Chapter 10
10
It was after midnight, and they were both still awake. The cottage was tiny, and the quiet was echoing in contrast to the city noises Rose was accustomed to. She could hear Tom shifting on the love seats he’d pushed together every time he turned over or rearranged a pillow.
There were fifty different obstacles to sleep, even up in the luxurious king bed. Rose stared at the ceiling, wondering if she was being silly to enforce trivial social norms like not sharing a bed with the ex she hadn’t seen in a decade.
She didn’t do this. Nothing casual. Nothing without thinking about it first. Not without thinking where it might lead. But she wasn’t some kind of Victorian. She wouldn’t have made Adrian sleep on the love seats. What was she worried about? That Tom might think she was easy? He already knew the exact extent to which she was easy.
“Are you awake?” she whispered into the still, pink room.
“These are really small love seats,” Tom immediately said in a normal, though annoyed voice.
“Is there any chance you can keep your hands off my boobs if I let you sleep in the big bed?”
“No better than even odds.”
Rose huffed in amusement because at least he got points for honesty.
He must have sensed her hesitation, because he pleaded, “It’s a really big bed.” Before she responded to that, he was already standing up, the pillows she’d tossed at him clutched in one hand.
“You can sleep up here if you promise to be good,” she decided, though she thought she might have already lost control of the situation.
Tom climbed up the ladder one-handed, hauling the pillows back to the bed. He paused at the top to survey the situation, a sleek, satisfied expression evident on his features even in the dark.
“I can be good,” he assured her in a tone suggesting that this contract had very few covenants and definitions. Good could mean many things.
She politely withdrew to the far side of the mattress to make room, but Tom flipped the duvet down and walked on his knees into the center of the bed.
“Jesus, babe, you’re going to give me a heart attack,” he said, looking down at her sleepwear with heated appreciation.
Feeling both flattered and exposed, Rose tossed her head as though she’d expected his reaction.
It wasn’t lingerie, or what she thought of as lingerie, because it covered her from neck to knees. She owned really good lingerie, but it wasn’t for sleeping in. No, here she’d found a line of satin pajama sets she liked and bought one in every color. She matched the decor in petal pink tonight, so she preened a bit, turning her head so that Tom could notice that the scrunchie she’d used to pull her hair back matched the pajamas. She tried not to wonder whether he was admiring the shape of her breasts through the thin fabric too, because that was out of her control.
“You always had the best little outfits,” Tom said contentedly as he dropped down next to her, making the mattress bounce under his weight. He was right next to her. Was he under the impression there might be spooning?
“You said you’d be good,” she whispered when he pulled the duvet over them both.
“I’m going to be very good,” he whispered back.
He scooted closer so that his chest was pressed against her shoulder blades, the heat of his body barely dampened by one layer of thin cotton and another of satin.
“I, um, I meant it about the hands and the boobs,” Rose said when he cupped her upper arm, palm curled under the edge of her sleeve.
“I would never ,” he replied, but he curved his body around hers, the arches of his feet batting familiarly against the soles of her own, his breath so close she could feel it against her neck. It was too close. She wound against the pull of Tom’s body, heart rising and pounding in her throat.
She couldn’t pretend it was anyone else. Her body would have known him even if her mind had not, this position still encoded into muscle memory. Good memories, all of them. But inescapable. They had easily shared a thousand nights of comfort and body heat and sex, even allowing for the objections of their roommates and the nights he hadn’t come home.
The first orgasm she’d ever had with another person had happened in this position: the two of them crammed into a twin bed, Rose’s faded heart-print sheets from home kicked down by their feet. Tom had put his hands over hers, Show me , because he didn’t know what to do yet, and she didn’t have the words to explain it to him. Her body had seemed so complicated to the both of them, especially compared to the very straightforward, predictable way his responded to her. They’d solved that mystery with tentative fingertips, found every point that sparked pleasure on her body, and Tom’s hands had grown confident when he put them against her.
That was the way he still touched her now: like he knew what to do with her. She didn’t doubt, with mind or body, that if he slid his hand over her hip and pressed it between her legs, he would have her gasping his name in moments. She’d feel him hard against her thigh and his mouth against her shoulder, then his whole weight pressed against her body to roll her over onto her stomach. She knew exactly how it could happen.
“Slow down,” she said.
“Am I doing anything you want me to stop?” Tom asked. And she realized his hand hadn’t moved—it was still resting chastely on her arm. His hips weren’t even flush against hers.
