Chapter 8
BLISS – ONE YEAR LATER
“The divorce was finalized last Tuesday.”
Nadia sets her mimosa down. “How do you feel?”
I think about it — actually think about it, sitting here on this sun-drenched patio at Morning Glory with the bougainvillea climbing the back wall and the salt breeze coming off the harbor two blocks south.
“Relieved,” I say. “Really, genuinely relieved. But also sad, which I didn’t expect.
” I run my thumb along the rim of my coffee mug.
“He had me fooled, Nadia. For nine years, he had me completely fooled. And the sad part isn’t missing him — it’s grieving the version of him I thought was real.
The man who I thought loved me as much as I loved him. That man never existed.”
She reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. Doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t need to. She held my hand through all of it — the discovery, the lawyers, the nights I called her at one in the morning shaking with rage — and now she’s holding it through the other side.
“Anyway.” I pull my hand back and pick up my coffee. “That’s done. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I want to talk about the man who’s about to walk through that door.”
Her eyes light up. “Finally. Three months of Damien this, Damien that, and I haven’t even seen a photo.”
“You’ll see him in about ten minutes. He’s parking.”
“So talk fast. Tell me everything.”
I take a sip and feel the warmth of it settle in my chest and think about how to describe something that doesn’t fit inside a description. Not a list of qualities. Not a résumé. A feeling — the specific, physical, undeniable feeling of being with someone who doesn’t need anything from me except me.
“He’s...” I shake my head. “I don’t have the words yet. He makes me laugh. He argues with me — actually argues, not the thing where someone agrees with you and then does whatever they want. He’ll tell me I’m wrong to my face and somehow that’s the most attractive thing anyone’s ever done.”
“And the sex.”
“Nadia.”
“You brought it up last week! You said, and I quote, I didn’t know my body could do that. You can’t drop a line like that and then plead the fifth.”
“The sex is...” I press my lips together. Shake my head. “It’s amazing. That’s all I’m saying.”
“That is not all you’re saying. Details. Now.”
“No.”
“Elena Isabella Carmichael—”
“There might be something serious here.” The words come out quieter than I intended. “I can’t just — I can’t talk about him like a hookup. He’s not a hookup. I think he might be—” I stop. Take a breath. “I think this might be real. And I don’t want to cheapen it by turning it into brunch gossip.”
Nadia’s face changes. The teasing drops away and something warmer takes its place — her eyes going soft, her mouth curving into the kind of smile that means she’s seeing something I probably can’t see because I’m inside it.
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll stop pushing.”
“Thank you.”
“But I reserve the right to interrogate him at the table.”
“I would expect nothing less.”
I check my phone. One new text: Walking up. Which patio? Also I’m nervous. Don’t tell her I said that.
I grin. Can’t help it — the grin that Nadia’s been making fun of for three months, the one that takes over my whole face before I can stop it.
“He’s here.”
Damien crosses the patio from the host stand. Dark hair, white linen shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow. He spots me and his whole face reorganizes — not a smile, something before a smile, something involuntary that starts in his eyes and moves outward.
He reaches the table. His hand goes to the small of my back — palm warm through my sundress, fingers spread across my spine. He leans down and kisses my mouth, and I moan in happiness. Slow. Unhurried. Like we have all the time in the world and he’s not going to waste any of it rushing.
“You must be Nadia.” He pulls out the chair next to me and sits and his knee presses against mine under the table and stays there.
“And you must be the reason I haven’t seen my best friend in three months.”
He laughs — open, easy, filling the patio. “Guilty. In my defense, she’s very hard to give back.”
Nadia looks at me. Looks at him. Looks back at me with an expression I will remember for the rest of my life — her lips pressed together, her eyes bright, a tiny nod.
She sees it. The thing I feel every time he walks into a room.
The thing I didn’t know existed until I felt it — what it’s like to be with someone who isn’t performing.
Damien listens when Nadia talks. He laughs at her jokes.
He asks her questions and actually hears the answers.
But his hand is on my knee under the table the whole time — not gripping, not claiming.
Just there. Warm. Steady. Like touching me is the baseline and everything else is built on top of it.
And when I speak — anything, even pass the hot sauce — he turns to me. Full face. Full attention. Like whatever I just said matters more than anything else at this table.
“I like him,” Nadia mouths at me while Damien flags the waiter.
I mouth back: “Me, too.”
The front door barely closes behind us.
Damien’s mouth is on my neck before I get the key out of the lock.
His hands find my hips and he walks me backward into the hallway and my shoulders hit the wall and his body presses against mine — chest, hips, thighs — and I feel how hard he is already, the rigid length of his cock straining against his jeans, pressing into my stomach through the thin cotton of my sundress.
“I’ve been thinking about this since breakfast,” he says against my throat. His teeth graze my collarbone. “You in this dress. The way you crossed your legs at the table. I almost lost my mind.”
“You hid it well.”
“I didn’t. Your friend noticed. She gave me a look.”
I laugh and it turns into a gasp because his hand slides up my thigh, under the hem of the dress, his fingers tracing the edge of my underwear. Teasing. Not going where I need him to go.
“Bedroom,” I say.
“Not yet.”
His fingers hook into my underwear and pull them down — slow, deliberate, his knuckles dragging along my skin. I step out of them and his hand slides between my thighs and his fingers find me already wet, already swollen, and he groans — this low, guttural sound that I feel in my own chest.
