It does nothing useful.
“Oh my God.”
He glances up at me then, sliding two fingers inside me, and the look in his eyes as he curls them just right nearly finishes me by itself.
Dark. Intent. Wrecked. There’s no panic in him now, no retreat, no careful distance.
Just hunger, purpose, and the kind of reverence that makes my whole body feel too exposed in the best possible way.
Then his mouth is on me again and I lose the thread entirely.
My fingers tighten in his hair. My free hand scrabbles for purchase against the wall, against his shoulder, against anything.
My knee trembles where it rests over him.
Every stroke of his tongue, every drag of his fingers, slow enough to be cruel until it isn’t, until he gives me more pressure, more heat, more of that perfect mouth, and I have to press my fist to my lips to keep from crying out.
I come apart so hard it frightens me.
It hits in a rush that steals all structure from my body. My thighs go tight, my spine bows off the wall, and the sound I’ve been trying so desperately not to make breaks loose anyway—muffled against my own hand, helpless, shaking, humiliatingly loud to my own ears.
David does not stop.
He works me through it with a patience so merciless it circles back around to kindness, his hand firm on my hip, his fingers easing me down from the sharpest edge only to keep me trembling there—oversensitive and gasping.
“David,” I whisper, and now it’s absolutely a plea.
He lifts his head slowly.
His mouth is wet. His hair is wrecked under my fingers. His eyes are dark in a way that sends a fresh pulse of heat through me despite the fact that I’m still shaking from the first orgasm and should, in theory, be incapable of coherent desire for at least thirty seconds.
Theory, unfortunately, has never met David Kingsley on his knees.
He presses one openmouthed kiss to the inside of my thigh. Then another. My entire body jerks.
“We shouldn’t,” I breathe.
“No,” he says, voice rough enough to fray me at the edges. His thumb strokes once over my hipbone beneath my skirt. “We really shouldn’t.”
“I need to go home.”
“You do.”
I drag in a breath, trying to remember that I’m thirty-eight years old, a school principal, and not in fact a romance heroine being ruined in a corridor. “Then stop looking at me like that.”
His gaze stays with mine, hot and unsteady. “I’m not sure I can.”
“David.”
He rises slowly, his eyes dark and wanting as he captures my mouth again, letting me taste myself on him. It’s filthy, it’s intimate, and it makes me want him all over again.
“Stay,” he murmurs against my lips, his voice rough with desire. “Spend the night. I need you here.”
I’m nodding before I can think, my body still humming, my resolve crumbling. “OK,” I breathe. “Yes, I’ll—”
“Daddy!” Michaela’s voice drifts down the hallway from behind her closed door. “Daddy, I had a nightmare!”
David’s eyes close, his forehead still against mine. I feel the war happening in his body, every muscle taut, caught between the woman in his arms and the child down the hall.
“Go,” I whisper.
“Nora—”
“Go to her.” I press a hand to his chest. Feel his heart hammering under my palm. “She needs you.”
“Daddy!”
He breathes. One breath. Two.
Then he straightens. Steps back. The distance between us reappears, and the air where his body was goes cold.
“On my way, monster,” he calls softly toward the hallway. Steady. Calm.
He looks at me. Everything he wants to say is in his face—the frustration, the tenderness, the half-formed future that just got interrupted by the present.
“I’m going,” I say, before he can ask me to stay again, because if he asks me again I’ll say yes, and I cannot say yes with his daughter calling for him from the dark.
“I’ll call you in the morning.”
I nod. “Goodnight, David.”
He stands there for one wrecked second longer, looking like a man being asked to divide himself with a butter knife.
Then he turns and goes. I hear his voice from down the hall, low and gentle—“What’s wrong, monster?”—and I don’t stay to hear her answer, because I am one bad decision away from never leaving this apartment again.
I slip through the front door and pull it shut behind me. Soft. Quiet. The click of someone leaving a place that has started to feel like hers.
The elevator is empty. The lobby is empty. The parking lot is cold and dark and smells like November.
I sit in my car for a full minute before I start the engine.
I wish you were my mom.
Stay.
Two wishes from two people I love, and I’m driving away from both of them to a house built for one.
I drive anyway. Because tomorrow exists, and tomorrow David Kingsley is going to call me, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, I’m not the person being left.
I’m the person being asked to come back.