12. Richard
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Richard
She’s in my house.
That’s the thought I wake up with every single morning now, before I’m even fully conscious.
Emily Anderson is down the hall, breathing my air, sleeping in a bed I picked the sheets for, and I lie there for a second every day just sitting with it like an idiot.
Ten years of wanting this exact impossible thing, and now she’s forty feet away with her shampoo in my guest bathroom and her shoes by my front door. Best kind of torture there is.
She starts Monday. Paul briefs her, and I brace for him to be his usual self, which is to say a man who has never once in seven years told me I was doing a good job.
By Wednesday he stops me in the hall and says, grudging, “She’s good, your new one.
She’s actually good.” From Paul, that’s basically a parade with a marching band.
By the end of the week my calendar runs better than it has in years.
She’s reorganized the whole mess of it, killed three standing meetings that never needed to exist, and figured out in four days flat that I’ll agree to anything before nine a.m. just to make people leave, so she’s stopped scheduling anything before nine.
I didn’t tell her that. She just watched me and worked it out.
She handles Paul, too, which nobody handles.
Paul has been my right hand for nine years and he treats every new hire like a personal insult until they prove otherwise, usually over a span of months.
Emily proved otherwise in three days by the simple method of not being intimidated by him at all.
He gave her the cold Paul stare on Monday and she gave it right back and said, “You’re going to be my favorite, I can tell,” and he didn’t know what to do with that, and now he brings her coffee. He has never once brought me coffee.
The problem is the office. In the office we’re professional.
She calls me Mr. Reed in front of people, cool and crisp, and it does a number on me I can’t explain to anyone, least of all her.
I’ll be mid-sentence in a meeting and she’ll say “Mr. Reed, your two o’clock,” and I lose my entire train of thought like a teenager.
It’s humiliating. I’m a grown man. I run a company.
She says my last name in that flat little tone and I forget what numbers are.
She’s merciless about it, too. She figured out by Tuesday exactly what it does to me and now she deploys it on purpose.
Hands me a folder in front of the whole finance team, perfectly polite, “These need your signature, Mr. Reed,” and holds eye contact one half-second too long, and walks out, and I have to ask the CFO to repeat the entire last quarter because my brain has left the building.
I caught her smirking at her own desk afterward.
She knows. She enjoys it. I’m doomed and I’ve made my peace with being doomed.
At night, different.
The nights are a thing we built without ever sitting down to build it.
The first night she was here she knocked on my study door close to midnight, sleep shorts and an old t-shirt, hair down, and said, “I can’t sleep, it’s too quiet out here.
My old place had a guy upstairs who bowled at three a.m., apparently I need that.
” So we talked. Two hours, about nothing, about everything, and nothing happened, and she went back to her room and I sat there grinning at the wall like a moron.
The second night, I knocked on hers.
And out of those two knocks we made a rule, the kind you don’t say out loud because saying it would make it real and breakable.
Neither of us goes into the other’s room uninvited.
We knock. We wait. We only go in if we’re wanted.
Sounds small. It isn’t. It means every single night is a choice she gets to make, and after two years of a man who made all her choices for her, I’d rather chew glass than be one more guy who decides things about Emily without asking.
It also means every knock could be her telling me to go away. So far she never has. That hasn’t stopped my heart from trying to climb out of my chest every time.
Friday night, end of her first real week. She crushed it. The whole office is half in love with her already, even Paul, who I caught actually smiling at a joke she made by the coffee machine, an event I’m fairly sure has never happened in recorded history.
The knock comes a little after eleven.
I’m up off the bed before I’ve decided to move. I open the door and there she is, sleep shorts, an old shirt sliding off one shoulder, hair down, no makeup, and she’s so pretty it makes my teeth hurt.
“Good first week,” I say.
“You worked it. I just answered your phone.” She leans on the doorframe, mirroring me. “Paul smiled at me today. I think I broke him.”
“You did. He told me you were good.” I shake my head. “He’s never said that. About anyone. Including me.”
