16. Jenna
Jenna
Iwake in a bed the size of Rhode Island with a man’s arm heavy across my waist, and for the first time in my adult life, I don’t immediately calculate the distance to the door.
Morning does what morning does in a strange apartment—strips everything down to inventory. Sunlight on old wood floors. The East River moving past the windows like it has somewhere better to be. Dominic asleep beside me on his side, sheets tangled at his hips, his dark hair an absolute mess.
I study his face—brow furrowed as though he’s negotiating with a dream, jaw shadowed, mouth barely parted in a way that makes me want to trace the curve of his lower lip just to see if he wakes. I don’t, of course. I am a woman with self-control.
I am a woman with self-control.
Last night he fed me pasta, put me to bed and held me. Just . . . held me, because somehow this man always knows exactly what I need.
I reach out and touch his lip.
He doesn’t wake, but his brow smooths as if I’ve soothed an entire argument away with the pad of one finger. I trace the crease between his eyebrows and think about what Serena said on the sidewalk—about not seeing what I had in front of me until I was ready to accept it.
Am I ready now?
I close my eyes and try to picture what life would look like if I didn’t run—if I let myself keep waking up in the morning, not planning my exit but just .
. . living. Would I become my mother, desperate for affection to the point of weaponizing it against everyone she loved?
Or is it possible to love someone that hard and not obliterate yourself in the process?
All signs point to no. All prior evidence says that even wanting something is a liability; that the second you admit to needing another person, the entire economy collapses and you’re left picking through the rubble for receipts.
But he’s here. I’m here. The world did not end, unless you count the family-size drama in Queens, and even that was survivable.
My mother woke up this morning, probably hungover and almost certainly still angry, and I woke up in a sunlit room with a man whose hand finds me automatically in his sleep, and the ledger—at least for now—shows a surplus.
He cracks an eye. “You’re staring at me, Pemberton.” His voice is rough with sleep, and somehow I don’t flinch. I let my hand fall to the sheet but not away from him. I’m not scared.
I am not scared.
“You snore,” I say, even though he doesn’t.
He grins, and the left side of his mouth tugs up in that way it always does when he knows he’s won a hand before I saw the cards.
“You drool,” he counteroffers, rolling to face me at full attention.
I smirk, and it’s a defense because I’m not ready for how easy it is to want him with nothing between us but linen and the city waking up beneath us. “You make a compelling case for separate bedrooms.”
“Agreed.” He pulls me closer. “But I don’t have the self-restraint to sleep that far away from you.
” He says it like a joke, but his hand cups my cheek, thumb tracing the hinge of my jaw with this proprietary reverence that should alarm me.
It doesn’t. His voice goes low. “I know why you’re staring. ”
“Because you look like hell and I can’t look away?”
“That, and you’re trying to decide if it’s safe to trust me with whatever you’re thinking about.”
I swallow, the truth caught in my throat. I want to say last night rearranged something in me, that I can’t remember the last time a man gave me an unbroken silence to be sad in, let alone stayed for the aftershocks. I want to say that with him, I feel like a person and not a fortress.
Instead, I say, “I’m not thinking. I’m calculating.”
He lets out a deep chuckle and leans in until my nose is full of sleep-warm skin and the faintest trace of the whiskey from last night.
“That’s a first,” he murmurs, and his lips brush my temple. “Let me know when you’re done, and I’ll help you with the math.”
I tilt my face up and kiss him. It’s small and impulsive—which is a catastrophic tactical error, because Dominic wakes like a predator who was merely being polite.
One second it’s a brush of lips. The next, his hand is at the back of my neck, holding me there while he kisses me properly—slow at first, then with the kind of deepening intent that makes my spine go liquid.
I make a small sound into his mouth that I will deny under oath, and he smiles against me like the bastard heard every syllable of it.
“I love it when you kiss me like a woman making terrible decisions on purpose.”
“That is an outrageous overread.”
He rolls us, smooth and inevitable, until I’m on my back and he’s braced over me, hair falling forward, eyes dark and amused and much too awake for a man who was asleep thirty seconds ago. The sheet slips lower on my chest. His gaze follows it. I feel the look like a hand.
“Dominic.”
“Jenna.”
I should stop this. I should ask for water, for aspirin, for a minute to put my armor back on in some approximation of the correct order.
