Chapter 16 Abbie
ABBIE
The bourbon sits between us like a dare. Gray pours two glasses. I watch his hands because I can’t quite look at his face yet.
"You remembered," I say, and my voice comes out rougher than I intended.
"I remember everything." He slides my glass across the table, his fingers brushing mine. "That's the curse, Abs."
I take a sip. Not drunk. I’m barely a third of the way through my first glass, but the tightness in my chest begins to ease.
"You want to know what I remember?" I set my glass down harder than necessary. "My thirty-first birthday."
Gray goes still across the table. His bourbon halfway to his mouth. "Abbie—"
"No, you said you wanted to listen. So listen." I lean back in my chair, arms crossed, heart hammering. "My thirty-first birthday. You promised me the whole day, phone off, whatever I wanted."
"I remember."
"Do you remember what actually happened?"
He's quiet. I can see him reaching for the memory, and the moment he finds it, the way his face changes.
"You were in Lisbon," I continue. "I went to lunch with Wren. I called you about that photograph, and after you explained it you talked about Ferreira and percentages and your flight home. And you hung up without remembering."
"You're right." He sets his glass down carefully, like it might detonate. "I chose work. I forgot. I took your silence for permission to keep making you wait."
"We didn't move past it. I swallowed it. Like I swallowed everything else."
"I know." His voice is raw. "I know that now."
I expected a fight. He sits and listens.
"The hoodie," I say, and my voice cracks a little on the word. "The VTG hoodie you gave me when we were dating. I used to wear it all the time because it smelled like you."
"I loved that you wanted it."
"Delaney wore it in our kitchen. She stood in our home wearing my hoodie and smiled at me like she knew exactly what she was doing." I wrap my arms around myself. "And you never said anything. You kept treating it like a laundry mistake instead of the thing that used to mean us."
"I handed it to her without looking." He stops. "That's not an excuse. I should have paid attention. I should have noticed."
"You should have protected what was ours instead of leaving it where anyone could take it."
"Yes." The word is quiet. Absolute. "I should have."
"I thought—" I stop. Start again. "I thought maybe you didn't care anymore. That it was just a thing to you, some old sweatshirt, nothing special. That maybe I was making it special and you'd already let it go."
"I kept it." He stands, goes to the hall cupboard and opens it. When he turns back, he's holding faded gray fabric, cracked lettering across the chest. "After you left, I found it in the back of the closet. I've had it here ever since."
"Why?"
"Because it was yours first." He crosses the room, holds it out to me. Not demanding. Offering. "It was always yours."
I take it. The fabric is soft, worn thin in places, familiar in a way that makes my chest ache.
"Gray..."
"You can have it back. You should have it back.
" He's close now, close enough that I can see the pulse jumping in his throat.
"And you should know. I never thought of you as something I owned.
I thought of you as someone I got to love.
And I was bad at it. I was so bad at it, Abbie.
I made choices for you instead of with you, and I told myself I was protecting you when really I was just—"
"Making it easier for yourself."
"Yeah." He exhales. "Yeah, exactly."
"You don't get to decide that for me." I'm shaking now, actually trembling, and I hate it. I hate that he still has this power over me. "You don't get to make noble sacrifices about my life. I was your wife. I deserved a choice."
"You're right."
"Stop agreeing with me!" I shove his chest, both hands flat against the solid warmth of him, and he doesn't move an inch. "Fight back. Defend yourself. Tell me I'm being unfair, tell me I'm remembering it wrong, tell me something so I can be angry at you properly instead of just—"
"Instead of just what?"
"Missing you." The words rip out of me before I can stop them. "Instead of missing you every single day for a year while pretending I was finally free."
Gray's hand comes up to cup my face, his thumb brushing my cheekbone, and my whole body lights up like a live wire. His touch is so gentle, so achingly familiar, and I want to lean into it and I want to run screaming into the storm.
"I missed you too," he says. "Every morning I woke up reaching for you. Every night I fell asleep talking to you in my head. Every time something good happened at the agency, you were the first person I wanted to tell, and every time I remembered I couldn't, it was like losing you all over again."
"Don't." My voice is barely a whisper. "Don't say things like that when you're this close to me."
"Why not?"
"Because you're so hot it's making me angry."
He grins.
"Then slap me," he says.
I laugh, harsh and surprised. "What?"
"You heard me." His hand is still on my face, his thumb tracing lazy circles on my skin. "You're angry. I deserve it. Slap me."
