Chapter 21
Tessa
Noah was at Sam's and Jamie's.
He'd been over the moon about it for two days.
Sam had bought the boys a new console—Jack had told Noah at school, and Noah had come home with the news the way he came home with news that mattered, all at once, between getting his shoes off and getting his backpack to the floor.
Mom, can I sleep over on Saturday? Sam got them a new game. Can I please?
I'd said yes before I'd thought about whether saying yes meant anything. It hadn't, then. It had just been my son asking for the kind of thing other nine-year-olds asked their mothers for, and me saying yes to it the way other mothers said yes.
It was the first sleepover he'd had in a long time. The first one since Havensworth.
I'd packed his bag that afternoon. Toothbrush, pajamas with the rocket ship he'd outgrown but still loved, a clean shirt for the morning, the painted river stone Aunt Jenna had given him because Noah didn't go to sleep without it.
Cole had driven him over before the bakery closed.
By the time I'd locked the front door behind us, Noah had been three streets away making jokes with Jack, and the apartment had been a thing waiting for me when Cole and I came home.
I don't remember how it started.
We came in the front door together. We took our coats off. I walked into the kitchen for water. Cole walked into the living room for something—keys, maybe, or a pen he'd been looking for—and turned around to ask me a question, and I was right there because I had followed him without thinking.
What I remember is that there was nothing else I wanted to do but kiss him.
Nothing else.
Not coffee. Not a glass of water. Not the pasta in the blue container in the fridge.
Not the second message Miranda had left me about the audit paperwork.
Not Noah, who was already laughing at something Sam had said three streets over.
Not the apartment that had been quiet for two weeks because I'd made it that way.
Not the version of myself who'd been telling herself, for two weeks, that she didn't get to have this.
I got to have this.
He'd said so at the bakery. I'm not going anywhere. He'd kissed me twice and meant it both times. He'd come back to the apartment with me. He had kept his hand at the small of my back the whole walk to the truck and the whole drive home.
I had spent two weeks teaching myself how to leave him.
I was done teaching myself things.
I crossed the living room. Cole had stopped wherever he'd been going. He was watching me come.
I put my hands on his chest. I tipped my chin up.
"Tessa."
His voice was low. He'd been careful with my name since the bakery, and he was still being careful now.
"Cole."
I said it the way he had said mine.
He bent his head and kissed me.
I hadn't known, before that night, that being wanted could feel like being seen.
Cole's hands were careful. He kissed me slowly. His hand came up to my jaw and stayed there. His other hand was at my waist, flat, not moving. He kissed me until my breath wasn't steady. He kissed me until I leaned into him with all of me, and he had to put his arm around me so I wouldn't fall.
Then he pulled back an inch.
"Are you sure?"
His voice was rough.
"Yes."
"Tessa."
"I'm sure, Cole."
He looked at me. He was looking the way he looked at things he was thinking through, slow and careful. He wasn't pulling back. He was making sure.
I took his hand off my waist and put it on the hem of my shirt.
His eyes shut for one count.
"Tessa."
"I want this. I want you. Stop asking."
He didn't stop asking exactly. He just stopped using words for it. He took my hand off his and put it back at his neck. He kissed me again, deeper, and his hand went under the hem of my shirt the way I'd asked it to. It was warm. It wasn't in a hurry.
I don't remember the walk to the bedroom.
I remember the lamp being on. I remember Cole's hand at the small of my back, guiding me.
I remember sitting on the edge of the bed and him standing in front of me, taking off his shirt because I'd asked him to with my hands.
I remember the long line of him. I remember the scar on his shoulder I'd seen across the apartment a hundred times and hadn't let myself look at.
He pulled me up.
He took my shirt off, inch by inch. His hands at the hem, lifting, his eyes on mine until the shirt was off and his eyes weren't on mine anymore. He hadn't been able to keep them there. They were everywhere—my collarbone, my shoulder, the place on my chest where my pulse was, the curve of my waist.
He stopped.
