Chapter 18 #2
He lifted her. Carried her down the hallway with effortless, maddening, physics-defying ease—and Emmy buried her face against his neck and breathed him in and felt, against her bare skin, the barely contained tremor running through his entire body.
He found the bedroom and set her down on the edge of the bed.
The room was dim—just the streetlight coming through the window, amber and cold. He stood over her, and the expression on his face wasn’t hunger. It was something older. Something that had been waiting.
“Em.” His voice was low. “We don’t have to do this now. We have time.”
The word cracked her open. Time. Like this wasn’t a single desperate night. Like he was planning on tomorrow, and the day after, and every day after that.
She reached for the hem of his shirt and pulled it over his head.
Emmy’s breath caught.
She’d seen him in Under Armour. She’d seen the billboards. She’d once accidentally lingered on an ESPN body issue photo and closed the tab so fast she’d knocked her coffee over, which she’d never told anyone.
This was different. This was Grant above her in the half-dark, close enough to touch, and the reality of his body was absurd—shoulders that blocked the streetlight, the planes of his chest, the hard lines of his stomach tapering into his waistband.
He was built like the thing he was, an instrument of controlled violence, and the contrast between that body and the way his thumb was tracing her jaw right now made her stomach clench.
She ran her hands up his chest. His eyes closed. His breath left him in a slow, shuddering exhale, and his head dropped, forehead resting against hers.
“You have no idea,” he said quietly, “how long I’ve—”
“I have some idea.” Her voice was barely there. “I have a very detailed idea, actually.”
The corner of his mouth lifted. There he was. “How detailed?”
“Grant.”
“Just asking.”
“Stop talking.” She pulled the cashmere top over her own head and reached back to unhook her bra, and the sound he made when he looked at her was worth every second of the last three months.
His hands found her. Reverent and rough at the same time—palms skimming her ribs, thumbs tracing the undersides of her breasts, mouth dropping to her collarbone with a groan that vibrated through her skin.
She arched into him, fingers digging into his shoulders, and felt him hard against her thigh, straining, the restraint costing him visibly now.
She reached for his belt. Got it open, got the button, shoved his jeans down his hips with hands that were still shaking. He kicked them off. And then there was nothing between them—his body pressed against hers, skin to skin, the full length and heat and weight of him.
“Tell me what you want,” he said against her throat. The same words, the same low command, except this time she could feel him trembling with the effort of holding back, and the question wasn’t about her—it was about him, asking permission to stop being careful.
Emmy Woodhouse had built a career on knowing what other people wanted. She had intake questionnaires and compatibility matrices and a sixth sense for desire that other people couldn’t articulate. She had never, not once, been asked that question by someone whose answer she actually needed.
“You,” she said. “Now. Stop being patient.”
Something broke in his expression. The last thread of control, snapping.
He reached for his jeans on the floor. Wallet. Condom. The foil packet tore. She watched him roll it on and her stomach clenched with a want so sharp it bordered on pain.
He settled between her thighs, braced above her on one arm, and looked at her.
“Stay with me,” he said.
She wrapped her legs around him.
He pushed into her, and the fullness of him knocked the breath from her lungs.
He was big—she’d known that, objectively, abstractly, in the way you know that a man who is six-three and two-hundred-thirty pounds is going to be proportional—but knowing and feeling were two entirely different things and feeling was everything.
Grant went still. His jaw was tight, his arms trembling, the effort of holding back written across every muscle in his body.
“Em.” His voice was strained. “You okay?”
She dug her nails into his back and pulled him deeper.
He groaned—a sound that started in his chest and ended somewhere primitive—and then he moved.
Not slow. Not careful. She’d told him to stop being patient and he’d listened.
His hand gripped her thigh, hitching her leg higher, changing the angle, and the first real thrust hit something that made her vision go white.
She cried out and he did it again, and again, setting a pace that was relentless and precise—this was the other Grant, the one who ran an offense with his body, who processed the physical world faster than anyone she’d ever met, who knew exactly where to apply force and how much and when.
Emmy had always been loud—during arguments, during celebrations, during every uncontainable moment of her uncontainable life.
