Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty
Iris walked home digesting all Rapacine had told her, especially the disturbing story about her mother, and what it might mean for her.
She remained uncertain about the ethics of wearing the perfume.
Sofia had good reason to use it; she had other people’s prejudice to overcome.
What was Iris’s justification for using an assist like this?
It felt like she was getting away with something—sometimes thrilling, sometimes shameful.
But she didn’t want to give up the opportunity with Wolff Dev, Jonathan’s esteem, or his paycheck.
And Gabe. She didn’t want to give him up either. But something told her he had already given up on her.
When Iris got home, she took a shower to wash the fragrance away; she needed a break. She had just changed into her pajamas and was raking some hair oil through her damp hair when her phone rang. The name on the screen made her heart quicken.
“Ben?”
“Hey, are you home? Your light’s on.” Ben chuckled. “Sorry, I’m outside.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I had a drink with a law school buddy in the neighborhood, so I was just wondering…have you taken Hugo out for his last walk yet?”
Iris softened. “Sure, give me a minute, I’ll bring him out.”
She caught sight of herself in her bedroom mirror: no makeup, wet hair, gym shorts and a Penn State tee—a far cry from the carefully curated eat-your-heart-out attire she wore to Mike’s party.
She glanced at the perfume’s flacon poised on her dresser but decided against it.
Iris was done wanting what didn’t want her.
Hugo caught Ben’s scent before they were out of the lobby, quickening his pace, and when the dog found Ben waiting, Hugo wiggled and whined with happiness. It made her heart twist. Hugo was Iris’s most loyal companion, but dogs don’t understand breakups.
Ben cut straight to Hugo’s favorite tushy scratches. “Didja miss your old man? Dja miss me, good boy?” Ben used his Muppety dog voice, and Hugo happily flopped onto his side for a belly rub. “He looks good!”
Iris fought the urge to melt. “Thanks. He’s been keeping busy.”
“Has he now?” Ben rose from the sidewalk.
“Six C got a puppy, a Cavapoo named Gracie. I think Hugo has a crush—”
“You’re so tan,” Ben interrupted her shtick. “I love when your summer freckles are out.”
The compliment threw her. “Oh. Um, I was in the Hamptons this weekend.” She started walking Hugo to break eye contact.
“Oh yeah, who with?”
“My new boss who built this new Hudson Yards building I’m working on. He invited some team members to his house on Shelter Island. The house was spectacular, it was great.” Iris didn’t know whether she’d left Gabe out for Ben’s benefit or her own.
“New boss? You left Candela?” He stopped in his tracks.
“I got a great offer, and Frank was dragging his feet on my promotion, I couldn’t put my career on hold anymore.”
Ben blinked. “Wow. Congrats. I’m proud of you. You’re too good to be on hold for anyone.”
“Thanks.” Iris looked down at Hugo.
They walked down the block on the route they knew well, and both Iris and Ben wordlessly adjusted their pace to accommodate Hugo’s arthritis and compulsively inquisitive nose .
As they strolled, she told him about how exciting it was to work with Wolff Development on such a major building, and Ben told her about negotiating the contract for the Knicks, and they were congratulatory and supportive.
When they were together, Ben had always accompanied her on the last dog walk of the night.
His protective urge made Iris feel cared for and valued in a way that, until this moment, she had forgotten how much she’d missed.
Hugo tugged toward some trash bags on the curb, tail wagging wildly, and Iris let him investigate.
The dog nosedived between two bags and flushed out a giant rat.
Iris jumped back with a yelp, Ben flailed to grab her, and the two of them collided, the crown of her head connecting hard with his chin.
Ben stumbled backward, holding his mouth, while Iris apologized profusely.
“I’m fine, I just think I bit my lip,” Ben mumbled, nearly tripping again over Hugo, who was feral with excitement.
“Is it bleeding? We’ll get ice at home.”
—
In her kitchen, Iris wrapped a baggie of ice cubes in a paper towel, and Ben folded down his lower lip to show her the damage.
