Chapter 34
Elena
Monday evening, in the stairwell of the Village theater, I read Mara’s text three times.
Hey, that guy from table six on Saturday? Tall, brown eyes, intense? He came in tonight asking for you by name. Jessica told him you weren’t working. He looked like he wanted to buy the building just to fire us all. FYI.
He came back. After the hallway, after the threesome comment, after I told him to leave and he left, he walked into that restaurant on a Monday night and said my name to a stranger.
My skin goes electric. I lean against the railing with the sounds of the cast packing up behind me and I feel something crack open in my chest, something I’ve spent two days trying to seal shut with silence and dead flowers and the glacial quiet of an apartment that gives nothing back.
I text him before the fear can catch up.
I’m sorry. Truly.
Then I go home and sit on my bed with the phone face-up on the pillow, the screen a small bright rectangle of hope in a room that has none, and I wait.
One hour. Delivered. Read. Nothing.
The tears come quietly, one thin line down my cheek, and I don’t wipe it because there’s no one here to see.
He read it and didn’t answer. Which is what I deserve.
Which is fair. Which is the natural consequence of lying to the only man who ever looked at me like I was the answer to something, and I should accept it, I should put the phone in a drawer and go to sleep and get up tomorrow and rehearse and waitress and build the life I said I wanted.
My phone buzzes.
Where are you?
I send him my location with a shaky, almost sarcastic smile: you asked, here I am.
Ten seconds.
I’ll be there in 30.
My jaw drops. I look at my apartment. Look at myself. Sweatpants. Unwashed hair. Two days of damage written all over my face. Thirty minutes to become a person worth driving to Alphabet City for.
I throw the dead flowers out, shower in four minutes, pull on jeans and a clean shirt. I don’t have time for the woman I’d want him to see. He’ll get this one.
The buzzer goes at nine forty-two. I open the door before he knocks because I’ve been standing behind it since nine thirty-eight with my hand on the knob and my heart in my throat.
He’s in a suit. He’s always in a suit. He fills my narrow hallway the way he fills boardrooms, completely and without apology, but his face gives me nothing. I wish I could read his mind, crack whatever wall is up, and see if there’s still anything left of what we were.
“Can I come in?”
I step aside. He walks through my apartment slowly, taking it in, and I watch him see what my life looks like without him. The small kitchen. The single window. The Hopper print. The brown couch. Every careful, insufficient thing I built to prove I could survive alone.
He turns. “Why.”
Not a question. A detonation.
“Why did you lie. Why Boston. Why did you let me believe you were somewhere else for five weeks.”
The armor wants to go up. I can feel the joke assembling, something sharp and deflecting that will buy me ten more seconds of safety. But I’m so tired of being safe. I’m so tired of the wall and the dark apartment and the flowers that die every Thursday because nothing in this place can stay alive.
“Because telling you the truth would have meant telling you I love you,” I say. “And I’ve never said that to anyone and had it end with them staying.”
His jaw works. The hardness shifts, cracks, and underneath it I see, hurt, raw and unmanaged, the same I’ve been drowning in on the other side of the city.
“Did you miss me?” His voice is rough. “While you were out here finding yourself. Did you miss me.”
“Did you?”
He crosses the room in two steps. His hands are on my face, warm and steady, tilting my chin up so I have nowhere to look but his eyes, which are dark and bright and furious and tender simultaneously, and so close I can see the shadows, the sleeplessness, the evidence of a man who has been as wrecked as I have.
“Stop,” he says. “Stop lying. Stop running. I want you. You. And if you’re going to stand here and tell me you love me then you’d better mean it because I am not losing you twice.”
“Well, I don’t know,” I whisper. “Are you going to love me back, are you telling your blonde friend you chose me?”
His mouth twitches. “I love you with all my heart, Elena. There’s no place for anyone else.”
He kisses me.
Not gentle. Not careful. Not the measured, controlled kiss of a man who does everything with precision.
This is desperate and deep and tastes like something breaking open, his mouth on mine, his hands on my face, his body pressing me backward until my shoulders hit the wall behind me.
