Chapter 17 #2
He watched her face. That was what undid her, how he watched her. Reading every shift in her expression, adjusting when her breath hitched, staying when her hips pressed forward. He was paying attention. The way he paid attention to everything now. The way he'd learned to.
She grabbed the front of his shirt. Her other hand braced against the doorframe, knuckles white, her body tightening around his fingers.
He kissed her neck, her jaw, the hollow beneath her ear, and whispered, "I've got you," and the words and his mouth and his hand all converged.
She came with a shudder that buckled her knees.
He caught her. Held her upright, his arm around her waist, his hand still inside her jeans, gentling now. She pressed her face into his chest and breathed: ragged, aftershock breaths that she felt all the way down to her feet.
Dominic withdrew his hand slowly. Buttoned her jeans. Kissed her forehead. The tenderness of the gesture after what had just happened — the contrast between his mouth on her brow and where his fingers had been ten seconds ago — made her laugh. Breathless, disbelieving, drunk on him.
"Good night, Charlie," he said. Voice wrecked. Eyes dark. He stepped back.
"You're still leaving?"
"I'm still leaving." He was halfway down the stairs before she could respond. He turned at the landing, looked up at her. She was flushed, leaning against her door in a hallway that now felt like a crime scene. The expression on his face was equal parts agony and satisfaction. "Friday. Same booth."
"You're an evil man."
"I'm a patient man. There's a difference."
He disappeared down the stairs. She stood in the hallway for a long time, heart pounding. Aching with desire. With love that was ferociously crawling back to the surface.
His discipline drove her crazy. It also made her trust him in a way she hadn't trusted anyone since the altar.
The diner dates expanded. Coffee on Wednesday mornings at a place near the school.
It wasn’t the fancy espresso bar she'd expected him to suggest, but the bodega on the corner that sold coffee in paper cups and pastries wrapped in cellophane.
He'd show up at seven, buy her a coffee and a cheese danish, and sit with her on the bench outside P.S.
34 for twenty minutes before the buses arrived.
Then he'd leave. No fanfare. No lingering.
Just coffee, conversation, and the quiet work of being present.
Then lunch. He started bringing food to the Thursday meetings — not catered, not delivered by some service. He'd cook. The first time he showed up with a container of pasta and two forks, she'd stared at him.
"You cook?"
"I'm learning. I watched a YouTube video."
"You watched a YouTube video."
"Several YouTube videos.”
She picked up a fork. The pasta was slightly overcooked and the sauce was too garlicky, and it was the most thoughtful thing anyone had ever brought her.
Eric had been a brief knot to untangle. The first few weeks after Charlotte and Dominic's diner dates became public knowledge — which took approximately forty-eight hours, because P.S.
34's faculty grapevine was faster than broadband — there'd been an awkwardness.
Dominic was stiff around Eric, and Eric was cautiously casual.
The two of them orbited Charlotte's classroom like planets that couldn't share a gravitational field.
Charlotte had expected jealousy from Dominic.
She'd gotten it: a tightness in his jaw when Eric leaned against her doorframe, a clipped politeness when they crossed paths in the hallway.
But he didn't say anything. He didn't stake a claim, didn't make it weird, didn't do any of the possessive things she'd braced herself for.
The tension dissolved when Eric started dating Regina Walsh, the second-grade teacher with an infectious laugh. Charlotte spotted them in the faculty lounge one morning, Eric pouring Regina's coffee, Regina touching his arm while she laughed at something he'd said.
"Eric's smitten,” Kate observed, watching them. “He brought her a periodic table mug. With both their elements highlighted. Cute or cringe?"
"Both. Definitely both."
The next time Dominic encountered Eric, the tension was gone. Eric shook his hand. “Good to see you, man.”
"You too,” Dominic replied, with a warmth that was genuine.
By the following week, Dominic was asking Eric about the chess club, and Eric was explaining Mason's latest tactical innovation. Charlotte was watching from her classroom doorway thinking: How did this become my life?
Kate was the harder sell.
Kate had built a wall around Charlotte that made Charlotte's own defenses look like tissue paper.
She'd carried Charlotte out of the Whitley Hotel, driven her to Astoria, held her while she sobbed, threatened to call the police on Dominic when he sat outside her building.