“No, I—actually, I’m fine.” She was embarrassed. Impressive—they’d gotten to third base entirely in her head, and he was just trying to go to sleep.
“You sure?”
“Yeah. It just felt like—never mind.”
It wasn’t like he’d announced that he wanted to sleep with her. Maybe he didn’t.
“I didn’t think I was getting laid tonight,” Tom said, sounding smugly amused.
“You are absolutely not getting laid.”
“That’s fine,” he reassured her. He rubbed her upper arm with tender familiarity. “You made me work for it last time too.”
This pronouncement was so dignified and also so ahistorical that Rose stiffened and craned her head back to glare at him.
“What? Oh my God. I did not .”
She did not. She was not someone who had ever, would ever, make a man work for it . She liked sex. She just didn’t believe in having sex with someone she wasn’t serious about. She had sex with men she was contemplating a future with, whether that happened on the third date or after three months.
“Okay,” Tom said, making it sound like he was humoring her. Rose rolled to her back and narrowed her eyes at him.
“We met at freshman orientation. I was sleeping with you by Halloween. It was six weeks, max .”
They’d been virgins . And Rose had needed to dump her high school boyfriend, figure out birth control at a Catholic university, clear out her roommate for a whole night—it had happened super fast, all things considered.
Tom paused with the air of a man doing complicated mental math. “Maybe you’re right.” Even in the dark, his expression was beseeching. “But six weeks felt like a very long time.” Rose jammed an elbow back toward his stomach, and he grunted dramatically. “Six weeks would still feel like a very long time!” he protested. “It would feel like a long time to anyone!”
“What if I told you there will be no sex for you at all on this trip?” Rose demanded. She wasn’t sure whether there would be. She was letting go of expectations.
“Don’t say things you’re just going to have to take back later,” Tom said, undeterred. “There’s not much to do here in the winter. Don’t take sex off the table when it’s too cold to play horseshoes or lawn darts.”
He caught her elbow before she could jab it into his ribs again and wrapped her arm around her stomach instead.
“It’s okay, babe,” he said. “I don’t mind working for it.”
“I just want to go to sleep,” she pleaded.
Tom paused as though rifling through a mental tool kit. Then he rearranged the pillows under their heads. “I get it. You can go to sleep. I’ll be good. Just relax.” He pulled back just far enough to put both his forearms against her upper back. She made a noise of confusion, and he shushed her. It wasn’t clear what he was doing until he put his hands on her shoulders and dug his fingers into the muscles there.
Tom held on to her shoulders and let his thumbs work little circles up and down her neck. The stiffness began to trickle out of her body, minute by minute. She went quiet, caught between the pleasure of it and the boundaries she hadn’t yet decided where to place. She supposed a shoulder rub was allowed. She probably deserved a shoulder rub.
Her guard wasn’t quite down when he bent his head to the back of her neck again. If he was going to kiss her there, that felt like an escalation, so she teetered on the edge of a protest. He hadn’t kissed her yet. It ought to mean something if he kissed her after so many years.
And then it wasn’t his lips on the back of her neck but the tip of his nose, pressed into the downy hairs at her nape. He inhaled deeply, the unexpected intimacy of it tightening her chest.
Before she could decide how she felt about it, Tom reached up to pull her hair loose from the band, letting his fingers slide up into her hair and prompting a very embarrassing noise when he began to stroke her scalp with soft fingertips.
The novelty of it was instantly gratifying, nearly as much as the wonderful sensation of his hands in her hair. He hadn’t done this before. She would have loved it if he’d done this before, but it hadn’t occurred to him to do it, and she hadn’t thought to ask. Someone else had taught him to do this.
That last thought felt like it could have had some hard edges, but it didn’t. She was thirty-four. She no longer expected to be anyone’s first anything. People her age came to the table with a lot more history. She’d gone out with people who had kids and dogs and divorces. She was nothing but lucky to get this expert pressure along all the tense spots on her head, places she hadn’t even known about.
“Don’t ever stop doing that,” Rose mumbled even as her eyelids got heavy.
“Okay,” Tom readily agreed. “Every night, if you want.”
“I want,” Rose said. “But your boyfriend will probably demand some kind of schedule.”
It was a throwaway line—she wanted to go to sleep, not have a complicated discussion about their limits, because Rose was a normie, a square, and she needed to check out Tumblr or wherever people learned how to navigate the boundaries set by their head-scratcher’s main boyfriend before she got into it. I could be cool about this , she supposed she was saying.
“My what?” Tom said.
