8. Eve
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Eve
The power dies at seven.
I’m in the kitchen reheating leftover lo mein of a questionable vintage when the lights flicker once, twice, and quit.
Outside, lightning carves the whole block white.
Rain throws itself against the glass like it has a grudge, and the refrigerator winds down to silence with a groan that sounds personally offended.
“Generator should kick in,” Dean calls from the living room.
He’s been here all evening. We ordered real food, the kind that doesn’t come with a health risk, and watched a genuinely terrible movie about sharks in a tornado, and he made fun of the physics for an hour while I made fun of him for caring about the physics of a movie called Sharknado.
We have very carefully not discussed what almost happened in that alcove at his brother’s old company.
The not-discussing has become its own guest in the room, taking up space, coiling tighter with every accidental brush of hands over the takeout, every glance that holds a half-second too long before one of us looks away.
The generator does not kick in.
“My phone’s dead,” I say, fumbling on the counter. “Building backup must be down too. We’re off the grid.”
“Romantic.”
“Apocalyptic.”
“Why not both.” His voice comes out of the dark, closer than I expected, and I startle, and I’m grateful he can’t see my face do whatever it’s doing. “Candles?”
“Bathroom cabinet. I think.”
And there’s the memory, ambushing me out of nowhere.
Another storm, a couple of years back, Simon’s parents’ house.
The power had gone out during a summer dinner and everyone scattered to find flashlights, and somehow Dean and I had ended up alone in the dark hallway by the kitchen.
We’d been laughing about something, his mother’s insistence on lighting the good candles only for guests who mattered, and then we weren’t laughing.
Then his hand was at my waist and mine was flat on his chest and the space between us simply stopped existing.
The kiss had lasted maybe three seconds. Soft. Barely there. A question more than a kiss. Electric enough that I felt it on my mouth for a week.
Then a flashlight swept the hall and we sprang apart, and Simon’s voice called my name from the other room, and Dean stepped back like I’d burned him, and neither of us ever said a word about it again. I told myself it was the dark. The wine. The storm doing something to the air.
I have thought about those three seconds more times than I will ever, ever admit out loud.
“Eve?” Dean’s phone light bobs toward me. “You disappeared on me.”
“Candles. Right. This way.”
We navigate by the glow, knocking into furniture, both of us laughing at two grown adults stumbling around a dark apartment like teenagers sneaking back in past curfew.
He finds them in the cabinet, a dozen white pillars I bought for a dinner party that never happened because Simon canceled it the morning of for a meeting that, I now understand, was probably not a meeting.
We carry them out and set them around the living room and light them one by one until the whole room glows warm and gold.
“There,” Dean says, settling onto the couch, the light catching every angle of his face, the line of his jaw, the gold flecks in his eyes I have decided I will stop noticing any day now. “Cozy. Very end-of-the-world.”
“I prefer romantic comedy. Third-act crisis.” I sit beside him, closer than the couch requires, because apparently that’s a thing I do now. The storm rages. The candles move. The not-discussing sits down between us and makes itself comfortable.
“Which part of the romantic comedy are we in, then?” he asks. “Professionally curious.”
“The part where the leads finally admit the obvious,” I say, “and keep getting interrupted at the worst possible moment by sharks, or mothers, or felonies.”
He goes still. Every muscle in him locks down at once.
“Eve.”
“I’m tired.” I turn to face him fully, legs folding under me, and it feels like stepping off a roof with no idea what’s at the bottom.
“I’m tired of pretending I don’t notice the way you look at me.
I’m tired of pretending I don’t look back.
I’ve been pretending about one thing or another for three years and I am so tired, Dean.
” A breath that comes from somewhere deep.
“So tell me I’m wrong. Tell me you don’t feel this, and I’ll drop it, and we’ll never speak of it again, and I’ll go back to pretending.
I’m very good at it. I have references.”
Lightning flashes. In the white of it his face is all candlelight and shadow.
“You’re not wrong.”
“Then why are you sitting all the way over there with your hands to yourself like a man at confession?”
“Because I have wanted this too long to let it be the wrong thing.” His voice strains, like he’s holding something back by main force.
“You walked out of that church days ago, not years. And I am terrified that if I reach for you tonight, I become the thing you grabbed in the dark because everything else was on fire. The rebound. The revenge. The mistake you wake up regretting in daylight. And I cannot be that. Not with you. Anyone else, fine. Not you.”
“I’m thinking perfectly clearly.”
“It’s been days, Eve. Barely.”
“It’s been five years.” The truth falls out of me before I can stop it, the thing I’ve been swallowing far longer than I want to admit.
“Five years since you made me snort wine off a balcony and called it the most honest thing in the room. Three of them watching you across your family’s table, the only person there who asked about my work and actually listened to the answer, who remembered I take my coffee with too much sugar when Simon never once did.
Three years of wondering why I felt more alive arguing with you about a movie than I ever felt being adored by him.
” My voice cracks. “It was never about the days, Dean. It started on that balcony and it never stopped, and I almost married the wrong brother because the right one’s phone rang at exactly the wrong moment, and we both decided friends was easier than brave. ”
The silence stretches, taut and unbearable, the rain filling it.
“I didn’t know,” he says, and it comes out scraped raw. “All this time. I thought you were happy. I thought I was the only one carrying it.”
“You weren’t. You aren’t.”
“Eve.” He says my name low, a prayer and a warning at once.
“If we do this, I need you to understand something. I can’t be a fling.
I can’t be a way to make him angry, a thing you do because you’re hurting and I’m here and the lights are off.
If we do this, I’m in. All the way in. The forever kind, no coming back from it.
And I need to know you’re standing here with me, eyes open, not falling because there’s nothing else to hold onto. ”
Thunder rolls hard enough to rattle the windows in their frames.