“So I’m better at your job than you are.”
“Little bit, yeah.”
She just looks at me, and I should let her in, and instead I do the noble idiot thing.
“Listen.” I scrub a hand over the back of my neck. “You don’t have to be here. If it’s too much, all of it, the house, the job, whatever this is, you can just say so and I’ll back...”
“Richard.”
“I mean it. No hard feelings, I’d never...”
“Richard.” She steps in, hooks one finger in the front of my shirt, tugs. “Shut up. I don’t want space. I want this.”
That undoes me. Just takes me apart, quiet and total.
I get a hand in her hair and kiss her, and she makes a soft hungry sound against my mouth and pushes up onto her toes, and I start walking her backward toward the bed because my knees have stopped being reliable equipment.
Then she turns it around on me, plants both hands on my chest, and shoves me down onto the mattress instead.
“My turn,” she says.
And God, I let her. That’s the whole point. She didn’t get to decide anything for two years, so if she wants to run this, she runs this, and I’ll lie back and thank her for it.
She climbs into my lap, knees on either side of my hips, settling her weight down onto me, and rests her hands flat on my chest like she’s claiming the place. “Hi,” she says.
“Hi.”
Then she kisses me, slower than the cabin, deeper, unhurried, like for once we’ve got all the time in the world and she means to use every minute of it.
My hands find her thighs, slide up under the hem of her shorts, grip.
She shivers and rolls her hips down against me, slow and deliberate, and I make a sound into her mouth that I’m not proud of.
“Tell me what you want,” I say against her lips.
“You.” She bites my bottom lip, tugs. “Just you. That’s the whole list. Try to keep up.”
“Bossy.”
“You love it.”
“I really do.” I get both hands under her shirt, drag my palms up the warm length of her back, and she arches into it like a cat.
Then I flip us. Can’t help it. I need her under me, need to see her hair spread across my pillow, and when I get her there she’s grinning up at me, breathless, flushed, and it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen.
“You’re in my bed,” I tell her.
“Yeah, I noticed. I walked down here and everything.” She hooks a leg around mine and pulls. “You gonna do something about it or just narrate?”
“God, you’re a menace.” I drop my mouth to her throat, drag it down, and she stops being able to be smug about anything.
I take my time stripping the shirt off her, kissing every inch of skin as it shows, and she squirms and fists a hand in my hair and tells me to hurry up, and I tell her no, and when I finally get her bare under me I have to stop and just look.
“Look at you,” I say, low, my hand spreading over her stomach, up. “So pretty, Em. So goddamn pretty.”
“You’re doing that on purpose.”
“Mm. No idea what you mean.” But I slow down even more, just to prove her right.
“Going slow. To make a point. To kill me, specifically.”
“I’m going slow because I’ve waited ten years for this and I’m not rushing a single second of it.” I drag my mouth lower, feel her hips lift off the sheets, chasing. “You can yell at me about efficiency in the morning.”
“I hate you so much.”
“No you don’t.” I settle my mouth where she’s been arching to get it, and whatever she was about to fire back breaks apart into a gasp.
I take my time, work her with my tongue and then two fingers, learning her by the sounds she makes, every hitch of breath, every time her fingers fist in my hair and pull.
She’s slick and hot and shaking against my mouth, and I do the thing that makes her thighs clamp around my head and then do it again, slower, dragging it out until she’s swearing at the ceiling.
When she comes apart the first time she slaps a hand over her own mouth out of two years of bad habit.
I reach up and pull it away, lace my fingers through hers, pin it to the mattress beside her head.
“Let me hear you,” I tell her, mouth wet, chin on her hip. “There’s nobody in this whole house but us. I want every single sound you’ve got.”
“Then you’d better make me make them.”
“That a dare?”
“That’s an instruction, Reed. Keep up.”