She was loud now. She was saying his name and she was saying please and she was saying things she’d never said to anyone because no one had ever made her feel like this—like she was coming apart at the molecular level, like every defense she’d ever built was dissolving under his hands, like the only real thing in the world was the place where their bodies met.
Grant pressed his forehead to hers. His breath was ragged, his rhythm faltering, and she could feel him getting close—could feel it in the way his hand tightened on her hip, the way his body tensed against hers.
“Em—I’m—”
“I know.” She pulled him closer, legs tightening around his waist. “I know. Let go.”
He drove into her one last time, deep and hard and shuddering, and when he came it was with her name on his lips, and the sound of it, wrecked and bare, pushed her over the edge with him.
She came with his body still shaking above her, the orgasm rolling through her in waves that made her gasp and clutch at him and bury her face against his neck while the world narrowed to the two of them and then expanded again, slowly, like surfacing from deep water.
Grant collapsed beside her. Then immediately gathered her against him, one arm hooked beneath her, pulling her into his chest with the casual possessiveness of a man who had no intention of letting go.
They lay there. Breathing. The streetlight still amber through the window.
And when the last wall came down—when she stopped performing, stopped strategizing, stopped trying to arrange this into something manageable and just let it be messy and real and terrifying—what she found underneath was simpler than any framework she’d ever built. Two people. No armor. Choosing.
Emmy pressed her face against his chest and listened to his heartbeat slow.
"Your bed is a fire hazard," Grant said. "My knees are in a different zip code."
"It's cozy."
"It's a cot."
"It was fine before you showed up and inflated it with your—" she gestured at his entire body—"dimensions."
The deadpan appeared. "Did you just call me dimensions."
"You know what I mean." She was laughing against his skin, and the vibration of it made something settle in her chest—the restless hum that had driven every reckless decision since September, quiet for the first time. Not gone. Just resting.
Grant sat up. Then stood—with an energy no human being should possess after what they’d just done—and smacked her on the ass.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Emmy’s mouth fell open. “Excuse me?”
“My place. Now.” He was already pulling on his jeans, moving with the efficient focus of a man running a no-huddle offense. “I’ve seen your shower, Em. There is no physical configuration of my body that fits in that shower.”
“It’s a perfectly adequate shower.”
“I’ve seen more room in an MRI tube.” He tugged his shirt over his head—inside out, not that he noticed or cared. “My shower fits two people. My bed is a king. And I have plans for you on every surface between the front door and the bedroom, so we’re going to need square footage.”
Emmy stared at him from the bed, still boneless, still buzzing, her brain struggling to process that this man had just taken her apart twice and was now standing in her bedroom looking like he was ready to do it four more times.
“Every surface?”
“You have no idea.” The deadpan was back, but his eyes were anything but. “Just wait until you see what I can do with some actual room to work.”
Emmy bit her lip. The laugh was coming and she couldn’t stop it. “We have to walk past Mrs. Jasinski’s door. She’s going to tell everyone in the building.”
“Sweetheart, the whole building already knows.”
Emmy looked up at him from the bed—the messed hair, the inside-out shirt, the mouth that was doing something it almost never did, which was smile without irony.
"Is this real?" she asked.
He leaned down. Tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "Yeah, Em." His voice was quiet. "This is real."
His brownstone was twelve minutes away. It smelled like home.
The shower fit two people. He hadn't been exaggerating
It was the best Christmas morning of Emmy Woodhouse’s life, and she hadn’t even opened a present.
Emmy was curled into the corner of Grant’s leather couch in one of his T-shirts and a pair of his sweatpants cinched at the waist with a hair elastic—the shirt still smelled like detergent and him, a combination she was going to have to develop a tolerance for or she’d never leave this apartment.
She’d borrowed his comb, found concealer in the bottom of her bag, and done enough damage control that she looked like a woman who’d slept well rather than a woman who’d slept spectacularly little.
She balanced her laptop on a throw pillow and FaceTimed her parents while Grant was in the kitchen making coffee in the French press he kept on the counter—the quiet morning ritual she’d heard him describe five months ago in a diner booth when she’d asked what his ideal Sunday looked like.
