Chapter 49
LAUREL
Dr. Levin calls as Beckett is driving me home from a Bellamy House meeting, rain sweeping across the windshield and turning the city into a blur of red taillights and watery storefronts.
The temporary augmentation has given them what they needed: my vocal folds close better with the gap corrected, speaking takes less effort, the pain has dropped and my middle register holds with more stability.
The scar is still there, still interfering with vibration, which means the next step is the one we’ve been circling for months.
Dr. Levin recommends microlaryngeal surgery once the injectable wears off far enough to give them an accurate baseline; conservative work on the scar and weak-side mechanics, followed by staged rehabilitation and absolutely no promises dressed up as optimism.
He can’t promise touring, my old range or even recording.
What he can offer is a reasonable chance at a voice I can use without hurting myself. Then he gives me a date in early December, and suddenly every calm, medically responsible word that came before it becomes very real.
“Yes,” I say.
My stomach drops. Dr. Levin’s office will send the instructions, Mama stays listed as my medical contact, and by the time the call ends I’m holding my phone in both hands as if December might fall out of it if I loosen my grip.
Beckett doesn’t ask if I’m okay. He keeps driving, one hand on the wheel, the other resting near the console until I put mine into it myself. His fingers close around mine.
“I want Mama with me going in,” I whisper, watching the rain. “She’s done every surgery. I don’t want that to change.”
“It won’t.”
I trace my thumb across his knuckles. “I want you when I wake up.”
His hand tightens around mine. “I’ll be there.”
The storm has taken out half of Green Hills by the time we reach my townhouse.
My security system is running on backup, the street is dark, and rain is coming sideways across the driveway when Beckett gets out to bring an umbrella around to my door.
The wind turns the thing inside out almost immediately.
I watch him stand there in the downpour with the broken umbrella in one hand and an expression of such personal betrayal that laughter bursts out of me. His head turns. I’m still laughing when I shove the car door open and run.
“Laurel!” I hear the warning in my name and laugh harder, shoes splashing through water as I race up the walk.
He comes after me, of course, and the sound of him behind me does something strange and wonderful to time; all at once I’m back in Columbia, dress wet against my legs, running through rain with Beckett chasing me to the car, both of us younger by only a few months and living in an entirely different life.
He catches me around the waist a few feet from the porch, and I turn in his arms with rain in my eyes and laughter caught in my throat. His hair is soaked, his shirt dark across his shoulders, water running down the side of his face as his hands settle at my waist.
For one suspended beat, we are exactly where we were that night in Columbia—my palms on his chest, his mouth inches from mine, both of us breathing too hard.
The first time, I’d drawn a line, and no matter how badly he wanted me, Beckett refused to turn wanting into permission. Tonight there’s no line between us. I’m divorced. I know who I am standing in front of him, I know exactly what I want, and he’s mine.
Beckett must read the memory on my face because his smile softens, almost questioning, and I slide both hands into his wet hair. “This feels familiar.”
His laugh is quiet. “A little.”
“You didn’t kiss me last time.”
“You told me not to.”
My chest fills with so much affection for him that it almost hurts. “I know.” His eyes stay on mine. I smile. “That was then.”
This time, Beckett kisses me in the rain.
His mouth finds mine warm despite the cold water running between us, and the first touch is so achingly familiar and completely new that I laugh into it.
He does too, one arm wrapping around my back as he pulls me close, and suddenly I am kissing the ending of a moment that has been waiting months for us to come back and finish it.
Rain catches in my lashes, his hands are warm through my wet clothes, and I kiss him with the absurd happiness of a woman who spent too long believing every good thing had to arrive complicated.
There’s nothing complicated about this. Beckett chased me through the rain once and stopped when I needed him to stop; he chased me through it again, and now I get to hold his face in both hands and kiss him until neither of us remembers that the porch is three feet away.
When we finally break apart, his forehead rests against mine and I’m smiling so hard my cheeks hurt. “We should probably go inside.”
“Probably.”
Neither of us moves.
I kiss him again.
∞∞∞
We eventually make it through the door soaked to the skin, leaving wet shoes by the entry and a trail of water that tomorrow’s version of me can resent.
