Chapter 7
Igo to Nathan the next evening, and I make sure, the whole drive over, that I know exactly what I'm doing and why.
He lives in a converted warehouse loft on the east side, brick and tall windows and the kind of quiet that costs money.
He buzzes me up. When he opens the door he's in a dark sweater with the sleeves pushed back, no shoes, a glass of red already breathing on the counter behind him, and he looks at me standing in his hallway in the good coat and the dress I chose on purpose, and he doesn't say anything clever.
He just takes me in, slow, like he's allowed to now.
"You came," he says.
"I told you I would." I step inside. "I'm not married anymore, Nathan. I mean, the paper's not final, but it's over and he's gone and I ended it with my own mouth in my own living room. I slept on it, like you wanted. I'm not running from anything. I'm walking toward something."
"I needed to hear you say it." He shuts the door. "Not for me. For you. So that later, when it's quiet, you know this was a thing you chose and not a thing that happened to you."
"It's a thing I'm choosing," I say. "I've spent days being told to stay calm and three moves ahead. I'm done being strategic for tonight. I came here because I want you, and I'm tired of pretending I don't."
That's all it takes. He crosses the space between us and his hands come up to my face, both of them, warm and certain, and he kisses me like he's been holding it back since the first afternoon in his office because he has.
It's nothing like being managed. There's no agenda under it, no next thing he needs from me, just a man kissing a woman like she's the only item on the entire night's itinerary.
I make a sound against his mouth that I haven't made in years and feel him smile.
He gets the coat off my shoulders and lets it drop. "Tell me if anything's a no," he says against my jaw, his voice rough now, the control fraying in a way I find I love. "Out loud. I want to hear it either way."
"Yes is the only word I've got tonight," I say, and he huffs a laugh into my neck and walks me back toward the bedroom with his hands already learning me.
He stops us once, halfway there, just to look at me in the low light from the windows, his thumb tracing my cheekbone like he's confirming I'm real.
"Every meeting," he says, low. "Every time you sat across from my desk while I handed you proof your husband's a liar, calm and sharp and so far out of his league he never had a prayer, and I wasn't allowed to do this.
" He kisses the corner of my mouth. "Do you have any idea how hard it was to keep my hands to myself? "
"You hid it well," I say, breathless.
"I hid it for you. So you'd never wonder if I rushed you." His hand slides to the small of my back and presses me into him, and I feel exactly how little he wants to wait now. "I'm done hiding it."
He takes his time, which is the thing I'm not prepared for.
Mark, at the end, treated sex like a flight he wanted to make on time.
Nathan acts like there's nowhere on earth he'd rather be than here, finding out what I sound like.
He gets the dress off slowly, looking, his hands following his eyes, and when I reach to cover the soft places I've spent a decade apologizing for, he catches my wrist and moves it gently aside.
"No," he says. "Let me. I've been thinking about this since you walked into my office and told me you were reclaiming your name." His mouth follows the line of my collarbone, the curve of my breast, lower. "You think I haven't noticed you. I've noticed nothing else."
I'm forty-two years old and I have never in my life been looked at like this, like I'm not being graded, like the looking is the whole point.
Somewhere in the last decade I'd quietly decided this part of my life was mostly over, that I'd had my run at being wanted and the rest would be comfortable and dim.
Mark made me feel like an obligation he met when he remembered to.
I started believing the dimness was just age, just marriage, just what happens.
It wasn't. It was him. I'm finding that out with Nathan's mouth on my skin and my whole body waking up like a house with the lights coming back on.
He lays me back on the bed and does not climb over me right away.
He kneels at the edge and looks until I feel the look everywhere, not as judgment, not as inventory, but as attention.
His palms slide from my knees to my hips, slow enough that I can stop him if I want to, and I do not want to.
I open for him before he asks. His eyes lift to mine, darker now.
"Tell me," he says.
"Yes."
"That was not the whole question."
I laugh once, breathless, and the laugh turns into a sound I do not recognize when his thumb brushes the wet heat of me. "Your mouth," I say, because I am done being shy in a bed where I am finally allowed to want something. "Please."
He closes his eyes for half a second, like the word costs him.
Then he lowers his head and gives it to me.
No rush. No practiced charm. His mouth is warm and sure, and when my hand goes into his hair he groans like the grip is for him too.
He learns me with a patience that is anything but mild.
A lick that makes my hips lift. A firmer pull of his mouth that makes my breath catch.
Two fingers sliding inside me, slow at first, then deeper when I say, "Yes, there. "
He does not make me translate the second time.
He listens to my body, to the way my thighs tighten, to the way I stop trying to be quiet.
Mark always liked quiet. Quiet meant he was doing fine.
Nathan makes a rough sound against me when I get louder, one hand pressing my hip down, not to hold me still but to keep me exactly where he wants me.
The pleasure builds with nowhere useful to go, no errand to run, no version of me to manage.
Just his mouth, his fingers, the sheet twisted in my fist, and my own voice breaking open in the dark.
"Nathan."
He looks up without stopping, and that is what tips me over, the sight of him between my legs, watching me like this is the part he came for.
I come hard, shaking under his hand, and he stays with me through the whole of it, slower when I am too sensitive, softer when I tug at his hair, still there until I am laughing and swearing and trying to breathe.
