Chapter 18 #3
“Don’t joke.” She pulls back an inch, and her eyes are shining and furious and wet all at once, and this is the part the poets skip: how much of making up is grief.
“Callie.” I take her face in both hands, and my own voice comes out wrecked, no play-call left in it anywhere. “Never again. You hear me? Whatever we break from here on, we fix it loud and we fix it fast. I’m not spending another two weeks watching the fifty-yard line.”
“Okay,” she whispers.
“Okay,” I say, and lift her onto the island.
She gasps, then laughs, then stops laughing, because I’ve started on her neck and I have two weeks of specific, itemized missing to work through and I intend to be thorough about the collections.
Her head tips back. Her fingers dig into my shoulders.
Jeans are dealt with, gracelessly, one leg at a time, both of us breathing like a two-minute drill, and when I get my mouth to the inside of her knee and start the long climb she grabs a fistful of my hair and remembers, barely, the ceiling above us and the two small tenants sleeping under it.
“Quiet,” she orders, at a volume that is not.
“That’s your assignment, sugar.” Another kiss, higher. “Mine’s the opposite.”
I go silent then, letting my mouth explore the damp heat between her legs.
My tongue circles her slick folds, tasting her arousal, diving deeper until her breath hitches and she’s trembling.
She parts her thighs wider, giving me full access.
I glide my tongue over her clit, flicking it with deliberate slowness until she moans into the empty space above me.
Her wrist flies up to cover her mouth; her other hand claws at the edge of the marble.
When I stand she’s flushed and boneless and looking at me with her eyes gone dark and certain, and she pulls me in by the waistband.
There is my wallet, mercifully within reach, and a moment of fumbling I will deny under oath, and then I’m stepping between her thighs and she’s wrapping around me and I push home slow, both of us exhaling like something’s been set down after being carried too far, and for a second neither of us moves at all.
Her forehead against mine. Her heels at my back.
My hands spread over her hips like I’m holding something breakable, which I am, which I knew the whole two weeks and pretended otherwise.
We find out pace fast, then have to slow it down, then can’t.
It’s deep and urgent and a little desperate, every stroke saying the things we already said in words: I’m sorry, I know, never again, stay.
She muffles herself against my throat. I press my mouth to her hair and say her name like a man who spent two weeks not allowed to.
The marble is cold and neither of us cares; the house is silent and both of us are careful; and when she starts to shake again she drags my mouth down to hers so we can break quietly into each other, which we do, her first and me two strokes behind, my whole spine lighting up, her name coming out of me in pieces against her lips.
We stay like that a long time. Wrapped up, cooling down, her fingers tracing idle lines on my back like she’s writing something there.
We reassemble ourselves with the giggling incompetence of teenagers, and I make her a plate of reheated pizza she informs me she doesn’t need and then eats, and I watch the woman I love sit cross-legged on my kitchen island in my t-shirt at eleven at night, and my house has never once in its existence been worth this much.
She’s on her second slice when I decide it’s time to empty my pockets of the rest of the evening’s news.
“Two more things before you fall asleep on my marble.” She raises an eyebrow over the crust: proceed. “Tomorrow, we’re going to see Danny.”
Her whole body goes still against the island.
“He said yes. The rest is his to tell you himself. I have practice in the afternoon. And tomorrow evening”, deep breath, here we go — “I need you to find a babysitter, because you’re going to be my plus-one at a charity event Morrison’s making me attend. ”
“You want me to —” She stares up at me. “Go somewhere public? With you?”
“If you come as my girlfriend, that’s great.
” I say it steady, watching her eyes. “If you come as a friend, also fine. I’m not doing it to force anything official, though, for the record, if you want official, I am extremely available.
I want you there because the man who put me in your path is going to be in that room, and I think you should meet him.
Thank him, throw champagne on him, interview him, dealer’s choice. I’ll hold your glass either way.”
What I don’t say, what I file under tomorrow’s business, next to the practice schedule and the flowers I’m going to pretend I didn’t order, is the other reason David Morrison needs to be in a room with us.
Because the snake owes a debt he doesn’t know about yet. And before that evening ends, he’s going to find Callie Carter a way to publish her article, or he’s going to learn exactly how expensive my cooperation has been running lately.