Chapter 30
What Happens at Leonard Cohen, Stays at Leonard Cohen
The hotel elevator ride feels like an eternity. We don’t speak. We don’t look directly at each other.
But I see him watching me in the mirrored panel, and I stare right back, our reflections braver than we are.
Cheesy elevator music hums softly, breaking the spell just enough to make me ache for it again.
When we reach the room, he opens the door, and I barely have time to think as he pulls me into it, shedding our coats as we stumble in, breathless and unsure. Our mouths are so close I can feel the warmth of his breath, and suddenly my knees threaten betrayal.
But he steadies me. His hands stay right at my waist again—firm, like he’s afraid that going any further will break us both.
And somehow, that restraint makes it worse.
My body is thrumming, every nerve wide awake, and still, it’s the nearness that undoes me. The wanting.
I press my forehead to his.
Our breath tangles between us. Shared and shallow. His hands shift—slowly, carefully—one brushing just beneath the hem of my shirt.
His fingers graze the bare skin of my lower back. Nothing more. But it’s everything.
“I’ve never felt like this,” I whisper, the words small and raw between us.
He exhales like I’ve knocked the air from his lungs.
“I know,” he says. “Me neither.”
For a second, we just breathe each other in.
My hands curl in his shirt, desperate to hold on.
And then the truth finds me. Sharp and cold. Like a light flipping on in the middle of a dream.
The desire doesn’t vanish. It just makes room for guilt.
“Gavin—”
He pauses, lips on the nape of my neck.
I press my hands to his chest.
“Olivia.”
He stills.
I whisper it another way, softer this time.
“She doesn’t deserve this.”
What I don’t say is: But I do.
I watch as something drains from him—the lust, the joy, the heat that held us together for a breathless moment.
He exhales.
I step back, slowly. One inch. Then another.
“Gavin,” I say, my voice cracking. “We should stop.”
He doesn’t move for a beat. Then he nods.
“I know.”
The space between us stretches. My skin feels cold.
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too,” he says, then turns and disappears through the door to the other half of the suite.
I sit on the bed, still clothed, shoes and all, staring at the wall like it might offer clarity.
The want is still there.
What hurts most is knowing this wasn’t just reckless desire. It was a kind of love. One with a name I don’t know, but one of the ninety-six, I’m sure.
The kind that aches.
The kind that knows it isn’t our time, but wishes, stubbornly, illogically, that it could be.