Chapter 15
Elise
The first cinnamon pancake spread across the skillet in a shape that suggested one side of a badly drawn continent.
Roman stood on the other side of the kitchen island with his sleeves pushed to his forearms and watched me examine the damage.
“You used too much batter,” he said.
“You’re standing in my kitchen criticizing food you haven’t been offered.”
“I was identifying the structural problem.”
“You’re not allowed to project-manage breakfast.”
His mouth moved at one corner.
Years ago, Roman had declared the first ugly pancake his forever. This morning, I slid it onto his plate without being asked.
“Thank you.”
He didn’t make a joke about being honored. He cut off a piece, ate it, and maintained an expression so neutral that I narrowed my eyes.
“How bad?”
“It has character.”
“That bad.”
“I didn’t say it lacked flavor.”
“You used your meeting voice.”
“I’m trying to preserve Sunday breakfast.”
I laughed before I could decide whether I wanted to.
Roman looked down at his plate.
I turned back to the stove and poured less batter for the next pancake. The kitchen smelled of cinnamon and butter. Sunlight reached through the narrow window above the sink, catching on the pale wood of the bookcase we had assembled yesterday in the room that would become the nursery.
He had left when he said he would, without touching or seeing anything I had not offered. Then I had asked him back for breakfast.
That had been my choice too.
“Music?” he asked.
“My kitchen.”
“Your selection.”
I chose an old soul playlist, not the one we used to play on Sunday mornings in Greyford. The first song began quietly from the speaker on the counter.
Roman noticed the difference. He didn’t comment on it.
We worked without colliding. He asked before taking the mixing bowl to the sink. I told him where the clean dish towels were rather than watching him search. When I reached above the stove for another plate, he stepped back instead of putting a hand at my waist to steady me.
The absence of touch became its own kind of touch.
By the time we sat at the small kitchen table, I had eaten half a pancake and become too aware of his bare forearms, his wedding ring, and the exact distance between his knee and mine.
I had invited him because I wanted an ordinary morning.
Ordinary did not mean harmless.
Roman spread butter over his second pancake. “Is there something you want to ask me?”
“You always did hate being watched without an agenda.”
“I used to assume I knew the agenda.”
“And now?”
“Now I ask.”
I set down my fork.
There were questions that belonged in public places, where a table and other people’s voices kept the edges contained. This one had followed me home from the first date, the exhibition, the parking-lot kiss, and yesterday’s brief intimacy with his hand on my stomach.
I wanted his answer and resented the old obligation to survive it gracefully.
“Did you enjoy it?” I asked.
Roman’s hand stopped beside his plate.
I did not help him by making the question easier.
“Serena needing you,” I said. “Did you enjoy being the person she believed she couldn’t manage without?”
He put the butter knife down.
“Yes.”
The word landed without padding.
I looked at the clean white space between our plates.
He could have told me he had been afraid for her. That part was true. He could have reminded me that she had been injured and confused. Also true. He could have described obligation, guilt, history, the terrible pressure of being treated as someone’s only safe person.
All of those truths would have arranged themselves around the ugliest one until I could barely see it.
He left it exposed.
“Yes,” he said again. “I enjoyed being needed that much.”
My stomach tightened beneath my ribs. The baby shifted, a slow pressure low on my right side.
Roman kept his hands on the table.
“Her fear wasn’t the part I enjoyed,” he continued. “Being the one person who could make the room safe made me feel necessary. Good. Important.”
“And when I told you it was hurting me?”
“I told myself your ability to stand without me meant I could ask more of you.”
The answer was so precise I almost wished he had lied.
I pushed my plate away. “You didn’t only choose her because she was fragile.”
“No.”
“You chose who you were when she was fragile.”
His gaze lowered for a second, then returned to mine.
“Yes.”
The music and the refrigerator’s soft mechanical hum were the only sounds in the room.
“Was that why you kept extending it after Dr. Chen said she could hear the truth?”
“One of the reasons.” He did not reach for me. “I was afraid of causing her pain. I was afraid Nadia would think I was abandoning her. And I liked being the man everyone believed had to stay.”
My throat burned.
“You were willing to let me believe you were trapped.”
“I made sure you believed it. If it was a medical necessity, then you couldn’t judge me for choosing it.”
I stood and carried my plate to the counter, though there was nowhere useful to put it that was different from where it had been.
Roman stayed seated.
The cottage around us remained mine. My dishes. My music. My client sketches stacked beside the far wall. My door could still send him in either direction.
I needed that while I wanted him.
I turned.