“Your boyfriend.” Maybe that wasn’t the right word. She didn’t know the open relationship terminology. She didn’t think Boyd was his partner, because she didn’t think she believed in long-term commitments that opened not just for sex but for regular head-scratching arrangements with ex-wives. Though what did she know, really?
Oh look, she was awake again. “Boyd,” she specified and rolled over. Tom, still sprawled across most of the pillows, looked honestly confused.
“Boyd’s not my boyfriend. He’s not my anything.”
Rose frowned at him. “Okay.”
Tom propped himself on his elbows, blinking rapidly.
“You don’t believe me,” he said.
She wasn’t sure she did.
“There are photos of the two of you kissing in a national newspaper. Sloane said there are fifty bazillion pictures of you on the Internet—”
“Because we’re in a production together, and his fans are weird.”
Rose searched Tom’s face for signs of deception, finding none. But he was a good actor. “Really?” she said doubtfully. Tom and Adrian were very good friends, roommates over multiple years, and yet Tom had never shown up wearing Adrian’s clothes. “Seriously? You two never…?”
Jesus, why not ?
Tom looked down at the pillows, rearranging them with atypical delicacy. He didn’t meet her eyes.
“Okay, well, you see how that’s a different question, right?”
That was actually a hilarious response to a straightforward inquiry.
“No! I mean, I could tell you, but do you actually want me to?” he asked. “I guess wanting to know if I’ve got something going on with him is fair—and I don’t —but do you really want to know what I was doing before you showed up on my doorstep? I don’t mind telling you everything, but do you want to hear it?”
Rose typically skipped that conversation, but a small, bitter part of her pushed her to continue.
“Yes,” she said. “Sure, go on. Anyone more famous than Boyd Kellagher? Anyone else I’ve heard of?”
“If I—if I tell you, are you going to do the same?” Tom asked, a tense little line appearing on his forehead. She couldn’t tell if he actually wanted to know or just thought this was a trump card to avoid admitting to what was surely a good decade-long fun run.
“Me?” Rose said, pressing a palm against her chest and looking at him with wide, concerned eyes. Two people he’d never met, one he had, none of them any of his business.
Annoyed, she screwed up her mouth and then looked away with a deliberate expression of frustration. As though deeply unwilling to admit it, she dropped her shoulders. She wasn’t an actress, but she’d gone to a lot of rehearsals.
“So I actually haven’t—yeah. Since you. I just didn’t—it didn’t feel right. I couldn’t.” She sighed with what she hoped was convincingly tragic, celibate resignation. “I took vows, you know.” She held the position for thirty seconds before she peeked at him.
His jaw had dropped. He was staring at her with four different emotions warring for top position on his face: Panic. Guilt. Disbelief. Awe?
Then she rolled her eyes at him.
He grabbed a pillow and held it out as though he was going to smother her with it. Rose snorted, falling back on the bed.
“I was trying to be considerate,” he growled.
“No, you were trying to cover your ass,” she said. “And you don’t have to. I don’t care if you’ve filled out your entire Pokédex.”
“Except that you do care, or you wouldn’t have brought it up in the first place!” he said heatedly.
He had her there. She inelegantly conceded the point, gathering up the pillow to her chest. “I thought Boyd was your boyfriend,” she admitted. She fell back on the bed. This wasn’t working. She was never going to sleep. She didn’t know how she’d sleep with Tom on the same continent .
Tom’s lips thinned. “I’m not a cheater, Rosie.”
“Okay,” she said. Nobody would dare cheat on one of the most famous movie stars in the world. She hadn’t thought that. She’d thought they had some kind of open relationship.
“Not just now, but ever. I’ve never cheated on anybody . Including you.”
“Okay,” Rose repeated, trying to scoot away from the conversation she now regretted starting. Wasn’t it past everyone’s bedtime now? Certainly hers.
“Do you believe me now?”
“Sure,” Rose said, just wanting the conversation to be over.
Tom scooted to the opposite side of the bed and raked an agitated hand through his thick, tousled hair. “Really? Because some of our friends—well, I guess the ones who turned out to be your friends—seemed to think I had. I heard about it a lot, in fact.”
His face was so righteously aggrieved that Rose felt her own anger rising. She’d had about enough of his subtle insinuations that he’d been so hurt and wronged when she threw him out. Fine. They were both awake now. Nobody was sleeping tonight. They were doing this now.
“I never told anyone you cheated on me.” That was one of the grounds for a contested divorce in New York, so she’d had the opportunity. “I just said that you’d basically stopped coming home, and I had no idea where you were or what you were doing for days at a time. Which was true. What was I supposed to think? Honestly.”
