Chapter 17
ANNIE
My eyes flutter open, and for a terrifying, suspended second, the world doesn’t quite click into place.
The light is the first problem. It’s too bright, too expansive, pouring through floor-to-ceiling windows that definitely don’t look out onto the brick wall of my neighbor’s air-shaft.
This is a bedroom, but it’s a grown-up bedroom.
It’s a room that implies the owner has a retirement fund and knows how to use a French press.
I am currently submerged in a bed so vast and comfortable that my twin mattress back at the apartment—the one that creaks every time I roll over like it’s giving up the ghost—is a distant, poverty-stricken memory.
The sheets are soft. The thread count is high enough that I suspect it’s actually made of woven clouds.
The room is…nice. Cozy but organized. There’s a bookshelf packed with the heavy hitters—archaeology textbooks, philosophy books, dog-eared novels, and a collection of vinyl records that suggests he’s a man of very specific, very expensive tastes.
A glass of water sits on the nightstand next to a silver watch and a framed photo: Leo and Emma at the park, caught in a mid-laugh explosion that makes my heart do a clumsy somersault.
Leo’s room.
Oh, god. This is Leo’s room.
I shift to sit up, and the sheet slides down my skin with a traitorous, silky glide. I am naked. Utterly, undeniably naked, wrapped in a white cocoon that smells like sandalwood, fresh detergent, and him.
I peer over the edge of the mattress. An empty condom wrapper and my bra are discarded on the floor, and the latter looks like a dejected beige ghost. It’s my “nun bra”—the one Cori says is a nude-colored, full-coverage monstrosity that I only bought because it was on sale and felt “sensible.” It has zero lace, zero personality, and exactly zero sex appeal.
Of course! Of course, the one time I end up in a bed like this, I’m wearing a bra the exact color of oatmeal.
I wasn’t planning on anyone seeing it, let alone a man who looks like he belongs on the cover of a moody academic magazine.
I try to piece together the trajectory of the night, but the memories are fuzzy around the edges, blurred by the wine into a series of snapshots.
We were talking. About God and stardust and—what else?
Love. We were talking about love. About whether it was real or just chemicals.
About tragedy and magic and the price of admission.
And then, the talking just…stopped, and the kissing started.
It wasn’t the tentative, “should we be doing this?” sort of kissing.
It was a landslide. It was Leo picking me up—his hands solid and certain under my thighs—while I wrapped my legs around his waist and he’d carried me here, and then we were having sex.
Amazing, brain-altering, I-might-never-recover-from-this sex.
Oh shit. I had sex with my boss.
I should feel guilty. I should feel ashamed or panicked or like I just made the worst decision of my life.
I should be spiraling about the professional messiness of it all, or the fact that I’m supposed to be the “responsible” one.
But I don’t. There’s no shame sitting in my chest, no regret making my stomach twist.
The man is a very good kisser. Devastatingly good. He kisses like he’s been thinking about it for years, waiting for the exact moment to put the theory into practice.
And those hands. They’re exactly as good as I’d imagined they’d be. Better, maybe. The way they’d moved over me—confident, careful, like he was learning me. Mapping me. The way his fingers had—
I squeeze my eyes shut, my face going hot.
I remember bits and pieces. The taste of him—wine and salt and something darker.
The breadth of his shoulders under my hands, all that muscle I’d been trying very hard not to notice for weeks.
How he’d looked at me when he’d pulled my sweater over my head with a look of such profound, quiet recognition that it made me feel like the most important person in the world.
I remember tongues and teeth and sweaty skin. The sound he’d made when I’d—
Okay.
I need to stop this immediately before I combust and leave a charred, naked silhouette on these very expensive sheets.
I look over. He’s still asleep, his face smoothed out into something almost vulnerable.
Those thick, dark lashes are resting against his cheekbones like ink strokes.
I find myself studying him—mapping the terrain of his face in the gray-gold light of the New York City sun.
I’m memorizing the sharp curve of his jaw and the way his skin looks, trying to archive the moment before reality decides to crash the party.
He’s more muscular than I realized. I wonder if he used to play sports, because this isn’t just going-to-the-gym muscle. This is years of something—rugby, maybe, or rowing. Something that builds shoulders like that.