“Jesus, Elena.”
“I told you. The dress was strategic.”
He drops to his knees. Right there in the hallway, the afternoon light from the living room windows falling across his back, and he pushes my dress up to my waist and hooks my leg over his shoulder and puts his mouth on my pussy and I slam my hand against the wall behind me because my knees almost give out.
His tongue is flat and slow and devastating.
He licks me from bottom to top in one long, wet stroke and my head falls back against the wall and my fingers twist into his hair and I hold on.
He does it again. Again. Each stroke a little harder, a little more focused, his tongue circling my clit with a precision that makes my thighs shake and my breath come out in sharp, broken sounds I can’t control.
“Right there — don’t stop — fuck —”
He doesn’t stop. He presses his mouth against me harder, his tongue working my clit in tight circles while his hands grip my ass and pull me closer, and I’m grinding against his face and I can hear how wet I am and I don’t care — I don’t care about anything except the coil tightening low in my belly and his tongue and the sound he’s making, this hungry, greedy sound like he could do this forever.
The orgasm crashes through me so hard my leg buckles. I cry out — loud, raw, the sound bouncing off the hallway walls — and he holds me up, his hands on my hips, his mouth still on me, working me through it until I’m shaking and pulling at his hair and gasping stop, stop, too much.
He stands. Wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. His eyes are dark and his lips are wet and he’s looking at me like I’m the only thing in the world.
“Bedroom,” he says. “Now.”
We make it this time. Barely. I’m pulling his shirt over his head as we cross the threshold and he’s unzipping my dress and it falls to the floor and I unclasp my bra and let it drop and his hands are on my tits immediately — cupping them, his thumbs circling my nipples until they’re hard and aching, and then his mouth replaces his hands and I arch into him and reach for his belt.
I unbuckle it. Unzip his jeans. Shove them down with his boxers and wrap my hand around his cock — thick, hard, the skin hot and smooth — and he makes a sound against my breast that vibrates through my whole body.
I stroke him slow. Feel him pulse in my fist. Feel the way his hips jerk forward, chasing my hand, his breath coming ragged against my skin.
“I need to be inside you,” he says. “Now.”
He lays me on the bed and kneels between my legs and I pull him down by the back of his neck and he pushes into me in one long, slow thrust that fills me so completely I gasp.
We both go still. His forehead against mine.
His breath on my lips. I feel every inch of him — the stretch, the fullness, the pulse of his cock inside me — and I wrap my legs around his waist and pull him deeper.
He moves. Slow at first — pulling almost all the way out and sliding back in deep, each stroke deliberate, controlled, his hips rolling against mine in a rhythm that makes my toes curl against the sheets.
His hands are braced on either side of my head and his biceps are trembling — not from effort, from restraint.
He’s holding back. Giving me the slow build because he knows what it does to me, knows I need to feel every inch before the pace breaks.
“Harder,” I whisper.
He snaps his hips forward and the sound I make is pure need.
He does it again — harder, deeper, the headboard tapping the wall — and my nails rake down his back and he hisses and his rhythm breaks and rebuilds, faster now, his cock driving into me with a force that pushes me up the mattress.
I brace my hands against the headboard and push back into every thrust, meeting him, matching him, and the slap of skin against skin fills the room along with my voice saying his name and words I don’t plan and can’t take back.
“You feel so fucking good,” he says, and his voice is wrecked — broken open, nothing held back. He hooks his arm under my knee and opens me wider and the new angle hits something deep inside me that makes white light flash behind my eyelids. “Right there — tell me — is that—”
“Yes — fuck — right there, don’t stop, don’t you dare stop—”
He doesn’t stop. His hips piston forward, fast and hard and relentless, his cock hitting that spot with every stroke, and I feel the second orgasm building — different from the first, deeper, slower, the kind that starts in my spine and radiates outward.
My whole body tightens around him. My pussy clenches and he groans — loud, guttural, his whole body shuddering — and his hand grips my hip hard enough to bruise and I want the bruise, I want the evidence of this on my skin tomorrow, proof that this is real and I am here and someone wants me without a contract attached.
“Come for me,” he says. “Elena — I want to feel you come—”
I shatter. The orgasm rips through me in waves so intense my vision goes black at the edges and I hear myself scream — actually scream, my back arching off the mattress, my thighs clamping around his hips, my whole body seizing around his cock.
He follows me over — three more hard, desperate thrusts and then he buries himself deep and I feel him come, feel his cock pulse inside me, feel his body lock and shake and his groan muffled against my neck as he empties himself into me.
We collapse. Tangled. His weight on me — heavy, warm, his chest heaving, his heart hammering against mine. I run my fingers through his sweat-damp hair and feel the aftershocks ripple through both of us — small tremors, his hips twitching, my thighs still shaking.
He lifts his head. Looks at me. His eyes are soft and dark and completely unguarded and he pushes a strand of hair off my forehead with a tenderness that makes my chest ache.
“I want to have a child with you.”
The words land in the bruised, tender spot between my ribs that has been waiting for nine years. But the bruise fades and my heart glows.
“Me too,” I say.
His hand finds my stomach. Spreads flat across it. Fingers wide, palm warm, covering the place I used to press my own hand against in the dark and whisper soon.
I don’t whisper. I don’t need to.
I pull him closer. His chin on top of my head. His heartbeat against my back. The afternoon light pouring through the windows — my windows, my condo, my bed, my life.
Everything is just beginning.