“Aw, it looks like it hurts.” Iris peered at the cut on his inner lip.
“It doesn’t,” Ben said, belied by the wince he gave when she touched the ice to it.
“Maybe you need the ice more on your chin, I really beaned you.” She tenderly touched his jaw, the intimacy of the gesture zapped her fingers like static electricity. She quickly let go and took a step back. “You hold the ice where you feel it most.”
Ben held it to his chin and regarded her, his lower lip swollen to a slight pout. “Iris, I miss you.”
“Don’t—”
He put the ice down. “It’s true. I miss you. I made a mistake, and I want to fix it.”
“What about Madison?”
“Things with her moved too fast. I thought fast meant it was good, it was exciting! But we both fell for the idea of each other. Sometimes I feel like she doesn’t know me at all. And if she did, she wouldn’t like me as much.”
The last part was how Iris had felt with Gabe over the weekend.
“But now I think I rushed things because I wanted to feel like I hadn’t blown up my life for no reason.” Ben rubbed his hand over his head. “I was saying to Mike, sometimes you think you’re running toward something, but you’re really running away from something else.”
“What are you saying?”
“I choked. Our future felt like a foregone conclusion. I felt locked in, and I panicked.”
“The contract lawyer afraid of commitment.”
“You’re right! You’re absolutely right, because my whole life is litigation over commitments.
I was thinking defensively then. But now I’m coming to you with my guard down.
Iris, you know me better than anyone. You’ve seen me at my best and, God knows, you’ve seen me at my worst. And you loved me.
Is there any chance you could love me still? ”
Iris stepped back and tried to exhale through the lump in her throat, tears welling, her mind a jumble of conflicting emotions. “Five years, Ben, you had five years to figure out how you felt about me. I believed in you, I built my whole world around you, and you kicked it like sand.”
“And I’m sorry. I know, I messed it all up.
When we were together, all I felt was pressure.
Then we broke up, and all I felt was guilt for hurting you.
But now I see you’re thriving! And that cloud of guilt has lifted, and I’m free to just feel what’s in my heart.
And what I want is you in my life again. ”
It had been exactly what Iris had been wanting to hear for the last six months. And yet she didn’t trust his change of heart. “What’s so newly attractive about me? What if it’s superficial, a new haircut, a new perfume? What if I’m exactly the same?”
“How could it ever be superficial with us?”
“This notion that you want me back, did it first occur to you at Mike’s party?”
“Yes, I haven’t stopped thinking of you since.”
She scoffed, suspicions confirmed. “Because there was just something different about me, right?”
“Because I felt exactly like I did on the day we met.”
She looked into his eyes, the same blue eyes that had haunted so many sleepless nights.
The ones that crinkled cutely when he laughed.
The eyes she had imagined seeing in their children’s faces someday.
The ones that had looked bloodshot and sorry when he smashed her heart to pieces.
And now these eyes were asking to put her back together again.
Ben kissed her, and her body answered. Her chest rose to meet him, inhaling his familiar scent through her nose, at once so painful and comforting that it broke her heart and mended it again.
He smelled like home. Ben was the home she had chosen, built brick by brick, and planned on living in forever.
This kiss tasted sweeter for the broken dreams it restored. It also tasted like blood.
“Your lip—” She didn’t want to hurt him.
“I don’t care.” He wrapped his arms around her so tightly that he all but lifted her off her feet.
They kissed again, more deeply this time. Her tongue ran over the raised ridge inside his lip, and she thought of all the pain he’d put her through with his indecision, his flip-flopping, all the marks she bore he couldn’t see. She sucked his bottom lip between her teeth until he flinched.
Iris pushed herself back from his torso, resentment’s bitter metal in her mouth. “No. You can’t take it back so easy. You can’t play with me—”
Ben didn’t let go of her waist. “I’m not, I swear, I wouldn’t—”
“How can I trust you?”
“Because it’s me . Because you know me, I know you, it’s us. I need you, Iris. Nothing makes sense without you.”