"I'm not going to—"
"Abbie." His eyes are warm and challenging in a way that makes my stomach flip. "Slap me."
So I do. My palm taps his cheek. We freeze.
"Oh my God." I clap my hand over my mouth, horror and laughter warring in my chest. "I'm so sorry, I can't believe I—"
Then he laughs, and I can’t help joining him.
"I love when you touch me," he says, still grinning, still amused. "Even if it's a slap."
"You're so goddamn flirty." I'm laughing and crying at the same time, tears leaking down my face while my shoulders shake. "This is the most dysfunctional thing I've ever done."
"It's not for nothing my last name is Valentine, Abs."
He sits on the sofa and draws me between his knees. I stop laughing.
"This doesn't mean I forgive you," I whisper.
"I know."
"I'm still furious with you."
"I know that too."
"And I'm probably going to regret this in the morning."
"Maybe." His other hand comes up to cradle the back of my neck, fingers tangling in my hair. "But I'm going to spend the rest of my life earning your forgiveness whether you let me kiss you right now or not. If you’re unsure, we can stop here."
"That's the most arrogant thing you've ever said to me."
"Is it working?"
I kiss him first. His mouth opens under mine, and he tastes like bourbon.
"Bedroom," Gray says against my lips. "Unless you want to—"
"Bedroom." I'm already pulling him toward the hall, and he's laughing again, this low delighted sound that rumbles through his chest. "Now. Before I change my mind."
"You know you can change your mind," he says. "Anytime. About anything. You know that, right?"
"Are you giving me an exit speech before we've even—"
"I'm giving you the truth." He cups my face in his hands, thumbs brushing my cheekbones. "Whatever happens tonight, whatever you want to happen or stop happening, this is yours to decide. Not mine."
"How very evolved of you."
"I'm trying." His mouth quirks. "Tell me if it's working."
"Ask me later."
He kisses me, slow and thorough. His hands slide into my hair as I pull him toward the bedroom. I set the hoodie on the chair by the window.
"Later," I say.
"After," he agrees, and then we're not talking anymore.
I'm just here. With him. Choosing this.
And when he pauses, forehead against mine, breath ragged. "You're sure?" I answer the only way I can.
"I'd have left already if I wasn't."
We sink onto the bed together, and somewhere between kisses he asks if I'm still on birth control and I tell him no, I stopped a few months after I left, and neither of us reaches for anything to stop it, like this is a conversation we've had a thousand times before.
"I love you," he says, and I put my hand over his mouth.
"Don't. Not yet. I can't—"
"Okay." He kisses my palm, my wrist, the inside of my elbow. "Okay. We don't have to say anything. We don't have to—"
"Just touch me." My voice breaks. "Just make me forget, for one night, how much you've hurt me."
He does more than touch me.
He peels my shirt over my head with hands that shake once and then steady, and when the fabric clears my vision he's already looking at me like the year apart was a dare he lost on purpose.
The VTG hoodie stays on the chair by the window where I left it, reclaimed, watching, not participating.
Good. Tonight is not about fabric. Tonight is about the man who gave it to me and then forgot how to keep what was ours.
"Bourbon on your mouth," I mutter, shoving his henley up.
"Bourbon on yours." He helps me strip him, awkward elbows and a soft curse when the sleeve catches on his watch.
The watch hits the nightstand. His jeans follow.
Then he's bare and huge and tattooed in the half-light of the Topanga bedroom he built with his own hands, and the anger in my chest reshapes itself into a hotter, meaner kind of want.
"You're so hot it's still making me angry," I tell him, because it's true and because I refuse to pretend otherwise.
"Then use it." His pale eyes gleam. "Use me. Be angry on top of me. Be angry under me. Just, Abbie, don't be careful with the anger. I can take it."
"Can you?"
"Try me."
I shove him back onto the mattress, the bed he built, solid cedar, no squeak, and climb over him. My mouth finds his throat. My teeth scrape. He groans like I've punched him in the best possible way. When I bite down harder at the hinge of his jaw he laughs, breathless and wrecked.
"There she is," he says. "There's the woman who slapped me in my own living room."
"Shut up and put your mouth where it counts."
He flips us with ridiculous ease, and then he's kneeling between my thighs, dragging my underwear down my legs, and the first pass of his tongue is so immediate and filthy that I swear out loud before I can stop myself.
"Jesus, Gray—"
"Louder." He says it against me, lips brushing my clit on every consonant. "The canyon doesn't care. Swear until you run out of words."