Chapter 23
ELI
TRACK: Leonard Cohen, “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye”
It wasn’t clear when she got here whether Reese was going to stay over. But after we get off my table—which I’ll never be able to look at the same way now—I’m guiding her toward the bedroom.
We pass by the window overlooking the valley, except we can’t see the valley because the snow is coming down so thick it’s fully obscured.
“Oh my God,” Reese says.
I pull her against me, loving the way I can see our reflection in the night backed glass.
“You can say that again”—I stroke her shoulder with my thumb and lean into her ear, not thinking of the snow at all—“when I make you come again.”
Reese laughs, then we’re in the bedroom and I’ve got her nestled in pillows like a queen, and soon enough I’ve got my tongue on her clit and fingers inside of her and when I tell her to come for me, she does, hard enough that tears run down her face as she cries my name, her body bucking under my face.
I don’t know what time it is when we fall asleep, but when I open my eyes next, it’s still dark. I feel fucking blissful when I find Reese curled up sleeping next to me, even though I’m on that bridge between tipsy and hungover.
I decide in this moment that I’m not going to tell her about Neil.
Not now. Not when it could ruin all this.
It would be a different story if he actually did something.
If he’d crossed the line past being slimy, there’s no way I could keep that in.
I’d tear the world apart if I found that out. Especially if it put Reese in danger.
But right now, we’re happy. She’s happy. She’s fucking singing, and I can’t take that away from her. I won’t.
I feel a weight off my chest, relieved to have made a decision.
“I’m going to do everything in my power not to hurt you again, Reese,” I whisper into her hair, too quiet to hear me even if she weren’t sleeping.
Then I close my eyes and disappear into darkness once more.
This time, it’s bright enough that when I open my eyes the sunlight streaming in my window is like a laser beam into my poor bruised brain. A monster of a headache is already jackhammering against the inside of my skull. I squeeze my eyes shut again, groaning.
It’s almost like I drank too much…which I don’t do much of these days and frankly is hard to do for me at all.
“Morning, sunshine.”
It comes back to me in a delicious fucking gut wallop. Tequila. Reese.
Licking tequila off Reese’s body.
I open my eyes. She’s standing there in my shirt from last night, holding two steaming cups of coffee. “You okay? Alive?”
“I don’t think so,” I croak. “But it’s fine because, clearly, this is heaven.”
Reese laughs. The sound is like angels singing, I swear to God. Her hair is a tousled sexy mess spilling over her shoulders, and her lips look bruised. My cock pulses as I remember all the places those lips were last night.
I stretch my arms out, beckoning her toward me. “Come here, baby.”
Reese sets the coffee down on the side table and slides into my arms and now I know it’s heaven.
For a moment, I don’t move. I don’t even breathe. I just hold Reese in my arms, letting myself feel the pure, liquid joy flooding my heart. The joy of finally having her here feels so fucking good. Because this is what I’ve wanted for way too long than I care to admit.
“Yeah,” I say finally. “Heaven is right here.” Then I grimace, letting out a breath. “That’s corny as hell, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” she laughs, resting her elbows next to my face. “But I like it.”
To my surprise, a tightness grows in my throat, and on its heels, a tightness in my gut.
The tiniest voice telling me this can’t be real.
That I don’t get to have these kinds of feelings.
But then Reese smiles, dipping down to kiss me, and at the feeling of her plush lips pressed against mine, I forget all about anything but her.
My hands slide down to her ass, but my head pangs then, a sharp spasm of pain that has me cursing. “I don’t want to move, but I need a painkiller, or I’m going to die for real, Reese.”
We take care of business—bathroom, painkillers, water, coffee, more coffee, and finally I insist we spend at least a few more minutes back in bed.
We’re sitting next to each other, lying really face-to-face, our heads against the propped-up pillows. “Cancel work today,” I say, brushing her hair from her cheek.
“I’ve started having Sophie take over Saturdays,” she says. “So, I’m not working.” Reese smiles, though there’s some kind of hesitation in her expression.
I’m too busy grinning back at her to linger on it though, at least not yet. “Perfect. I can make love to you all day.”
“Excuse me, I didn’t say I was free.”
I slip my hand up over her bare hip. “You mean you don’t want me to make you come again?”
“I didn’t say that,” she says, giggling as I tug her hips close to me. “But…” Her cheeks go pink. “I was going to head to the studio for a bit.”
