24. Erika
— ? —
Erika
Sunday arrives, and it feels like standing at the edge of a cliff, knowing you’re about to jump but not sure if there’s water below.
I change outfits four times, telling myself it doesn’t matter what I wear, that this is just lunch, that I’m not hoping for anything, and then I change again, and I put my hair up and take it down and put it up, and by ten I’ve given up on the apartment and sat down at the typewriter to keep my hands out of my hair, and I get a page, an actual page, the first in a week, a scene where she cooks for a man in a kitchen too small for two people and nothing goes wrong, and I get to the end of it and read it back and it’s fine, and it’s a lie, and I pull it out and start it again with too much garlic, because that’s the version I know how to write, and I’m on the second sheet with the sauce ruined and the two of them laughing when the buzzer goes.
It’s twelve on the dot. He’s exactly on time, not early, not late, exactly when he said he would be, and it shouldn’t feel revolutionary, but it does.
Four years I set his calendar. Four years I knew what on time meant to him, which was whenever the last thing finished.
I stand in my own hallway with my hand on the door for a second before I open it, because it’s such a small thing and it lands so hard.
“Hi,” he says when I open the door.
“Hey.”
He’s holding a bottle of wine and wearing jeans and a button-down with the sleeves rolled up, and he looks more like the boy I fell in love with in college than the billionaire I married, and the sight of him does a complicated thing to my chest.
“I thought we could cook,” he says. “If that’s okay.”
“You want to cook? In my kitchen?”
“Our kitchen was always too big.” He shrugs. “I missed cooking in a small space. It’s more…”
“Intimate?”
“I was going to say cramped. But sure, intimate works.”
I step aside to let him in, and he moves past me into my tiny apartment, sets the wine on the counter, and opens cabinets like he lives here, and I watch him not find the corkscrew and not ask, just keep opening drawers until he does, and I don’t help him.
“Pasta?” he asks. “I brought the ingredients.”
“The recipe from your college apartment?”
“The one where I taught you to cook standing behind you at the stove.” He glances at me over his shoulder. “I figure we could use the good memories.”
We cook together in my tiny kitchen, and it’s exactly as cramped as he promised, his shoulders brushing mine as we navigate around each other, his hip bumping mine when I reach for the olive oil, and every accidental touch sends sparks across my skin, and I find myself engineering reasons to stand close to him.
“You still don’t measure the garlic,” he says, watching me dice.
“You said you can never have too much.”
“I said Grandma said that. I was twenty-three and trying to get you to stay for dinner.”
“It worked.”
“For five years it did,” he says, and then, quieter, “I’d like it to work again,” and I keep dicing, and he laughs at himself, real and warm, and the sound of it cracks my chest open a little.
The pasta turns out perfectly, and we eat on my secondhand couch, plates balanced on our knees, and talk about things that don’t matter, the birthday party for Dora, the seating chart drama, whether she’ll actually wear the necklace he bought or declare it too flashy.
“She’ll wear it,” I say. “She’ll tell you it’s too much and then she’ll wear it every day for a month.”
“She told me the restaurant was too much.”
“And?”
“And she asked if they’d do the beef without the sauce.” He grins. “So I think we’re fine.”
We talk about the movie, which scenes I’m most nervous about, which actors Dean is considering for the lead, and he asks real questions and waits for the answers, and I keep waiting for the phone, for the glance down, for the half of him that used to leave the room while the other half stayed, and it doesn’t come.
There’s a book I’m reading that he pretends to be interested in until I catch him yawning.
“Sorry,” he says. “It’s not you. I haven’t been sleeping well.”
“Neither have I.”
We look at each other, and the easy conversation evaporates, and what’s left is heavier.
“Why haven’t you signed the papers?” I ask.
The question has been sitting between us all afternoon, and I can’t hold it back anymore.
“Because I don’t want to lose you.”
“You already have.”
“Have I?”
His eyes meet mine, and I don’t have an answer.
“I know what I did,” he says quietly. “I know I failed you in every way that mattered. But I look at you, Erika, and I still see the girl who believed in me when no one else did.”
“That girl is gone.”
“No, she’s not. She’s just buried under four years of me being an idiot.” He sets down his wine glass and shifts closer on the couch. “I’m not asking you to forget what I did. I’m asking you to let me prove that I can be different.”
My heart is pounding, and heat is gathering low in my belly, and I hate my body for betraying me like this.
“Kai…”
“I love you.” His voice is rough. “I never stopped. Even when I was too blind to show it.”
I should tell him no, tell him to leave, to sign the papers, to stop making this harder than it has to be.
“You can’t just say that and expect everything to be okay.”
“I’m not expecting anything. I’m just telling you the truth.”
“The truth is that you hurt me. For years. And now you’re sitting on my couch saying all the right things, and I don’t know if I can trust it.”
“Then don’t trust it. Trust this.”
I know what he means before he moves. I’ve known since he walked in with the wine and didn’t look at his phone once in three hours, since he waited for my answers, since he found the corkscrew without asking.
I’ve been sitting on this couch for an hour telling myself I’m still deciding, and I’m not, I decided when I opened the door, and the only thing left is whether I’m going to be honest about it.
He closes the distance between us and cups my face in his hand and waits, gives me time to pull away, and I don’t pull away. I kiss him. I kiss him first.
I grab the front of his shirt with both hands and pull him toward me, and then his mouth is on mine and nothing else exists. He tastes like wine and longing, and four years of chemistry detonate all at once. I bite his bottom lip and the sound he makes is low and rough and so familiar it hurts.
“Tell me to stop,” he gasps against my lips.