"Okay," he says, low, kissing the inside of my thigh, and there is so much warmth in it I have to blink at the ceiling.
When he reaches for the drawer I put my hand on his chest. "I want to," I say. "All of it."
He stops immediately. "Because you want me."
"Because I want you." I slide my hand down his stomach, feel the muscles jump under my palm, and wrap my fingers around him.
The sound he makes is not controlled at all.
I love it more than I should. "Not because I'm proving something.
Not because I'm trying to forget him. Because I want you inside me. "
"Good," he says, and the word is almost wrecked.
He finds the condom, and I watch his hands while he handles it.
There is something indecently intimate about that too, the practical care of it, the fact that he does not make me ask whether he will protect me.
Then he is over me, braced on those forearms, and he pauses there at the edge of everything to look at me one more time.
"Still yes?"
"Still yes," I say, and I pull him down.
He pushes into me slowly, giving me time to take him, and I have to close my eyes because it is too much for a second, the stretch and heat and the impossible rightness of being wanted this carefully. He stops at once.
"Too much?"
"No." I hook my leg around his hip and pull him closer. "Don't stop."
He gives me another inch, then another, watching my face the whole time, and when he is fully inside me he goes still, jaw tight, like staying still is the hardest thing he has done all month.
I move first. A small roll of my hips, a test, and his control slips enough that I feel it. That makes me bold. I do it again.
"Gillian," he says, warning and plea together.
"Move."
He does. Slow at first, deep enough to make my fingers dig into his shoulders, steady enough that I can meet him.
The first few strokes are careful, all restraint and attention, but my body knows him faster than my head expected.
I find the angle I want and show him with my hips.
He catches it, adjusts, and the next thrust hits exactly where I need him.
"There," I say.
"I know."
He does know. That is the dangerous part.
He knows and keeps doing it, one hand sliding between us so his thumb can work me while he moves, and the combined pleasure pulls a sound out of me that would have embarrassed me yesterday.
Tonight it only makes him lower his head and kiss me harder.
I bite his shoulder. He swears against my mouth.
"Harder," I tell him.
His restraint breaks in pieces, not all at once.
His rhythm changes. His breath turns rough.
The bed shifts under us and the city light catches on his face, and I get to watch the man who has been careful with me for weeks finally let me feel how badly he wants me.
Not the case. Not the wounded woman. Me.
My hands, my mouth, my body under his, my voice telling him yes and more and don't you dare stop.
The second orgasm comes up fast, almost unfairly fast, and I grab at him because I need something solid when it takes me.
He keeps his thumb where I need it and drives into me through it, murmuring my name once, then again, rougher, like he is trying to stay with me and losing the fight.
I come around him and feel him follow, his body going tight over mine, his forehead dropping to my shoulder as he shudders and gives up the last of that control.
For a moment there is only breathing. His weight is careful even now, one arm braced beside my head, his face turned into my neck. I can feel his pulse everywhere. Mine answers it.
"Okay," he says at last, voice wrecked against my skin. "That was worth the wait. For the record."
"For the record," I agree, and I'm laughing too, which I did not see coming, joy in a bed at the end of the worst month of my life.
After, he doesn't roll away and fall asleep with his back to me, jet-lagged from nothing.
He pulls me into the curve of his body and stays.
He gets a glass of water and makes me drink half of it.
He runs his thumb along my spine in long slow lines while my heart settles, and he doesn't fill the quiet with anything, doesn't need me to manage his feelings about what we just did, doesn't ask me to confirm any story.
"You're thinking," he says into my hair. "I can hear it."
"I'm thinking this is the first time in a long time that being in bed with someone didn't feel like a chore I was good at," I say. "That's a grim thing to realize about your marriage at forty-two. But it's also a good thing to find out you were right about wanting more."
His arm tightens. "It's not a rebound," he says, like he heard the question I didn't ask.
"I want to be clear about that, because tomorrow you'll wonder.
I didn't take you to bed to get you over him.
I've been careful with you from the start because I didn't want this to be the thing that happened in the wreck.
I wanted it to be the thing you walked toward on purpose.
" He kisses my shoulder. "Which you did.
Out loud. In the hallway. I'm keeping that. "
I lie there in a stranger's loft that doesn't feel like a stranger's, in the dark, wanted and attended to and entirely myself, and I think about the woman who sat in short-term parking almost two weeks ago, frozen behind the wheel, waiting to be lied to.
I want to tell her something. I want to tell her the pickup's canceled.
Nobody's landing. You're the one who finally leaves.
"There's still the dinner," I say, because I'm me, and the logistics part of me never fully clocks out. "The twentieth. He still thinks I'm coming to make him look stable."
Nathan goes quiet a moment, and I feel him decide to follow me there, to let the night hold both things, the private choice and the public plan, without smearing one into the other.
"There's still the dinner," he agrees. "But that's a different room than this one.
Tonight isn't about him. Tonight you don't owe him a single thought.
" His hand finds mine in the dark. "Tomorrow we'll figure out exactly what walks into that dinner with you.
Tonight you're just here. With me. Wanted. That's the whole agenda."
I turn into him and let it be the whole agenda. The dinner can wait. For one night, so can the rest of my life.