Chapter 3
Audrey
My back hit the door, and then he was on me.
He had me pinned against it, one hand at the small of my back, the other against the wood beside my head, and his mouth was on my neck.
The chain lock was rattling against the door behind my shoulder blade.
My keys were on the floor somewhere. I'd dropped them when he kissed me in the entryway, and I hadn't thought to pick them up.
The ride back came in fragments. The gate clicking shut behind us in the dark. A streetlight sliding across the Uber window, yellow across his jaw. The driver's eyes flicking to us in the mirror and away again.
And the moment, three blocks from the bungalow, when I turned my face toward his and kissed him.
I kissed him. He'd looked over at me with his hand on his thigh, and that face he had, watching, waiting, careful for once in his life—and I leaned across the seat and put my mouth on his.
I felt him register what was happening, the half-second pause before he caught up, and then his hand came up to the side of my face.
He kissed me back. The air inside the car went narrow, and that was the end of the night I'd planned and the start of whatever this was instead.
The rest of it was getting clearer by the second.
He pulled back to look at me. His hand was still at the small of my back, my back against the door. He was waiting for something. Not consent—we'd cleared that line three blocks ago. Permission to keep going past the point where either of us could pretend in the morning.
I took his face in my hands and kissed him again.
He made a sound against my mouth, low and surprised, like I'd just changed the terms of the contract on him.
He pushed off the door, got an arm under my knees, and lifted me.
I made a noise I would not have predicted from myself.
My arms went around his neck. The dress rode up against the line of his forearm.
"Bedroom?" he said.
"Down the hall."
He took me down the hall. He knew where it was because there was only one place a hall this size could go, and because he had read every room he walked into for as long as I'd known him. He set me down at the foot of the bed. He kept his hands on my waist.
For one second, neither of us moved.
I'd not had a man in this apartment in nearly two years. I had a list in my head of the reasons, and tonight, every line of it was sitting outside the bedroom door because I'd decided to leave it there. I was tired of holding the door.
He pulled the zipper of the sage dress down with one hand. The other stayed at my waist. The dress slid off my shoulders, and his hands came up to my arms to slow it down, like he was making sure I understood that he wasn't in a hurry.
I was the one in a hurry. I worked at the buttons of his shirt, got two of them open, gave up, and pulled it over his head. He laughed against my mouth, low and a little stunned. Then he wasn't laughing.
It was warm. That was the first thing.
The whole length of him against me was warm in a way I'd forgotten about—not the temperature, the fact of him, another person's heat against my skin after years of being the only warm thing in my own bed.
His hand spread flat between my shoulder blades.
His mouth moved down my throat. I closed my eyes and let him.
The bed took my weight. He came down over me, on his elbows above me for one second with the dimple gone, no joke in his face anywhere. I felt my chest do something I wasn’t going to name.
"Callahan."
"Don't."
"Don't what?"
"Don't talk."
He bent his head and put his mouth on me, and I was through the door.
He took his time. That was what I would remember, later, when I would try not to remember any of it.
He took his time, and he kept his hands where I needed them.
He learned me. He found the place at the side of my neck under my ear that I'd not let anyone find in long enough that I'd forgotten about it, and he stayed there.
He moved when I made the noise that meant move.
He stopped when I made the noise that meant stay.
For three months, I'd thought I knew what he was like.
I'd catalogued the dimple, the rolled sleeves, the hands he used like punctuation.
I was wrong about the part of him that was under all of that.
The part under all of that was attentive.
Patient in a way that broke something open in me, because I'd not let anyone be patient with me in years, and I'd not known I missed it.
When he came up to look at me, I reached up and put my hand against his jaw. He turned his face into my palm. He didn't say anything. He didn't need to.
When we came together, it was slow.
It was slow. Quiet. His face close enough that I could feel him breathing, and I was the one who broke first. I said his name.
