Chapter 20
The stairs up to my door had never felt narrow before, but Caleb was close enough behind me that I noticed every inch of the walkway and the gold light along his jaw when I glanced back.
I got the key in the lock on the second try, which I considered a personal victory given that my hands weren’t entirely steady, and pushed the door open into my own dark living room like I was smuggling him in, even though this was, technically, an invitation I had extended out loud, with words, like an adult.
“You can turn on a light,” I said. “This isn’t a heist.”
“I know where the switch is.”
“Of course you do.” I dropped my keys in the bowl by the door, the one shaped like a treasure chest that a vendor had talked me into buying two Christmases ago, and heard the door click shut behind him.
Not locked. Just shut. I noticed that he waited, hand still on the knob, like he was giving me one more chance to change my mind before he committed his whole body to the room.
I didn’t take it. “Front door,” I said, turning to face him. “Like I promised.”
“Like you promised.”
He was still wearing the same neutral shirt from the stakeout, sleeves pushed up now, and there was something about seeing him standing in my living room instead of framed through a windshield or a doorway that made the whole night collapse down into one single fact: he was here, inside, no glass and no distance between us.
“Come here,” I said, and he crossed the room in three steps like he’d been waiting for permission the entire drive.
The kiss wasn’t careful. I’d had careful with Mark for almost a year, and careful had never made my grip tighten on a man’s collar before he touched me.
Caleb kissed like he was paying full attention, answering the hitch in my breath and the way my hands found him.
He backed me two steps until the couch caught behind my thighs, and I pulled him down with me by the front of his shirt because I had no interest in being gentle about wanting him.
“Josie.” My name in his mouth had a weight to it that no one else’s version of it carried, low and rough, like he’d been saving it. “Mine tonight,” he said against my jaw, quiet, almost like he hadn’t meant to say it out loud. “If that’s all right.”
“That’s more than all right.” I felt him laugh against my throat, a real laugh, not the dry almost-laugh he rationed out in public.
“Tell me what you want, then.”
“I want you to stop being so polite about it.”
“I can do that.” His hand slid up under the hem of my shirt, and he paused there, thumb resting against my ribs, waiting, actually waiting, until I nodded, a small sharp motion that felt like giving away something more important than it should have.
Then his mouth was on my neck and his hand was moving with a purpose that made the whole room tilt sideways.
“Off,” I said, tugging at his shirt, and he sat back long enough to pull it over his head. I put my palm flat against his chest, feeling his heart going faster than his composure let on, and that felt like the truest thing he’d told me all night.
“You’re allowed to want this messy,” I said. “I do.”
“Noted.” But he didn’t speed up. He came back to me slow, deliberate, working my shirt off over my head like rushing would mean missing something he’d regret not having.
When his mouth moved lower, tracing a line down my sternum, I heard myself say his name the way he’d said mine, low, involuntary, and felt him go still for half a second like he’d filed that sound away somewhere permanent.
“Bra,” I said, “is a solvable puzzle, Rourke.”
“Give me a minute.”
“Cocky.”
“Confident.” He proved it fast enough that my laugh dissolved into something else when his mouth found my breast, unhurried and thorough. My hands went into his hair. He had spent weeks watching me from a distance; this was the first time I let him close enough to touch what he had been looking at.
“Tell me if I’m wrong,” he said, voice rough against my skin, hand sliding down over my hip to the waistband of my jeans, “but I don’t think you want slow tonight.”
“You are extremely not wrong.”
He undid the button, and I lifted my hips to help him get the jeans down, and then his hand was exactly where I wanted it, fingers moving with focus, like he had every intention of getting this right.
“Caleb.” I said it like a warning and a request at the same time, and he looked up at me, gray-green eyes gone dark, checking, always checking.
“Good?”
“Very good. Keep going.”
He kept going, and after a minute he stopped, breath uneven, and looked up at me again, more deliberate this time. “I want to taste you,” he said, low, no performance in it at all, just a plain want laid out for me to answer. “Tell me yes.”
“Yes. God, yes.”
He made a sound against my hip like the word had cost him something to hear, and then his mouth was following the path his hand had cleared, and I said his name again, softer this time, an entirely different kind of true.
He was thorough, patient and attentive and completely unwilling to be rushed even when I tried, hips lifting, hands pulling at his hair in a way that should have hurried him and didn’t.
When I came, it was with his name and a curse tangled together, and he didn’t stop until I pushed weakly at his shoulder, oversensitive, breathless, laughing in the helpless way you laugh when your whole body has just been proven wrong about something.
He came back up my body slowly, kissed my hip, my stomach, the corner of my jaw, and settled beside me on the couch, hand splayed possessive and warm against my ribs like he was reluctant to stop touching me even now that the immediate urgency had passed.
“That was,” I said, and didn’t finish the sentence, because there wasn’t a word ready.
“Yeah.” He said it like agreement, like he’d been there too.
I felt his hand start to drift lower again, unhurried, an invitation rather than a demand, and I caught his wrist before it got anywhere interesting.
“Not tonight,” I said.
He stilled instantly, no argument in his body at all, just attention. “Okay.”
“Not because I don’t want to. I really, really want to.
” I sat up enough to look at him properly, chest still not quite steady, hair a disaster I didn’t care about.
“But you’ve watched me for weeks, Caleb.
You know my coffee order and my sleep schedule and probably the brand of my toothpaste.
You’ve had more access to me than almost anyone in my life, and I gave you plenty of it on purpose, because it turned out I liked being known that much.
But I don’t know anything that costs you something.
I know the version of your childhood you can say in one clean sentence in a parked car. I don’t know the rest of it.”
He didn’t look away, which I gave him credit for. “That’s fair.”
“I’m not trying to punish you. I’m not even mad.” I reached over and laced my fingers through his, mostly because I needed to be touching him while I said the rest of it. “I just don’t want to be the only one who’s naked in this relationship. Literally or otherwise.”
His eyes changed, quick and unguarded, before he hid the reaction. “Water,” he said instead, standing, pulling his shirt back on like it was armor he needed to have on before he could finish the sentence properly. “You should drink some water.”
“Deflection noted, Rourke.”
“I’m getting the water first. Then I’ll answer whatever you actually asked me.
” He came back a minute later with a glass, sat close enough that our knees touched, and waited while I drank half of it before he spoke again, quieter now, like the room had gotten smaller.
“I’m not good at this part. The part where I go first.”
“I know.”
“When I was a kid,” he said, slowly, like he was testing the weight of each word before he let it out, “I used to time how long it took my father to notice I’d left the room.
That’s not a story. It’s just a fact I’ve never said out loud to anyone before you.
” He looked at the glass in my hands instead of at me.
“That’s the smallest thing I’ve got, and it still felt like handing you something sharp. ”
“That’s not smaller than it feels,” I said. “Thank you for it.”
I set the glass down and pulled the throw blanket off the back of the couch, wrapping it loose around both our shoulders because the conversation felt like the kind that needed some form of warmth attached to it.
“I’m not asking for all of it tonight,” I said. “Just that you know I noticed. And that eventually, the door swings the other way.”
I leaned my head against his shoulder, and felt him exhale slow, some tension leaving his frame that I hadn’t fully registered was there until it left.
“The next locked door is yours.”