The house is dark except for the security panel and the storm flashing silver across the windows, so I find candles and start lighting them around the kitchen until the room turns warm and gold.
Beckett peels off his wet shirt, and when I glance over, he’s standing there with rain still caught in his hair, watching me with an expression that has lost every trace of humor.
I’m cold, my blouse is plastered to my skin, December is sitting somewhere in the future with a surgery room attached to it, and Grant Mercer has spent the past several months detonating pieces of the life I thought I understood. None of it follows us into this room.
Beckett takes the towel from my hand and dries my hair with slow, careful passes, then wipes a faint streak of mascara from under my eye with his thumb.
I undo the first button of my blouse. His attention drops.
I undo another. There’s no speech about if I’ve had a difficult day, no attempt to protect me from a decision I’m making with a perfectly clear head.
I take his hand and place it over my breast. “I want you.”
His palm closes around me. “Come here.”
The power comes back as I’m sitting on the kitchen counter kissing him, every recessed light blazing on at once and making both of us jerk apart.
I bury my face in his shoulder with a groan; Beckett starts laughing, the deep helpless kind that makes his chest shake under my hands, and I’m laughing too when he reaches over and kills the lights again.
Candlelight takes the room back. The rain keeps beating against the windows.
He kisses me, slower now, and whatever was funny disappears under the heat of his mouth.
We make it upstairs with wet clothes abandoned in stages, and there’s less hesitation this time. Beckett rolls on a condom and settles between my thighs; when the head of his cock presses into my pussy, the stretch pulls a broken sound from me and my fingers dig into his shoulders.
He pauses only long enough to read my face, then pushes deeper when I wrap my leg around his waist and draw him in. The feeling of him filling me is still so new it steals my breath, intimate in a way I don’t think repetition is ever going to make ordinary.
“Beckett.” His mouth covers mine as he sinks the rest of the way inside, and I moan into the kiss.
We have sex in the candlelight spilling from the hallway across the bedroom floor, my hands in his hair and his mouth wrapped around my nipple, sucking in long, lazy pulls that keep making my breath stutter, both of us smiling every so often because I can’t stop remembering that ridiculous umbrella.
He already knows how I like to be touched, and I know what happens to his breathing when I clench around his cock; the discovery is still there, only now there’s confidence threaded through it.
When I come, my pussy pulses hard around him and I bury the first helpless moan in his neck, laughing when he curses my name like I’ve inconvenienced him.
He follows not long after, holding me close as his rhythm loses its shape, and for a while all I can hear is the soft patter of rain, our breathing and the hard beat of my heart slowly settling.
It’s only when the euphoria begins to ebb that I understand why this feels different.
We weren’t frantic tonight. There was no urgency to prove anything, no desperate need to get somewhere; Beckett took his time with me, kissed me through every slow roll of his hips, held me as if being this close was the whole point.
I stare at the ceiling for a moment, almost amused by how long it takes me to name something this obvious. We fucked, technically. But that isn’t what it felt like. My heart starts racing all over again when I admit the word to myself.
We made love.
∞∞∞
Later, we’re cuddled up in my bed, the storm wearing itself down outside.
His overnight bag sits beside the chair because I asked him to stay, his toothbrush is in my bathroom because I put it there.
He doesn’t have a key, a drawer or clothes slowly taking over space in my closet; nothing about Beckett being here has happened without me choosing it first. The distinctions would probably sound ridiculous to anyone else. To me, they are the whole point.
He is here because I invited him, and that makes his arm around my waist, his bare foot tangled with mine and his breathing warm against the top of my head feel sweeter, not temporary. I fall asleep listening to the last of the sound of his heartbeat.
My phone rings near dawn.
Celia.
I come awake on the first ring because Celia doesn’t call me before sunrise. Beckett wakes under me as I reach across the bed for my phone, but he says nothing, just pushes himself upright beside me when I answer. “Celia?”
Her breathing is ragged enough that every trace of sleep disappears. “I’m sorry,” she says, and the words break halfway through. “Laurel, I’m so sorry. I know I shouldn’t be calling you. I know he isn’t yours to take care of anymore.”