She was whipsawed between craving his reassurance and demanding his remorse.
The internal battle left her weak in the knees, but Ben caught her in his embrace.
As their passion gained steam, he whispered in her ear, “Not here.” He wouldn’t take her in the kitchen like Gabe might have.
She wasn’t a fling to be rushed. She was someone who mattered. She was the one .
She collapsed toward him and he gathered her up into his arms. Iris wrapped her legs around his waist and buried her face in the crook of his neck, kissing the delicate skin there, feeling the butterfly-wing beat of his pulse against her lips, her lashes, as he carried her toward the bedroom.
Their bedroom. Could it all go back like it was?
Ben peeled her top off as soon as her feet touched the hardwood.
She was eager and yielding to him but not the aggressor.
She needed to see that he wanted her, that it wasn’t a passing urge, old habit, or one thing leading to another.
Iris didn’t help him to undress her. She let him see that her figure wasn’t tiny and taut like Madison’s.
She hadn’t gotten a postbreakup revenge body.
She wasn’t wearing the perfume. She was only herself. Would he still want her back?
And yet Ben cupped her breasts with awe like it was the first time.
He took them into his mouth in turn, savoring them, his tongue was delicate on her nipple but his fingers kneaded greedily into the flesh of her backside.
She preferred his greed. His validation fed her like water to a wilted flower.
She undid his fly and reached into his boxers, and her hand closed around the hard proof of his desire, making him moan.
The reassurance of his body responding to her hit her system like a drug, it numbed the agony of their breakup and anesthetized the painful self-doubt and self-reproach that had racked her brain since the weekend.
Ben wanted her back, so she had to be all right.
He kissed a trail from her throat to her heart to her belly and below, until he was kneeling before her, a supplicant with a handful of ass.
She ran her fingers through his hair as he parted her legs and tilted her head back as he tasted her.
The sight of him on his knees reignited her anger without dulling her desire.
You should kneel and be sorry, after what you did, fucking beg for me.
His desperation was the turn-on, she craved his penitence as much as his cock.
He had wronged her and she demanded satisfaction.
She turned her back on him, and without hesitation, he gripped her hips and buried his face in her bottom.
His stubble tickled her butt cheeks, his hot tongue tickled her elsewhere. She giggled in embarrassed delight.
Ben stopped when she laughed. “Was that wrong?”
Iris silenced him with one look over her shoulder, and he went back to it. When she crawled farther onto the bed, he followed like a puppy.
Ben pulled over a pillow to slide under her stomach—a signature of their old routine and his favorite doggy position, not hers.
But Iris was getting what she wanted this time, and she wanted to see his face when she did.
In one swift motion, she swung her legs over him, trading places and straddling him.
She rocked back on her heels and in a deliberate, catlike motion trailed the softness of her naked body from his furry thighs up to his flushing neck, teasing him.
While he kissed whatever part of her his mouth could reach, she snatched a condom from her nightside and slid it on.
Ben gasped when she brought him inside her, and his brow furrowed in helpless pleasure as she ground deeper onto him. His reaction made her buckle over him, a mewling kitten again.
“Don’t you want me? Tell me you want me,” she whimpered in his ear.
And he told her over and over again that he did.
She rocked back on top of him, reached behind, and gripped his balls.
Ben’s head popped off the pillow. “Whoa there, cowgirl.”
She threw hers back to stop herself from rolling her eyes at him. Ben could be so corny, but his dick felt good.
Iris went back and forth like this, yielding all power to him one minute and then clawing it back the next, sometimes with her nails in his back.
Ben must have felt he was having sex not with one woman, but two; the first a desperate pleaser willing to do anything to win his approving moan, the second a selfish hedonist who sat on his face longer than a man could do without oxygen.
Either way, Ben couldn’t get enough. For him it was win-win, but he was the toy, not the player.
Iris was battling her own conflicting needs.
Did she want his validation, or his atonement?
Iris decided to take both.