So I crawl up her body, and she gets a hand around me before I’m even settled, strokes me slow and tight until it’s my turn to lose my grip on a sound. “God, Em.” I have to catch her wrist. “Not unless you want this over embarrassingly fast.”
“Good to know.” She does it again, grinning, the menace, and I groan and pin that hand down too.
The second time she doesn’t cover her mouth.
I push into her slow, inch by inch, watching her face the whole way, and she’s tight and wet around me and her eyes stay open, locked on mine, holding my gaze like she won’t let me hide from a second of it.
She wraps her legs around me and pulls me deeper and tells me to move, so I move.
I find a pace that pulls her apart slowly, my fist twisted in the sheets by her head, my other hand riding the roll of her hip.
“God, you feel good,” I say against her jaw, wrecked. “So good. Better than I let myself imagine, and I imagined a lot.” I drop my forehead to hers. “You’re not sleeping down that hall again. Not a chance.”
She laughs, breathless and wrecked, and drags my mouth down to hers, and when she tips over the edge a second time she takes me with her, my face buried in her neck to muffle the sound I make against her skin.
“Stay,” she says after, boneless, both of us a sweated-through mess and neither of us caring.
“Okay.”
She falls asleep on my chest within minutes, one hand curled against my heart, breathing slow and trusting.
I don’t sleep, though. I lie there and watch her in the dark, telling myself I’ll close my eyes in a minute, and I never do, because I don’t want to miss a second of having her here.
***
Sometime around four in the morning I’m still awake, and she’s dead asleep, breath even, face soft in the dark, all the sharp wary edges she wears in daylight gone slack and peaceful.
She looks about nineteen. She looks like the girl across the council table who never once knew I was halfway gone over her.
I should stay.
I want to stay. God, I want to stay so badly it’s a physical ache, want to be here when she opens her eyes, want to be the first thing she sees.
But if I stay, she wakes up with me here, and she thinks this is more than it is.
Thinks we’re a real thing, a settled thing, and then she feels boxed in, decided-for, trapped, and the absolute last thing Emily needs after Henry is to feel trapped by another man who moved too fast and assumed too much.
I’m giving her room. Giving her the chance to choose this for real, in daylight, eyes open, instead of waking up already caught.
At least that’s what I tell myself as I ease out from under her, slow and careful, settling her hand down onto the warm spot where I just was.
She shifts. Reaches out in her sleep. Her hand finds the empty side of the bed, pats it once, and goes still.
Something cracks straight down the middle of my chest.
I stand there in the dark like a coward, looking at her hand on the cold sheet, and then I do what I always do. I find paper. I write the only thing I ever seem able to write to this woman. Didn’t want to wake you. Five words, and I still don’t have anything better.
I take it down the hall to my study. I pull up the Tokyo problem, the one that’s been on fire since the bus, and I answer emails I could answer in my sleep, anything to keep my hands moving and my feet from carrying me back down the hall.
This is the arrangement. This is what she needs.
I keep telling myself that, over and over, until the sky starts going gray.
Around seven she comes down in one of my shirts, sleeves swallowing her hands, hair a wreck, and my heart does the thing it always does.
“You left early,” she says, getting coffee.
“Work stuff. Tokyo.” It’s even true.
She nods and lets it go, like she always lets it go. But a look crosses her face for just a second, there and gone, a small flat disappointment she folds away before I can be sure I saw it.
I tell myself I imagined it.
I’m getting very good at telling myself things.
What I don’t tell her, because it isn’t mine to be proud of, is the thing she mentioned last night, offhand, half asleep against my shoulder: she filed the divorce paperwork herself.
Got a new number. Cut Henry off clean, no help from me, no help from anybody.
Walked into that office and ended it with her own two hands.
God, this woman.
She reaches past me for the milk, close enough that I could pull her in, and I don’t, because that’s the deal, and I watch her pad back across my kitchen in my shirt like she’s always lived here.
I leave before dawn. Again. She’s reaching for the cold side of the bed in her sleep, and I see it, and I make myself walk out anyway.