She groped around on the floor for her phone. She needed to get out of here.
“I never, ever would have cheated on you,” Tom said, and he was standing now, or trying to, but the ceiling was too low for that, so he was just looming uncomfortably. “If I was gone overnight, I was just passed out in the green room at La MaMa or on someone else’s floor because I didn’t want to come home drunk.”
Rose gave him a long look, wondering whether he might happen upon some realizations as those words emerged from his mouth. Ah, there were her socks.
“Okay, yes, I can see now that that was…not great,” he said, motioning as though he’d put that thought away to the side. His tone was only slightly less aggressive. “But I never cheated. The day you filed for divorce, I’d never been with anyone else. I never looked at anyone else. Why would you think that?”
Rose took note of the flag he planted—the day she filed for divorce, not the day a year later when he finally signed the papers—but it wasn’t as though she hadn’t been seeing other people by then too. So she took him up on his more important point.
“Oh, come on. You didn’t even notice when we stopped having sex, and you like having sex more than anything except dramatic solo numbers. Of course I thought you were cheating on me.” She crawled toward the ladder.
Tom snorted incredulously. “Believe me, I noticed . But you were working a hundred hours a week and managing both of our entire lives. Was I supposed to complain that you weren’t finding time to have sex with me too?”
Rose put her feet on the top rung as exhausted tears began to prickle in the inner corners of her eyes. “Complain? I couldn’t tell if you cared at all. And I—I couldn’t live like that. You stopped looking at me .”
That he was cheating on her had been the good story she’d told herself. A reason he didn’t notice how unhappy she’d been, because he was too guilty to look. She’d already decided to forgive him for cheating on her.
The bad story was that he’d just fallen out of love with her; she didn’t know how to forgive him for that.
Tom sucked in a surprised breath and held it. If Rose knew him, this was the moment he bolted. Tom wanted everything to be fun and easy and pleasant. Any sign of distress was to be immediately soothed away, and if it couldn’t be soothed, it was to be avoided.
That was why she had her feet on the ladder. Either he’d take himself out, or she’d leave.
Indeed, Tom looked at the door. Off he’d go, and then they’d never speak of it again, if they even spoke again. But then he set his jaw and met her eyes, and although his own were wide and scared, he held still.
“We should have had this fight,” he said.
Rose sighed and climbed down to the bottom of the ladder.
“Where are you going?” he called.
“I need to sleep,” she begged him.
“We should have had this out,” he said. “Baby, please. Tell me what you wanted me to do. I didn’t know what you wanted me to do.”
Maybe he was right and maybe he wasn’t. They’d never know because they hadn’t fought about this. Or, rather, they’d had one fight, and then Tom never came home again.
“Rosie,” he called down when he saw her gathering her clothes. “Seriously, where are you going?”
“I’m going to sleep in the car,” she said.
Tom turned around and slid down the ladder like a fireman, just hands and insteps on the poles. It was physically impressive, but for the first time since that morning, he wasn’t trying to show off.
“Come on,” he said when he turned around, face still wounded. “You think you’re better off not knowing I was going to be faithful for the rest of my life, and I never get to hear you say what I did wrong?”
Rose curled her hands into tight fists, arms rigid at her side.
“You can’t have it both ways,” she said. “You can’t tell me Baby, I’ve changed while you’re still trying to prove things should have worked out a decade ago. They didn’t work out! We got divorced! You broke my heart into tiny little pieces, and that happened , even if you think it didn’t have to.”
Tom’s mouth pressed into a thin, flat line as he considered that.
“Just come back to bed,” he finally offered. “I’ll stop.”
Rose shook her head. “No. You’re either the guy who broke my heart, or you’re someone I just met. And I don’t sleep with either of those guys.”
He took a deep breath and let it out. He was disappointed, but not dejected.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll go, then.” He stooped for his pants, which he’d conveniently left in the middle of the floor.
“I’m not trying to be mean,” Rose said. “I’ll fit in the back seat. You won’t.”
“Nah,” Tom said, one corner of his mouth curving up. “I’ll go across the street to one of the clean-ish rooms. I got the lights on and the bees corralled in the suite.”
“What?” Rose looked around their stolen little pink cottage. Not that she was sure she would have left it if she’d known. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
He shrugged apologetically, shoved his bare feet into his shoes. He took his coat off the hook where she’d hung it. “Why do you think? You were over here.” He gave her a tired smile. “And I wanted to be over here with you.”