His lips are slightly parted, looking soft and dangerously inviting even in sleep.
His nose has a slight, character-building crook to it—broken at some point, probably—and it’s the only thing that keeps him from looking like a Greek god statue.
It makes him real. It makes him the man who argues about Friends and drinks too much Bordeaux with the nanny.
His hair is a disaster of dark, untamed curls, spiraling in every direction. I want to touch them so badly it actually aches. So I do. I reach out, winding a single curl around my finger. It’s soft, springy. I watch it coil and then snap back when I let go, like it has a mind of its own.
His eyes flutter open. For a second, there’s that disoriented blur, and then he sees me, and he doesn’t panic.
He doesn’t pull away. He just smiles a soft, sleepy smile that makes my stomach do a somewhat graceful backflip.
He stretches, his entire body lengthening with the fluid, lazy grace of a cat, and glances at the clock.
7:30 AM.
I’m still there, my fingers tangled in his hair, watching the dust motes dance in the light catching the curls.
He lets out a low laugh. “Are you petting me, Annie?”
“Maybe,” I whisper back with a small laugh of my own. “Is that weird?”
“A little,” he murmurs, his voice groggy and morning-deep.
“Should I stop?”
“Don’t you dare.”
He shifts then, his weight hovering over me, pinning me into the softness of the mattress. He kisses me—a slow, sweet, unhurried thing that tastes like the end of a long journey. It’s a kiss that says we have all the time in the world, even if the world is currently waking up outside the door.
“Good morning,” he breathes against my mouth.
“Hi.”
He pulls back just enough to look at me.
Not a look that’s assessing or even overtly sexual, but something far more intimidating—he’s being attentive.
He’s taking in the details and storing them somewhere safe, like I’m not just a girl in his bed but something he’s choosing, deliberately and completely.
It’s as if I matter in a way that has nothing to do with what we just did and everything to do with what comes after.
I reach up, tracing the line of his lips with my fingertip.
I remember noticing them the first time we met, back when I was convinced he was an arrogant asshole.
My finger slides over the tiny crease in the center of his bottom lip, and he catches my hand, kissing the tip of my finger before leaning down to find my jawline.
He finds the spot. The one he discovered last night that makes my entire brain go to mush.
I let out a soft, sharp gasp. “Isn’t Emma going to wake up soon? What are we…what are we doing?”
“Emma sleeps like the dead,” he mumbles against my skin, his breath hot and steady. “We’ve got at least two hours before the demands for cereal begin.”
He goes back to work on my neck, nipping gently at the sensitive cord of my throat before soothing it with his tongue.
I wrap one arm around his neck, my other hand buried deep in that messy hair, and I realize I could live here.
I could live in this too-soft bed with this man and never leave.
I could let him make me feel like this—wanted, seen, safe—forever and never get tired of it.
His lips travel downward, kissing and licking a path down from my neck.
I look down and see the faint, plum-colored marks on my chest from last night—hickeys that should probably make me feel like a reckless teenager, but they don’t.
He doesn’t seem to care either. He slides my nipple into his mouth and his tongue circles it, slow and torturous, then flicks across it in a way that makes my back arch off the bed.
I start squirming underneath him involuntarily, my hand tightening in his hair, tugging harder than I mean to.
He moans against my skin and I realize he likes that. He likes when I pull his hair, when I lose my grip on the “polite nanny” persona.
I tug his hair again, a little more insistently this time, and the feel of him against me is doing something to my central nervous system that would probably make for a very interesting, very scandalous research paper.
His tongue hitches, a jagged little movement that feels entirely too good, and then his hands are sliding to my thighs—heavy, warm, and utterly certain—parting them just enough to settle himself into the space I didn’t realize I was saving for him.
“Leo, wait—”
He pulls back just enough to rest his chin on my chest, looking infatuated and annoyed in equal measure—like a kid who just got told to stop eating dessert before dinner. I could laugh.
“What do we do from here?” I ask, winding his curls around my finger again. “What about Emma?”
He doesn’t say anything right away, but he traces my collarbone with one finger.
“She’s going to wake up,” I continue, the Great Wall of Reality finally starting to rebuild itself brick by brick. “And ask why I’m still here, in yesterday’s clothes. We need some sort of game plan. Something to say.”