Quiet. Maybe some music, but low. I'm making coffee. The good stuff. She's just... there.
Her dad answered first. His face filled the screen—glasses slightly crooked, wearing the cardigan Serle had given him last Christmas, already looking like a man who'd been monitoring multiple health apps since dawn.
"Emmy! Merry Christmas. Your mother is—Karalyn! It's Emmy." He peered at the screen. "You look nice, sweetheart. Is that one of West's old shirts?"
"No," Emmy said, and felt her face go hot. "Merry Christmas, Dad."
Her mother appeared over his shoulder, coffee in hand, reading glasses pushed up into her hair. "Merry Christmas, sweetheart. You look—" She tilted her head. Did that half-second assessment that Emmy had inherited and weaponized. "You look rested."
"I slept well."
"Hmm." Her mother's mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile. "Did you."
"Is West there?"
"Right here." West's face crowded into the frame, Brynn just behind him, her hand resting on the curve of a belly that had grown considerably since Emmy had last seen her. West looked like he'd already eaten half the breakfast spread. "Merry Christmas, Em."
"Merry Christmas. Brynn, you look amazing."
"I look like I swallowed a basketball." Brynn grinned. "But thank you. Merry Christmas."
Four faces on the screen. Her family. The people who'd been orbiting the same kitchen table since before she could remember—minus one, who was usually there, who always had a plate saved, whose chair had been empty this year because of her.
Grant walked into the frame.
He was wearing pajama bottoms. Just pajama bottoms. No shirt. He was carrying two cups of coffee, and he set one down beside Emmy with the easy, unhurried confidence of a man in his own home, and then he leaned down and pressed a kiss to her temple.
On camera.
The screen erupted.
Her father went pale, then red, in a medical progression Emmy was genuinely concerned about. "Is that—Grant? Grant Knight? In—are those—Emmy, why is Grant Knight shirtless in what I'm now realizing is his own apartment on Christmas—"
"Oh," her mother said. Just that. Oh. With the satisfied tone of a woman who had called this shot approximately a decade ago and had simply been waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
West closed his eyes. Opened them. The look he gave Grant was the look of a man who'd received a two-word text twelve hours ago and had been stewing about it ever since.
"I knew it," West said. "I knew that's what that text meant. Brynn said I was overreacting—"
"You were overreacting," Brynn said.
"—and I said, no, that man is about to do something with my sister, and—" He gestured at the screen. At Grant's bare chest. At Emmy in Grant's T-shirt. "This. This is what I meant."
Brynn smacked the back of his head. Not gently.
"Ow—"
"Say Merry Christmas, you baby."
"Merry Christmas," West muttered, rubbing his head. His eyes found Grant's through the screen with an expression that promised a very long conversation at the earliest opportunity.
Grant, to his credit, stood behind Emmy with his hand on her shoulder and the serene composure of a man who had absolutely zero plans to explain himself.
"My blood pressure," her father whispered.
"Your blood pressure is fine, John," her mother said. "Merry Christmas, Grant. Will you be joining us for dinner later?"
"Wouldn't miss it," Grant said.
"Grant—" Emmy's dad was leaning closer to the screen. "Grant, is that a bruise on your neck?" His voice sharpened with concern. "And another one on your shoulder. You weren't hurt in practice, were you?"
Grant glanced down at himself. "No, that's from—"
"Mom!" Emmy's voice came out three octaves too high. "How's the ham coming along? Can we bring anything?"
Grant looked at her. His expression didn’t move. His eyes were another story entirely. Emmy wanted to die.
Her mother smiled serenely. "Just yourselves, sweetheart. We'll see you at four. Oh, and Emmy dear? Maybe run by your apartment first? I’d like a nice photo for Facebook.”
"Gotta go," Grant said, and closed the laptop.
Emmy's mouth dropped open. "My father just asked you about hickeys on a family FaceTime. And now they're going to think we left to have sex."
"You can tell them we were doing compatibility research." He picked up his coffee. Took a sip. The deadpan was flawless. "For matchmaking purposes."
Emmy threw a pillow at him. Grant caught it one-handed without spilling a drop.
Outside, it started to snow.