“Let’s go.” I make like I’m getting up, but she tugs me back down.
“No!”
“No, you don’t want to go, or no, I can’t come?”
“I…” Reese hesitates, then buries her face in the pillow. Then she peeks up at me, and when she does, her smile is gone. “I don’t know if I’m ready to sing for you yet, Eli. For anyone.”
I want to kiss her again, to tell her she has nothing to be embarrassed about, that she sings like a goddamned angel.
I take her hand, pulling it up so I can see that tattoo on her wrist, the one that makes my blood boil.
“What was his name?” I ask. “Simon what?”
Reese looks down at the ink.
“Houghton,” she whispers. “But that’s not what the initials stand for. At least, that’s not all.”
I keep quiet, letting her continue only if she wants, even though I’m dying to know.
She meets my eye. “It’s what he used to tell me, back when I was trying to make singing my career. ‘Stay Humble.’”
I frown. “What?”
“He thought it was a kind saying, I think, a reminder to remember who I was. But now, I think…I think he saw me outgrowing him. I think he wanted me to stay quiet.”
The sound echoes in my brain. Shhh. “I want to kill him. I actually want to commit a crime and murder this man for hurting you.”
Reese laughs softly. “Don’t you dare. He’s the guy who’d sue you for trying. Wouldn’t be worth ruining your life over.” She blinks, but her eyes aren’t focused on me. She’s looking at the past.
Suddenly, so am I.
“Reese,” I say. “I never said I was sorry for what I did to you back then.”
Now her eyes snap to mine. She purses her lips. “Yes, you did, Eli. But it’s water under the bridge.”
“No, it’s not. You were pissed at me before all this. And I deserved it.”
Reese scrunches her nose, rolling onto her back. “You’re right. I was pissed then. But I’ve thought about it a lot lately. I thought about it the most, actually, that first day in the kitchen, seeing you and Kelly together. I realized I hadn’t been fair.”
“Are you kidding? You didn’t do anything wrong.
” The old feelings scrape against the new for a moment, the ugly against the beautiful.
“I was so fucked up, Reese. I was reeling from my divorce. From this perfect life I thought I’d created.
I gave Kelly everything I had and…it wasn’t fucking enough. I wasn’t enough.”
She turns back to me, brings her hand to my cheek.
“Do you remember what you told me back then, Eli, when I said I just wanted to keep things casual? To have fun? You said, ‘I can’t do casual.’ You were telling me the truth.
I could have taken that as a warning and left.
But I didn’t. I read it like an invitation, because I was still so vulnerable…
so…lonely after Simon. So I stayed, even though I knew you weren’t ready.
And you were so different from him. So kind and caring and hurting because you’d tried so hard to show someone you loved them.
I fell for you because of how much you cared. ”
My throat is thick now. “I wasn’t ready then, Reese. But I am now. I’m—”
I’m in love with you.
The thought is like a bell, ringing loud and true. I was in love with her then, too, but we’d only been together a few weeks. I thought I was going in too hard, too fast, and that it wouldn’t have worked between us just like it hadn’t worked between me and Kelly. I’d refused to see it.
I thought that part of me was broken. But it’s not, I see that now. It never was.
“Reese—” I begin, wanting to tell her—needing to.
But just then my phone buzzes. It’s loud on the bedside table. I pick it up. It’s a text.
MIKE: You probably want to cancel today, right?
“Shit,” I say.
“Everything okay?”
I explain how earlier, I’d checked my phone to discover the batting class I teach on Saturdays would be canceled due to the snow. “Except there’s one lesson I’m doing off the books.”
I tell Reese it’s the kid I told her about that day in the restaurant when she’d dumped the mimosa on that asshole’s lap.
I apologized to Alvin’s dad, Mike, for throwing the bag of bats at him.
I knew he cared about his kid; he was just going about showing him the wrong way.
“I offered to give Alvin private coaching for free, on the condition that Mike sits off to the side to watch the lesson and doesn’t say a word.
We ended up doing it only every third Saturday because of his custody arrangement with Alvin’s mom. ”
“And that’s today?” Reese says, glancing out the window.
I nod. “In a couple of hours. I can’t say no, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry.”
“Reese, we should talk, right? About what comes after?”
“We should. But maybe it can wait?”