Instead, I lie there looking up at him with sunlight all over his shoulders, and I have the humiliating realization that I want this more in daylight than I ever did in the dark.
He studies my face, and it seems like some joke he was about to make catches in his throat and dissolves.
He looks at me a beat longer, with that unwavering, hawk-like focus, and for once I don’t flinch.
I just reach up, thread my fingers into his hair, and—hating myself for how much I mean it—I say, “Please.”
It’s a prayer and a daredevil’s last words, and Dominic must hear all of it, because his face goes beautifully, terrifyingly still.
“Anything,” he says, and then he’s kissing me hard, open-mouthed, tongue moving against mine in a way that makes my head swim.
His hands are everywhere—my jaw, my neck, my shoulders, and then finally exactly where I need them, palming my breasts through the soft cotton of yesterday’s borrowed T-shirt.
I arch under his touch. The fabric barely counts as a covering, but when he pushes it up, teasing over my ribs and exposing me to the morning, I gasp in a way that sounds nothing like the woman who survived yesterday’s kitchen warfare.
His palm is warm and rough for hands that have spent their life negotiating with the world, and the slide of his thumb over my nipple is enough to make logic vaporize.
He smiles, open and pleased, and then dips his head, dragging his mouth down my throat, pausing at the hollow just below my jaw where he can feel my pulse stutter and skip.
He bites. Not hard, but definitely more than gentle.
I make another undignified sound and claw at his back, and he groans like I’ve given him purchase on reality itself.
When his mouth finds my breast, the counterpoint of teeth and tongue is enough to make me say his name.
It feels so foreign, my voice that raw and honest, that I want to cover my face and never show it again.
Instead, I wrap my legs around his waist and let him press between my thighs, and the friction is instant, exquisite.
He grinds against me, slow, deliberate, and in the bright white of morning there’s nothing to hide behind.
I’m only wearing thin cotton panties beneath his T-shirt, and he’s wearing only a pair of boxers that turn every movement into a direct line of fire.
Everything feels new and terrifying and absolutely as it should be.
He pulls back, just a fraction, so he can see my face.
“You sure?” he asks, and it’s the first moment all the charm’s gone out of him. He’s not even smiling now—he’s just searching my face for a panic button, like if I so much as twitch, he’ll abort the mission and talk me down instead.
It undoes me.
I nod. Once, hard.
“Say it, sweetheart. I need to hear the words.”
“Fuck me.”
He shakes his head. Slow. “Try again.”
“Fuck me, Dominic. Please.”
His breath comes out in a sigh. “That’s not what I need to hear and you know it.”
Heat climbs my neck and blooms in my cheeks as I fight with the words caught in my throat. If I say them, I don’t get to pretend this was just an itch that needed a scratch. If I say them out loud, I’m admitting this is real. And I can’t take it back a second time and expect him to believe me.
Forcing the lump in my throat back down, I meet his eyes. “Make love to me,” I whisper, hesitating before I add, “husband.”
He groans and closes his eyes for a half second, like the words physically hit him, and then he’s right there again, mouth on my collarbone, hand skimming down my stomach to the waistband of my underwear.
“My wife.”
His fingers rest just above the elastic, and only move when I flex my hips up, giving permission with the tilt of my body. He drags the panties down, slow and deliberate.
I grip the sheet, desperate to do anything with my hands but tally the likelihood of what happens next.
He’s done this before—he’s mapped my body with unwavering attention, learned my pleasure by induction and then proved the theorem with every subsequent encounter.
But it’s never been like this. Never so blatant and honest. Never with my defenses so clearly inoperative.
He settles over me, eyes on mine, like all of New York could collapse into the river and he’d only care whether I was watching him.
He slides two fingers inside me, slow, like he wants to memorize every micro-flinch across my face.
His thumb moves over my clit in circles, a perfect syncopation, and I’m torn between arching into it and melting down into the mattress.
He keeps his eyes on mine, everything about him so intent and so good that I can’t look away even if I want to. I don’t.
He’s gentle at first, but when my hand finds his wrist and holds him there, he picks up the pace, working me until my hips climb off the bed and my other hand is in his hair pulling, God, pulling him down like I think maybe if we’re close enough it will stop the world from moving.