I make myself look at it honestly, the way he’s asking me to. I strip away the anger at Simon, the chaos of the week, the wreckage of the dress still wrinkling in the corner of my bedroom. I ask myself what’s left underneath all of it.
What’s left is Dean. Who was real before any of this. Who was real on that balcony. Who has been real the whole time I was looking at someone else.
“I’m here,” I whisper, and it comes out a vow. “Not because the lights are off. Not because I’m hurting. Because it’s you, and it was always going to be you, and I’m done being a coward about it. I’ve been here longer than I knew.”
He moves.
One second there’s a foot of space between us, and the next his hands are in my hair and his mouth is on mine, and I’m gone, drowning in the best possible way.
He kisses me like he’s been waiting years, because he has, and the knowing of it goes straight through me to the bone.
There’s hunger in it and a control just barely holding the line, and the second I feel that control I want to be the thing that snaps it.
I pull him closer. My back hits the cushions. His weight settles over me, careful, like I’m something he’s afraid to want too fast, and I drag my nails down his arms to tell him he doesn’t have to be careful, not with me, not tonight.
He pulls back just far enough to look at me, candlelight pooling gold in his eyes.
“If you want to stop, any second, you say the word and I’m gone,” he murmurs against my jaw, and I feel the words more than hear them. “But God, Eve. I am hoping with everything I’ve got that you don’t say it.”
“If you stop now,” I manage, “I will end you. Slowly. I’ll have time, I’m unemployed.”
His laugh is low and delighted, breaking against my throat. “There she is.”
He takes his time. That’s the thing I don’t expect, the thing that undoes me more than anything else could.
There’s no rush in him, no grabbing, no performance.
Just his hands moving slow up under my shirt, learning the shape of my ribs, the dip of my waist, like he means to commit all of it to memory and be tested on it later.
Every place he touches lights up and stays lit.
He kisses the corner of my mouth, my jaw, the soft spot below my ear that makes me gasp, and by the time he eases my shirt up over my head I’m already breathing like I sprinted here, thighs pressed tight together, mouth gone dry, every nerve I own migrating toward wherever his hands decide to go next.
“I’ve thought about this,” he says against my collarbone, and it’s half confession, half sin. “More than I should have. For a lot longer than I should have. There’s a version of me that’s been imagining this since that night on the balcony, and he is having a very good night.”
“Then stop narrating it and show me.”
So he does.
He kisses down my stomach, slow and filthy, dragging his teeth over my hip, until his mouth is at the inside of my thigh and his breath is hot against me and the anticipation alone has me soaked.
“Look at how wet you are for me.” He says it against my skin, almost reverent, almost smug. “Christ, Eve. You’re dripping.”
“Then do something about it.”
He spreads my thighs wide with both hands and licks into me like he’s been starving for it, and my back bows clean off the couch.
He works my clit with his tongue, two fingers pushing into me and curling until they find the spot that makes my whole body jerk, and he does it with a patience that should be against the law, like he’s got all night and every intention of using it to ruin me.
When I’m close, shaking, right at the edge, he pulls back and refuses to let me come.
“Dean.” My name comes out wrecked. “I swear to God, if you stop again.”
“I know, baby. I know.” I can hear the grin in it, the absolute nerve of him, his mouth shining when he glances up the length of me. “Ask me nice and I’ll let you.”
“Please. Please, Dean, let me come, I need it.”
That undoes him. He puts his mouth back on my clit and his fingers back inside me and doesn’t let up, and when he finally lets me go over it tears through me so hard I see white, and he groans against me like he’s the one falling apart, holding my hips down through every wave of it.
He crawls up my body and settles between my thighs, and I feel his cock against me, and the wanting is almost more than I can stand.
“Look at me,” he says, and I do. I hold his eyes as he pushes into me, slow, every inch of him stretching me open, and I watch his face come undone like I’m the only true thing in a world otherwise full of liars and cheats and color-coded folders.
“Fuck,” he breathes, all the way in, holding there, making me feel every inch of him. “You feel like you were made for me. Like nobody else ever should have gotten to have this.”
“Nobody did. Not like this.”
He fucks me slow and deep, the storm outside answering the one rolling through me, then harder when I beg for it, his hips driving into me until the couch knocks the wall.
His forehead drops to mine. His hand slides between us and his thumb works my clit in time with every thrust, like he memorized me the first night and has been waiting years to use it, and when I come apart the second time it’s around his cock with his name in my mouth and his arms holding every piece of me together so I don’t fly off the edge of the world.
He follows a moment later, buried to the hilt, spilling into me with my name groaned against my neck like a curse and a prayer at once, and we collapse into a tangle of limbs and candlelight and rain.
After, he pulls me into his chest and presses his mouth to my temple. The candles have burned low, throwing long shadows up the ceiling that move when the flames do.
“Still thinking clearly?” he asks, voice lazy and unforgivably pleased with itself.
“More clearly than I have in years.” I tip my head up. “Don’t let it go to your head. There’s a real risk of it going to your head.”
“Far too late,” he says, and I hear the smile in his voice. “It went to my head somewhere around the part where you threatened to end me slowly.”
“I meant it.”
“I know. It’s one of my favorite things about you.”
We fall asleep wound together, candles guttering to nothing, rain still working at the windows. His heartbeat under my ear is steady, counting out something that feels less like an ending than a first page of something I actually want to read.
I wake to gray morning light and Dean warm and solid beside me, his arm slung warm across my waist, and for one whole minute everything is perfect. A quiet I’d forgotten was possible.
Then the pounding starts.
A fist against my front door, hard enough to rattle the hinges. Once. Twice. Three times.
And a voice screaming through the wood, vicious and unmistakable.
“EVELYN. I know he’s in there with you. You disgusting little WHORE.”
Hilda.