Kate didn't forgive easily, and she didn't trust men who'd hurt her best friend.
She regarded Dominic's reformation with skepticism. At first.
The thaw started at the showcase prep meeting.
Dominic had stayed late to help Charlotte and Kate assemble display boards for the student artwork — actual manual labor, cutting poster board, taping labels, arranging Oliver's dragons in chronological order.
Kate had been ignoring him, a frostiness that could've chilled the room, until Dominic held up one of Oliver's early drawings — the dragon with sneakers — and said, "This one's my favorite.
He told me the sneakers are Jordans because his cousin has Jordans. "
Kate looked at Dominic. "Oliver told you about his cousin?"
"He told me his cousin's name is DeShawn, lives in the Bronx and he's going to play for the Knicks. Oliver's words, not mine."
Kate was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "DeShawn's a good kid. He came to Oliver's birthday party last year and organized a whole basketball tournament in the backyard."
"Oliver mentioned that too."
Kate studied him. Charlotte held her breath.
"You actually listen to them," Kate said slowly.
"I'm learning to."
Kate nodded and went back to cutting poster board. But the frostiness had dropped by several degrees, and by the end of the evening, she'd accepted coffee from Dominic's thermos without comment, which in Kate's language was practically an embrace.
Over the weeks that followed, Kate graduated from cold tolerance to cautious neutrality to something approaching warmth.
She started including Dominic in faculty lounge conversations.
She asked his opinion on a fundraiser sponsorship pitch.
She even laughed at one of his jokes, then immediately looked annoyed at herself for laughing.
Charlotte watched it happen, smiling. He was indeed courting her. This was patient, deliberate, unhurried. He was also learning her. Learning the people she loved and letting them learn him.
It was a Thursday, late afternoon, the school emptying around them. They were in the conference room finishing up the final showcase logistics. Charlotte was making notes about student transportation when Dominic said, casually, as if he were mentioning the weather:
"I talked to your parents."
Her pen stopped.
"I called your dad. Kate gave me his number." Dominic paused, and for the first time all afternoon, he looked uncertain. "I asked if I could come by. To talk to them. To apologize."
Charlotte set the pen down. "You called my father."
"I did."
"My father. The man who was half out of his seat at the wedding ready to come after you."
"That's the one." Dominic's jaw worked. "I told him I owed them both an apology. A real one. Face to face. Not a letter, not a message through you. I need to sit across from the people who watched me humiliate their daughter and tell them I'm sorry."
Charlotte stared at the table. "What did he say?" she asked finally.
"He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, 'Sunday. Five o'clock. Don't be late.' And hung up."
"That's it?"
"That's it. No small talk. Just the address and the time.
" He met her eyes. "I know they might not forgive me.
I know your dad might spend the whole evening looking at me like he wants to throw me through a wall.
But I can't build something with you while the people who love you most are carrying what I did.
They deserve to hear me say it. To my face.
Where I can't hide behind a card or a voicemail. "
She was quiet. The conference room hummed with its fluorescent light, its faint smell of dry-erase markers, its cargo of weeks and weeks of Thursdays.
"He'll be tough on you," she said.
"I'd be worried if he wasn't."
"And my mom — she's going to cry. She cried for a week after the wedding. She'll take one look at you sitting in her living room and she'll cry again."
"Then I'll sit there, let her cry and I won't make it about me."
"I want to come with you," she said.
"Are you sure?"
"They're my parents. And you're—" She stopped. Chose the next word carefully. "You're… whatever this is. I'm not going to let you go alone."
His eyes went bright. He blinked it back, but not before she saw it. The raw, unguarded thing that kept surfacing in him lately, rising closer to the top every week, harder and harder for him to push down.
"Sunday," she said. "Five o'clock. Don't be late. And Dominic? My dad's going to be wearing cufflinks. Tell him you like them. He's still not over the hotel concierge thing."
Dominic smiled. The full one. The one she was collecting now, hoarding them like her students hoarded colored pencils — greedily, aware of their value.
"I'll notice the cufflinks," he said.
"And don't oversell it. He'll know."
"Noted."
She picked up her pen and went back to her notes. But she was smiling, and she didn't try to hide it. Across the table, Dominic was smiling too.