He was watching me, but not with the careful expression he used when he feared one wrong movement would close everything. There was desire in his face now. He did not disguise it as concern.
I crossed the kitchen before I could convert the impulse into a safer decision.
Roman rose when I reached him, then stopped.
I placed my hands against his chest. His heartbeat pressed hard into my palm.
“I’m going to kiss you,” I said.
“Yes.”
I caught the front of his shirt and pulled him down.
The first contact was almost gentle. That lasted until his mouth opened under mine and seven years of knowing exactly how he kissed became present instead of past.
Heat moved through me with humiliating speed.
I kissed him harder. His hands stayed at his sides until I caught one and pressed it against me.
“Touch me.”
Both hands closed around my waist, warm and firm above the curve of my stomach. The certainty of his grip sent a sharper wave of heat through me.
I moved closer on my own.
The baby made closeness different now. My body would not fit against his in the old arrangement, and Roman did not try to force it. He angled himself around me while I slid one hand into his hair and kissed him until breathing became inconvenient.
His thumb moved once against my side.
He broke the kiss with his mouth still brushing mine. “I’ve thought about this every night since the parking lot.”
“Then stop thinking.”
I pulled him toward the living room.
He followed without passing me. At the sofa, I sat and drew him down beside me. The cushions dipped under his weight.
I climbed over one of his thighs, careful of my stomach. His breath left him sharply. His hands tightened at my waist, no longer pretending he did not want to hold me.
The restraint made me want more.
I kissed the line of his jaw, then his throat. I knew the place below his ear that changed his breathing. My mouth found it without thought.
“Elise.”
Not an old pet name. Not a plea. My name, roughened by desire.
I leaned back enough to pull my sweater over my head.
Pregnancy had altered the shape and weight of my breasts, the curve of my stomach, the way I occupied space. He did not pretend not to want any of it.
I took his hand and placed it over my bra. “Here.”
His palm covered me.
Pleasure tightened low in my body. I closed my eyes for one second, then opened them.
“Kiss me.”
He did.
His mouth moved over mine while his thumb stroked once. I arched into the touch.
I shifted against his thigh. The friction dragged a sound from me that I did not recognize until Roman’s fingers tightened at my waist.
I guided his hand beneath the fabric. His pupils widened, but he let me set the pressure.
My head tipped back. His mouth touched my throat, then stopped there.
“Here,” I said.
His lips moved lower.
His mouth crossed skin that remembered both the marriage and the months apart.
I threaded my fingers through his hair. “More.”
He kissed the upper curve of my breast while his hand supported me, following every shift of my body.
I moved against him again, and his free hand gripped the sofa cushion instead of my body.
I took his free hand from the cushion and slid it beneath my skirt to my thigh.
“Higher.”
His hand traveled slowly upward.
The phone on the coffee table vibrated.
Three hard pulses against the wood.
My body went cold before my mind found the memory.
A hospital corridor. Roman’s screen lighting in his hand. Serena’s name. Her voice from behind a half-closed door using the old nickname as if seven years had not happened.
Roman’s fingers were still against my inner thigh.
“Stop.”
He stopped before the word finished. His hand left my skirt, and the arm around my waist released. He waited until I shifted, then helped me set both feet on the floor before he stood.
He backed away until the coffee table was between us.
I dragged my sweater against my chest. My breathing came too quickly, each inhale catching before it reached the bottom of my lungs.
Without looking at the screen, Roman silenced the phone and placed it facedown on the far shelf. He offered no theory about the caller or my body.
Then he stood where I could see both his hands.
“What do you need?”
The question hurt.
“Put your coat on.”
“All right.”
His hand went straight to the coat on the hook beside the door. I pulled my sweater over my head, fingers clumsy at the hem.
Roman waited with his hand near the doorknob but not on it.
“Leave it,” I said. “I’ll lock it.”
“All right.”
I braced for my name, gratitude, or one careful sentence that would require a response.
He opened the door.
Cold air entered around him.
Then he left.
I crossed the room and locked the door myself.
The half-eaten breakfast remained on the kitchen table. His plate was there, but nothing else belonged to him. No keys. No coat. No reason he could claim he had to return.
Fifteen minutes passed. My phone stayed dark.
I sat on the sofa where his body had warmed the cushion and placed both hands over my daughter.
Stopping had once meant I had failed to be understanding enough, desirable enough, easy enough to love. I had believed a man’s disappointment was evidence that my boundary had harmed him.
Roman had wanted me. He had stopped anyway.
For the first time, I did not feel as though I had ruined what came next.