He just stopped, with his hands on my hips and his eyes on me, and didn't move.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing."
"Cole."
"You're beautiful."
He said it plainly. Like he'd already worked it through.
I smiled.
I pulled him down to me.
The bed took us. The lamp was still on. I didn't ask him to turn it off. I'd spent ten years with a man who needed it dark, and I wasn't going to spend my first night with a man I'd chosen pretending I was someone different.
Cole didn't need it dark.
He moved over me carefully, and his hands found everywhere they could find. He kissed my throat. He kissed my collarbone. He kissed the place on my chest where my pulse was, and his mouth stayed there for a second longer than it needed to, and I felt him register the way I was breathing.
His hand went up my ribs.
He found it.
I felt him find it before he did anything about it. The pause was small—a fraction of a second where his palm stilled, took the shape of the mark under it, and then went on.
The scar was on the left side of my ribcage, just under the curve of my breast. It was old. It was thin and pale and a little shiny in certain light. I didn't know if it had been a buckle or the corner of a coffee table. I'd decided, a long time ago, not to remember.
Cole didn't ask.
He didn't flinch. He didn't lift his head to look at it. He didn't stop in any way that asked me to explain. He just bent his head and put his mouth there, soft, for one count. Two.
Then he moved on.
I hadn't known I'd been carrying something there. Something braced against the day a man would find it and want to know. He hadn't wanted to know. He'd just put his mouth on it and let it be part of me.
Something inside my chest came untied.
I turned my face into the pillow and felt my eyes wet.
Cole noticed. Of course, he noticed.
"Tessa."
"It's good."
"You sure?"
"It's good. Keep going."
He kept going.
He took the rest of my clothes off the way he had taken my shirt off—slow, with his eyes coming back to mine. He took his off the rest of the way. He came back to me.
I had thought, before that night, that I knew what this was. I had been with two men in my life, and neither of them had been Cole.
The thing I hadn't known was that you could be looked at, while you were under a man, the way Cole looked at me.
He moved between my thighs. His weight came down on his forearms on either side of my head. His mouth was on my temple, then my jaw, then my mouth.
I made a sound.
He stopped.
"Does it hurt?"
"No."
"Tessa."
"No, it doesn't hurt."
"I don't want to hurt you."
"Cole, stop asking and just—"
He moved his hips.
I stopped speaking.
I rested on his chest after.
His arm was around me. His hand was on my hip, steady, the thumb running slow across the bone there. The lamp was still on. The sheets were tangled around our legs the way sheets get tangled. My hair was coming loose from where I'd pinned it earlier in the day. I hadn't put it back up.
I tipped my chin up so I could see his face.
He was looking at me. His eyes hadn't closed.
"I'm glad I came back to Havensworth."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Me, too."
I leaned up. I kissed him.
He kissed me back, soft, no rush in it. His hand came up to my jaw and stayed there.
I settled back down on his chest.
A minute went by. Two.
"Cole."
"Yeah."
"That didn't feel like your first time."
His chest moved under my cheek. He was laughing, a little, in the silent Cole way.
"I may have read one of Quinn's books."
I sat up.
"You didn't."
"I did."
"Cole."
"I was curious. I hear the female experience is different. I wanted to know."
I was looking at him. He was looking at the ceiling, the corner of his mouth doing the thing it did when he was trying not to smile.
"You read a romance novel."
"One."
"From Quinn."
"She has a lot of them."
"Cole Weston."
"Tessa."
"Did you enjoy it?"
He turned his head and looked at me.
"You or the book?"
I went to swat his shoulder.
He caught my wrist.
His fingers wrapped around my wrist, gentle, his thumb at the inside of it where the pulse was.
"You," he said. "I enjoyed you a lot more than the book."
He pulled me down.
He kissed me.
If someone had told my sixteen-year-old self that I would end up here someday—sleeping with Cole Weston, enjoying it, with a man who'd read a romance novel to learn how to be careful with me—she would have laughed in their face.
She'd have been wrong about all of it.