“Don’t stop.”
“Erika, if we do this…”
“I said don’t stop.”
He makes a broken sound and then his hands are everywhere, one in my hair tilting my head so he can kiss me deeper, the other at my waist dragging me onto his lap on the couch, and my thighs bracket his hips and I can feel how hard he is through his jeans, and I grind down on him and we both moan.
“Off,” I demand, yanking at his shirt. “Take it off.”
He pulls it over his head in one motion and I run my hands over him and feel every change, the sharper lines, the ribs under my palms, and he’s thinner than he used to be, I can count things I never used to be able to count, and there’s a hollow under his collarbone that wasn’t there, and the evidence of it makes my heart clench even as my body burns.
“You’re so fucking beautiful,” he breathes, pushing my shirt up and over my head. “I forgot. How did I forget?”
“You stopped looking.”
“Never again.” He unclasps my bra and tosses it aside. “I’ll never stop looking at you again.”
He closes his mouth over my nipple and I cry out, back arching, fingers digging into his shoulders, and I’m grinding on him through his jeans hard enough that I could come like this, and I know it and he knows it, and I don’t want it like this.
I get his belt open with shaking hands and he lifts his hips so I can shove his jeans down enough, and I take him in my hand for one second first, hot and hard and jumping against my palm, and watch his eyes shut, and then I drag my own underwear aside under my skirt and sink down on him right there on the couch, no finesse, no waiting, and the sound he makes is the sound of a man who’s been holding his breath for two months, and his hands are flat on my thighs for one second like he’s afraid to grip, and then he isn’t afraid, and his fingers dig into my hips hard enough to leave marks and he drags me down onto him and holds me there, and I gasp, and he says, “Stay,” and I stay.
“Kai, please…”
“Please what?” His voice is gone. “Tell me.”
“You. I want you. Please.”
He makes a sound I’ve never heard him make, low and wrecked and grateful, like a man handed a thing he’d stopped letting himself want, and he stands with me still on him, still inside me, and carries me to the bedroom with my legs locked around his waist and my mouth on his neck, and we tumble onto the bed and fight the rest of our clothes off, and he turns me over.
He takes me from behind, my knees in the sheets and his chest against my back, one arm around my waist and his other hand flat over mine on the mattress, and it’s deep like this, deeper than I’ve felt him in months, and I press my face into the pillow so I don’t have to look at anything, so I don’t have to see him seeing me, and he knows what I’m doing and he lets me, for a while, fucking me slow and hard with his mouth on my shoulder and my name in it.
I can’t see him and I don’t need to. I know exactly what he looks like right now, the line of his back, the muscle in his jaw, the sweat starting at his temples, I’ve had four years of the picture and two months of nothing but the picture, and I turn my head enough to catch him in the mirror on the closet door, and it’s worse than I remembered and better, his eyes closed and his mouth open on my shoulder, taking me like a man who’s been starving, and I come like that, watching him in the glass while I hide my face from him, shaking, with his hand pressed over my mouth because he knows I don’t want to hear myself.
Then he turns me over.
He rolls me onto my back and pushes back into me and holds my face in his hands so I can’t look away, and his forehead is against mine and his eyes never leave mine, and I can see everything he’s feeling, love and regret and desperate hope, and he moves in long slow strokes that make me feel every inch, and this is the part I was hiding from, and I don’t hide.
“Say it back,” he whispers, his pace increasing. “Please, Erika. I need to hear it.”
I can’t. I want to, the words are right there, pressing against my teeth, and I can’t make myself say them, not yet, not when I don’t know what tomorrow looks like, not when my heart is still raw.
Instead I pull his mouth down to mine and kiss him, and I come apart around him with a cry that he swallows, and he follows a moment later, groaning my name into my neck, and I feel him take the answer I gave him instead of the one he asked for, and hold onto it anyway.
After, in the wreck of the sheets, reality crashes back.
We’re lying tangled together, his hand tracing patterns on my hip, and it feels right, it feels like home, and that terrifies me.
“This doesn’t change anything,” I whisper.
His hand stills. “Erika…”
“I mean it. This was… I don’t know what this was. But it doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven you.”
He’s quiet, and I wait for him to argue, to push, to try to convince me that this meant more than I’m saying.
“Okay,” he says instead.
“That’s it?”
“If you need time, I’ll give you time.” He presses a kiss to my hair. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“You should go.”
The words hurt to say. My hands are shaking as I pull away from him, wrapping the sheet around myself, and I get them under the sheet where he can’t see, and it doesn’t help, because he can see my face.
He nods, sits up, climbs out of bed and starts gathering his clothes, and I watch him dress in my bedroom doorway, pulling on his jeans, shrugging into his shirt, his hair a mess and his lips swollen, a man who just had his world rocked, and that’s my doing, and I’m making him leave anyway.
He buttons his shirt slowly, and I can see his hands trembling slightly, and he doesn’t hide them, and I don’t know if that’s because he can’t or because he’s decided not to hide anything from me anymore, and I don’t know which is worse.
When he’s dressed he crosses to me and cups my face in his hands, gentle, and doesn’t kiss me, and I want him to and I’d hate it if he did.
Then he walks to the door, and I follow, still wrapped in the sheet, my legs unsteady beneath me, past the couch where it started and the two plates still on the coffee table and his wine glass with an inch left in it, and it’s such an ordinary trail through such an ordinary afternoon that I can’t believe what’s at the end of it.
At the door he stops and turns back.
“It changed everything four years ago,” he says quietly. “I’m the one who forgot.”
The door closes behind him, and I slide down to sit on the floor, back against the wood, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I do both.