She looks away from me, and I wonder if there’s something she’s not telling me. There are probably a thousand things she’s not telling me. Before this whole thing I foisted on her, she probably had plans of her own, ones I don’t know about.
Ones I’m not a part of.
I think about how cavalier my thoughts were with the word love. How easily I could have said it a moment ago, and how easily she could have told me it’s not the same for her. If she wants to put it off, it can’t be good.
But I can’t corner her into staying with me, can I? No matter how much I want it?
Too much, Eli. You’re too much.
I sit up, swinging my legs out of bed and running a hand through my hair.
“After filming then,” I say, trying to keep my voice light.
“When the show wraps…you can tell me what’s next for you.
” That’s when I’ll tell Cass I’m done with the hotel too, I decide then. Whether or not it’s to be with Reese.
My chest aches with the thought it might not be.
“After filming,” Reese says, her voice soft.
But all I can think is, God help me, that’s the voice that lives in my very soul. Like I’m some kind of cheap poet.
“Eli?” Reese asks, tentatively.
“Yeah,” I say, not turning around. Not wanting her to see how deep I’ve fallen.
“Maybe I can come with you?”
I freeze, my heart lifting just a little. “To baseball?”
“Yeah. I want to see you in action. Then you can drop me at the studio.”
I turn around, my chest cramping at how beautiful she looks with her wild hair and pink cheeks. Like I’d forgotten in the few seconds I’d turned away from her.
“I’d love that,” I say, meaning it.
“But I could use a shower first?” she says, her lips turning up.
My dick jumps, oblivious to the delicate scaffolding holding up my heart. “So could I,” I say, scooping her up in my arms.
A few minutes later we’re standing under a steaming jet of hot water, and all I feel is the rush of heat in my lower half seeing her stand there, water and soap sudsing down her slick skin. My dick strains almost painfully, at full mast since we’d stripped and turned the water on.
There’s still the terrifying thunder in my chest knowing how deep my feelings go for her, but I try not to focus on that. I try to focus only on the now.
And it works, when she slides the soap over her tits, letting them bounce as her hands pull away.
“You okay?” she asks, her brows arched in concern.
“I will be, once I’m inside of you,” I say, without hesitation.
Reese’s mouth falls open and I run a thumb over her lip.
“You want that, Reese?”
She nods and I bend down to touch my lips to hers, to run my tongue along her soft upper lip, her tongue, the roof of her mouth.
“Need it, is the correct way to put it,” she says breathily, after breaking the kiss.
“I need to get a condom—”
“No.” The word is urgent. “I’m protected, Eli.”
After a quick exchange reveals we’re both recently tested and she’s got an IUD, everything else leaves my head except the need to feel her wrapped around my throbbing cock.
I reach up and pull the removable showerhead from its holder. “So you’re telling me I can come inside you, Reese? I can fuck you until you feel my cum pulsing out of your pussy?”
Reese’s eyelids flutter. “Yes.”
I turn the jet so it shoots out in a thick, pulsing stream. Then I turn her around so she’s facing the wall, her palms splayed on the tile.
I pull her hair aside so I can see over her shoulder, to the water streaming off her beautiful tits. “Good,” I say. “Then take this and make yourself come for me while I fuck you. Make me remember the next time I have a shower where that jet was pointed last.”
She directs the water toward the apex of her thighs. The sounds of her whimpering gasps meld with the sound of the jet splattering hard against her pussy, and it’s almost enough to make me come before I get inside her.
But I can’t let that happen. I won’t.
I can’t wait, either. So I grasp my cock, find her waiting entrance, and thrust my cock in her slick pussy. The feeling of her clenching around me makes me shudder with pleasure. But I want more. So much fucking more.
I use my free hands to grasp her wet tits, and I fuck her then, unable to wait. One, two, three hard thrusts, her nipples between my fingertips now, my name in her mouth filling my ears, my chest, my fucking soul.
“Yes, Eli!” she cries as I thrust inside her now, so hard my wet balls slap against her.
“I’m coming!” Her voice is so tight, so ripped through with desperate need there’s no holding back for me.
My balls tighten and I explode into her, shooting my load so deep I pray, selfishly, that it’ll broach her barrier.
I’m shocked by the thought, and would feel guilty, too, if I didn’t feel so fucking on top of the world I might die right now, like this.
And that would be just fine with me.