He answered me. He answered me like he'd been waiting for me to ask, and I felt the whole length of him go still against me for one second before he started to move again. After that, I wasn’t thinking in sentences.
The wave built. He had his face against the side of my neck.
I had my hand at the back of his head. The room was warm.
The sheets were a wreck under us. He said my name once, against my temple, and the name was different in his mouth than it had ever been in three months of him calling me Callahan. I was gone.
Afterwards, neither of us spoke.
He rolled off me but stayed close. His arm came across my waist. He was breathing hard against the pillow. I was breathing hard at the ceiling. The streetlight outside the window threw a line of yellow across the foot of the bed.
I thought about saying something. I thought about it for a long time. Whatever sentence I built kept coming apart before I could get it to my mouth, and at some point, I stopped trying.
I went to sleep before I could decide what I was going to do in the morning.
I woke up first.
The light coming through the blinds was the gray-pink that meant it was earlier than I wanted it to be. His arm was across my waist, heavy with sleep, and his face was turned toward me on the pillow with his mouth a little open.
I lay still and looked at him.
His hair was a mess. There was a small line at the corner of his mouth from where the pillow had pressed against him in his sleep.
His stubble was darker than it had been last night.
His lashes were longer than I'd registered.
The dimple was gone because he wasn't smiling, and he looked younger than thirty-two by some margin I'd not been prepared for.
I felt it land. The whole night, in one piece. The dress on the floor. His shirt over the chair. My keys in the entryway where I'd dropped them. My body sore in places I hadn't been sore in a long time. The smell of him on the pillow next to mine, clean, warm, and unmistakable.
I let myself look at him for one more minute. I gave myself that.
Then I started building the wall back.
I did it in real time, in my own head, with the light coming up gray through the blinds and his arm warm across my waist. I worked through it like a chart at the hospital—methodical, fast, no wasted motion.
The night had been a release valve we both apparently needed.
Three months of fighting about a seating chart, a cake, and the toasts.
A one-off. A one-off. Two adults who knew better than to make it into something it wasn't.
I slid out from under his arm. He shifted but didn't wake. I sat on the edge of the bed for a second with my feet on the cold floor, then went to the bathroom.
I closed the door behind me.
The mirror was unkind first thing, always.
My hair was a wreck. The lipstick from the wedding was gone except for a faint stain at the corner of my mouth.
There was a red mark at the side of my neck under my ear that was going to be a problem for the next several days.
I was naked. The smell of him was on my skin, clean and warm, and I refused to think about that directly.
I put my hands on the edge of the sink.
I want to do that again.
The thought arrived without permission. It arrived in my own voice, and I looked at myself in the mirror and let it sit there.
I wanted to do that again. I wanted to wake up in a bed that had another person in it and not feel like the world was ending.
It scared me more than I knew how to handle.
Wanting was the road. It went to the kitchen at eleven o'clock, and the phone on the counter and the chair my mother had set for three years.
Wanting led to needing, and needing led to the empty chair, and I'd spent twenty-eight years building a life that didn't require a single chair I hadn't bought and put together myself.
The man in my bed was Duke Rhodes, the most arrogant man I'd ever met, and he had put his face against the side of my neck and said my name like he meant it, and I wanted him to do it again.
I turned on the cold water and splashed it on my face. I dried my face on the hand towel and looked at myself in the mirror until the shape of it stopped trembling around the edges.
This was a thing that had happened. This was a thing I was now going to handle.
I tied my hair back at the nape with a band from the counter. I pulled the robe off the back of the door and tied it at my waist. The mark on my neck was still a problem. The rest of it I could put away.
I went back into the bedroom.
He was awake.
He was sitting up against the headboard with the sheet at his waist, scrubbing his hand through his hair, and he looked over when I came in and stopped scrubbing.
"Hi," he said.
He looked at me in the robe. He didn't say anything. The look went somewhere I wasn’t going to follow, and then it came back. His face did the thing it had done last night before he kissed me—the small recalibration, the reading of the room.