14. Nichole #2
In front of Genevieve. In front of his mother. In front of the whole room and everyone in it. His hand comes up to my jaw - wine and all, wet fabric and all - and he kisses me like I am the only person who was ever invited to this party.
The ballroom loses its composure all at once.
A wave of murmuring rolls out from us across the floor. Heads turn. Glasses lower. Someone’s fork stops halfway to a mouth. They’re watching. They’re all watching.
And here is the thing I will not let myself admit until much later, in the dark: I like it.
I am soaked in another woman’s champagne and being kissed on purpose in front of everyone who wanted to watch me drown, and I like it.
I like the pressure of his hand on my jaw.
I like the way his mouth moves against mine like a statement.
I like the way his breath changes somewhere in the middle of it, a small hitch, a tiny loss of control.
He said sorry like it was a performance.
That was not a performance.
That was something else entirely, and it frightens me more than the wine ever could.
When he lifts his head, the room is still buzzing.
He looks at none of them. He tucks my hand into his arm, jacket still over my shoulders, and walks me the length of the floor and out the doors.
Past Genevieve, gone white. Past his mother, gone whiter.
Past every single person who thought they knew what this marriage was.
He doesn’t hurry. He doesn’t hide me.
He puts me in the car himself.
The door closes. The car pulls away. And in the dark of the back seat, I am still wearing his jacket, still smelling of spilled wine, still half-telling myself the thing in the ballroom was only strategy.
I turn to say exactly that - to hand us both the excuse, to frame it the way it needs to be framed.
His face is closer than I thought.
He reaches up and wipes a bead of wine from my jaw with his thumb. The same gesture from the lawn at the charity event. The same place his hand found me in the fitting room. But there’s no one here to see it now. No room to play to. No point left to prove.
He does it anyway.
“Callum.” My voice is barely a whisper. “There’s no one watching.”
“I know.” He drags his mouth down my throat, open and wet. “I know and I still can’t stop.”
And he kisses me again.
Not for the room. Not for his mother. For me.
This kiss is slower. His hand slides into my hair, and I can taste champagne on his mouth, and this is the one that tells me the first was not a lie. This is the one that matters. This is the one that changes everything.
I kiss him back.
I shouldn’t. I know I shouldn’t. But my hands are fisting in his shirt and his mouth is warm and sure and I have been wanting this - wanting him - for so much longer than I let myself admit, and the contract in that drawer at home might as well be ash.
His hand slips under the hem of the dress, palm hot against my outer thigh, climbing higher until his fingertips brush the edge of my underwear.
“Fuck, you’re already wet. Is that from the wine, or from me kissing you in front of everyone? ”
“Say it,” he murmurs against my ear. “Say you want this.”
“I want-” The car hits a bump and I grab his wrist. “Callum, we can’t-”
He stills instantly, but his fingers stay where they are, feeling every small twitch. His forehead drops to mine.
“I know,” he says roughly. “I know. Just… let me keep touching you until we get home. That’s all. Nothing else. Just this.”
I can’t answer - just a broken sound as he presses the heel of his hand over me through the thin fabric and circles once.
I’m enjoying it. I’m enjoying it too much, until the fear catches up.
It always does. One beat behind the wanting, like a shadow I can’t outrun.
I get a hand flat against his chest and I push. An inch. Then more. Until there’s cold air in the space where he was, and my spine is against my own door, and my heart is going like something with its foot in a trap.
“Nichole-”
“No.” My voice won’t hold. I hate that it won’t. “We can’t.”
“You kissed me back. I thought you were enjoying what I was doing to you.”
Not an accusation. Almost wonder.
“I know exactly what I did.” The true thing sits in my throat, too dangerous to hand him, so I say it to the black glass of the window instead.
“I have one signed year and a brother breathing because of it and a way out at the end of it, and none of that survives me falling for the man who wrote the contract.”
Silence.
“Everything I have ever let myself hold has been taken back out of my hands,” I say. “Every single time. And I will not sit in this beautiful car and give a rich man the last soft thing I have left to lose.”
More silence.
Then, quietly: “What if I don’t take it?”
“That’s not how it works.” I finally look at him. “That’s never how it works. You promise not to take, and then something changes, and then you do anyway, and I’m the one standing in the wreckage wondering how I let it happen again.”
“Nichole-”
“I have one year.” My voice is steadier now. I’m building the wall back up, brick by brick. “I need it to stay one year. Don’t turn it into something I’ll have to grieve.”
The car is slowing. We’re pulling into the driveway. The house looms ahead, all its windows dark.
I’m out of the car before it fully stops.
Up the steps. Through the door. I don’t look back - because if I look back I will go to him, and if I go to him I am finished.
I climb to the room we share and do not share. My bed, and the fold-out couch shoved against the far wall where he has slept every night since he decided one night was one too many.
I lie down in the dark.
He’ll come up within the hour. He’ll stretch out ten feet away and pretend to sleep, same as me. Two people who built beds across a room to keep from reaching.
And I understand that the kiss was not the mistake.
The mistake was the lie I told right after it.
Because I am already grieving the very thing I swore I wouldn’t.
There are ten months left on the clock.
A whole room of cold air between the bed and the couch.
And I have to survive him breathing in the dark across it.