I grab the front of his shirt and pull him closer and kiss him back with everything I’ve been holding for five weeks, every sleepless night, every moment I lay on Nadia’s couch or my own bed staring at a ceiling and missing him so badly I thought it would kill me.
His hands slide from my face to my waist, pulling me flush against him, and I feel every inch of him through the fabric, the heat, the tension, the five weeks of want compressed into the space between our bodies.
My fingers find his hair. His mouth moves to my neck and I tilt my head back and the sound that comes out of me isn’t dignified and I don’t care.
“God, I missed this,” I breathe. “I missed your mouth. I missed your hands. I missed the way you smell.”
“You’re so beautiful.” He says it against my throat, low and rough, like the words are being pulled out of him. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you. Every single night.”
I pull at his shirt, untucking it, my hands sliding underneath to find warm skin, and he inhales sharply when my fingers trace the muscles of his stomach.
He lifts his head and looks at me his eyes darkening with desire, “I want you,” and the way he says it isn’t polite or careful, it’s a man at the end of something he can no longer hold back.
His mouth finds mine again and we’re moving, stumbling backward through my tiny apartment, his jacket catching on the doorframe, my hip hitting the corner of the hall table, both of us too wrapped up in each other to navigate properly.
I’m pulling at his shirt buttons and kissing him at the same time, which means I’m doing both badly, and he’s trying to walk me backward without breaking the kiss, which means we collide with the bedroom door, it swings open and we half-fall onto the bed in a tangle of limbs and undone buttons and laughter.
“Smooth,” I say, underneath him.
“Very,” he says smiling, and the sight of it after everything does something devastating to my chest.
I push him onto his back and straddle him.
His hands settle on my hips like they were designed for exactly this.
I loosen his tie first, pulling it free from his collar slowly, the silk sliding through my fingers while my other hand rests against his chest, feeling his heart beat, fast and hard under my palm.
I hold the tie up. Look at him. Raise an eyebrow.
He understands immediately. Something shifts in his eyes, a flash of surprise, then heat, then surrender, which is a word I never thought I’d associate with Patrick Aldera but there it is, in the way his chin lifts and his breath catches and his hands fall to his sides.
“Can I?” I say.
His jaw tightens. His eyes drop to the tie in my hands, then come back up to mine, dark and deliberate. “Do it.”
I lean forward and wrap the silk tie across his eyes, reaching around the back of his head to knot it, checking that it’s not too tight the way he checked for me that night in his bedroom with the blue scarf. His hands find my hips, instinctive, and I gently move them away.
“No,” I say. “Not yet. My turn.”
The sound he makes is low and rough and does something to the inside of my chest that I’ll be processing for weeks.
I finish unbuttoning his shirt, the last few buttons slow and deliberate, taking my time because the way his breathing changes with each one is worth slowing down for.
His chest appears the rest of the way, the hard planes of muscle, the warmth of his skin, the way his stomach contracts when my knuckles brush against it.
I push the shirt off his shoulders and let it fall.
I kiss his neck. Just below the jaw, where his pulse is hammering.
His head tilts back and I feel the groan vibrate against my lips.
I kiss lower. His collarbone. The hollow of his throat.
The center of his chest where his heart is doing something reckless.
I trace a line with my mouth down his sternum, slow, deliberate, mapping him the way he once mapped me, learning the geography of his body with my lips and my hands and the specific attention of a woman who has spent five weeks memorizing the memory of him and finding it insufficient.
“Elena.” His voice is strained. His hands twitch at his sides, reaching for me, and I take them and press them gently back.
“Wait,” I say.
“You’re killing me.”
“Good.”
I undo his belt. Pull it free. The sound of leather sliding through loops sends something electric through me, a full-body current that starts between my hips and radiates outward.
I unbutton his pants. Ease them down his legs and toss them off the bed.
He’s lying in nothing but the blindfold and his boxer briefs and the evidence that waiting isn’t something his body is interested in.