Chapter Three #2
He picked up a book from the side table. I stared at my spreadsheet. The numbers could have been in Mandarin for all the sense they were making.
“Ask you something?” His voice was low, casual. He didn't look up from his book.
“Depends on the question.”
“Your manual. Section seven.” He turned a page. “Conflict resolution protocol.”
“What about it?”
“It says if one party has an unresolved concern, the other party has twenty-four hours to acknowledge receipt and schedule a discussion window.” He looked up. “Does that apply to the person who wrote it?”
“I wrote it to be equitable.”
“Good.” He set the book down. The firelight caught his jaw, the shadow of his beard. “Because I've had an unresolved concern for about three days and I'm running out of twenty-four-hour windows.”
My heart rate climbed. “What concern?”
He held my gaze. Gray eyes, steady. The same stillness he'd had when I'd first stepped out of the Prius, except now I knew what lived underneath the stillness — the humor, the gentleness with a cat, the way he woke before dawn and watched the trees.
Knowing those things made the stillness harder to sit across from.
“I keep thinking about what Drew said,” he said. “That his algorithm doesn't lie.”
“That's not a concern. That's a statement about software.”
“It's a concern if the software's right.”
The rain hammered the roof. The fire popped. I was very aware of the eleven feet between us and how little effort it would take to close it.
“Cliff.”
“I'm not good at this part,” he said, and his voice shifted — the dry humor stripped away, the self-deprecation dropped.
What was left was a man sitting in firelight telling me something true.
“The talking part. I never have been. I'm better at —” He stopped.
Rubbed the back of his neck. “I'm better at most things that don't require me to sit still and say what I mean.”
“You're doing fine.”
“I'm doing terrible. But I figure that's on-brand for me, so.” The corner of his mouth pulled up, but his eyes didn't match it. “I wasn't expecting you.”
Three words. My chest went tight around them and I couldn't breathe for a second, which was a physiological response I understood and an emotional one I did not, and before I could analyze the difference I was standing up from the table.
He stood too.
I crossed the eleven feet. Or he did. Or the cabin did what it had been doing for eight days and put us in the same space whether we'd planned it or not.
His hand came up to my jaw. His thumb traced my cheekbone and his palm was rough and warm and large enough to hold my whole face, and I stopped thinking.
I stopped thinking.
His mouth was on mine and the kiss was not gentle.
It was the eight days and the touches and the flannel shirt and his favorite color and the way he left sugar by my coffee, all of it compressed into the pressure of his lips and the grip of his hand on my hip pulling me against him.
I made a sound against his mouth that I would be embarrassed about later, and he responded by deepening the kiss, his tongue sliding against mine, one arm wrapping around my waist and lifting me onto my toes.
His body was a wall of heat against mine.
I could feel the hard plane of his chest through the flannel, his thighs against my thighs, and lower — the unmistakable press of him, thick and hard against my stomach, and knowing how much he wanted me sent a bolt of heat between my legs so sharp I gasped.
He walked me backward. My hip hit the kitchen counter and he lifted me onto it in one motion, his hands gripping my thighs, spreading my knees so he could stand between them, and the new angle put his mouth at my throat.
He kissed below my ear and I arched into him.
His teeth grazed my neck and my hands fisted in his shirt and pulled.
“Nell.” His voice was rough against my skin. His hands slid up my thighs, thumbs pressing into the sensitive inside, and I was shaking, actually shaking, my whole body electric and aching and wanting in a way my plan had not accounted for.
“Don't stop,” I whispered, and I meant it with everything in me that had stopped being strategic three days ago.
“Wasn't planning on it.” His voice was wrecked, barely a voice at all, and the sound of it ran through me like current.
His fingers found the hem of the flannel. His flannel. On me. He made a low sound when he touched the bare skin of my waist, and his hands spread across my ribs, thumbs brushing the underside of my breasts, and I arched into his palms and pulled his mouth back to mine.
Thunder cracked so close the windows rattled.
The lights went out.
We froze. His hands were still where he'd left them. My legs were still wrapped around his hips. His breath was coming as hard as mine, and in the sudden dark, lit only by the fire, I could feel his pulse hammering against my inner thigh.
The generator hummed to life. The lights flickered back. We were looking at each other from three inches away, his pupils blown wide, his lips wet, my fingers digging into his shoulders hard enough to leave marks.
He stepped back first. Slowly. His hands slid from my ribs and found the counter edge on either side of me, and he stood there, not touching me, his arms braced, his head dropped, breathing.
I sat on the counter and tried to remember how oxygen worked.
“That —” he started.
“We should —” I said at the same time.
Neither of us finished. He pushed off the counter and went to check the generator. I stayed where I was, gripping the butcher block edge, my body humming with an urgency that had no productive outlet. The rain kept coming down. The counter was warm where he'd touched it.
I climbed down. My legs were not entirely reliable.
Later, after a dinner we both made without mentioning the counter or the kiss or the sound I'd made against his mouth, I locked the bathroom door and pressed my forehead against the mirror.
My reflection stared back: flushed, hair wrecked, lips swollen, his flannel wrinkled where I'd gripped it and then where he had.
My body was still humming. Eight hours later and my skin felt like it was waiting for his hands to come back, and the worst part wasn't the wanting — the worst part was that the wanting felt like more than wanting.
It felt like the beginning of something I had not planned and could not control and did not know how to stop.
I pulled out my phone. Signal: three bars, courtesy of his cell booster. I opened my email. Marcy Ferrante's last message sat at the top of the inbox, dated two days ago, the subject line reading Chambers-Masterson: Exit Timeline Review.
I'd read it when it arrived. I'd meant to respond the same day, confirm the schedule, request the custody clause revisions. Standard procedure. Clean, forward-moving action I was good at.
I stared at the email. The cursor blinked in the reply field.
The subject line said exit timeline and I thought about his hand on my jaw, the way he'd said I wasn't expecting you, the expression on his face when I'd laughed without filtering it.
I thought about the sugar by my coffee every morning.
I thought about the man sleeping on a couch that was six inches too short for him and never once mentioning it.
I closed the email without responding.
I turned off the phone. Set it on the edge of the sink. Stood there with my palms flat on the porcelain and my heart running a calculation my spreadsheets had no formula for.
The rain hadn't stopped. Through the bathroom door, through the hallway, I could hear him settling onto the couch. The familiar creak. A long exhale. Then quiet.
I turned off the light and went to bed. The quilt was heavy and warm. The river was loud below the cabin and the rain was steady on the roof and I lay in the dark with my body still wanting and my plan developing its first real crack, and I did not know what to do about either one.