Chapter 8 #2
She laughed under her breath. “You’re insane.”
“Yes.” And because we were alone and the room was warm and the tea had gone from practical to ritual and there was no one here to witness what it did to me when her mouth softened without defense in it, I found myself smiling back before I could stop.
She saw that too and the smile faded from her face not because she disliked it, but because whatever ease had been growing between us all weekend had crossed into something far more private and far less manageable.
I stood before I could overthink it. Kelly’s eyes tracked upward. She asked, “What are you doing?”
I had promised to let her lead and sitting that close made me want to touch her. I stepped back. “Looking at the rest of your apartment.”
I moved toward the bookshelves near the window. Photos. A stack of lesson plans. A child’s drawing taped to the frame with a note in shaky marker across the bottom: MISS KELLY U R PRETTY
I smiled despite myself.
“What.” She asked.
I pointed. “You have admirers.”
She looked over and groaned. “One of my kids made that.”
“That doesn’t make it less flattering.”
“It does.”
I turned. “No. It means a seven-year-old has better instincts than most adults.”
Kelly glanced into her mug. “I’m not discussing my beauty with a man standing in front of my teacher shrine.”
“Teacher shrine,” I repeated. “That’s one word for it.”
“Don’t start.”
I looked around the room again. There were no expensive objects displayed to prove design taste.
“Your place is warm,” I said.
Kelly’s expression changed. “I can open a window.”
“No that’s not it.”
“What then?”
I looked back toward the couch, toward her like she belonged so fully to the room.
“Because my homes and world aren’t this real or warm.”
The admission sat there longer than I would have preferred.
She found my face with that too-perceptive face and said, “That sounds lonelier than being alone.”
It wasn’t the word I would have chosen. I leaned one shoulder against the wall by the bookshelf and folded my arms. “I like being efficient, no mess.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“I know.”
“Do you always answer feelings with management language?”
I almost laughed. “It’s how I live.”
“That is disturbingly sad.”
“Thank you.”
“That was not a compliment.”
“It was to me. You saw beyond my family.”
Her expression shifted again to a potent smile.
There was a growing awareness that being near each other had stopped feeling like mere chemistry and started feeling, private way neither of us particularly trusted.
I should have said something clever. Instead I crossed back to the couch.
Slowly enough to give her time to stop me if she wanted, but she didn’t.
I sat, not in my original place, but closer. Far enough that I wasn’t crowding her. Near enough that the shift mattered.
Her breathing changed, but she closed her eyes and said, “No.”
She set her mug down carefully on the side table without taking her eyes off me. “Is this the part where you tell me to kiss you.”
Heat punched through me with such clean force I almost swore.
One brow lifted and I let out a slow breath. “You’ve been thinking about that sentence.”
Her face gave her away before her mouth could. Just one little flash of color. Enough.
“I think about a lot of regrettable things,” she said.
I should have backed off but instead I said, “That one didn’t sound regrettable.”
Kelly’s fingers tightened once in her lap. I leaned in by instinct now. Not by much. Just enough that the tension sharpened and she had to feel it as something physical instead of theoretical.
She didn’t move back.
“Xerses.”
I searched her mouth and back to her eyes. Then let myself say exactly one true thing and nothing else. “I do like being near you.”
I watched the recognition move through her in visible stages, surprise, heat, resistance, that volatile little pull toward something she knew better than to trust easily.
And then, because Kelly was still Kelly and honesty from either of us apparently had to be paid for in sparks, she said, “That feels like my cue to put more space between us.”
I almost smiled. “Then why haven’t you.”
She looked at me for one devastating, fully conscious second.
Then she said, “Because I like this too much.”
God help me, so did I. The thought should have been a warning.
Instead it felt like standing on the edge of something and realizing you had already stepped closer than you meant to.
“Good,” I said, and my voice had gone lower again without permission. “That makes two of us.”
Her lips parted. I wanted to kiss her. Bad. But that was why I didn’t.
What happened between us has to be her decision and I’d not push in the first place she’d invited me after asking for space. Instead I reached past her and took her empty tea mug from the table.
The motion brought me close to feel her breath catch.
I set the mug beside mine on the coffee table and sat back.
The restraint cost me more than I wanted it to as my body was rigid.
I knew because the expression on her face shifted from heat to something far more. I held her gaze and she said, “Thank you.”
I winced but asked, “For what?”
“For not making everything that happens between us feel like you’ve already decided how it starts and ends.”
Damn. I stilled but nodded once. “I heard you the first time.”
Her face softened, enough.
Outside, the evening had deepened. Blue sliding toward black beyond her windows, but neither of us moved toward it.
Eventually Kelly stood first and walked to the window, drawing the curtain halfway more from habit than modesty. I watched her do it and followed the line of her back and ached to brush the loose knot out of her hair.
When she turned back, she found me watching and said, “You are impossible.”
I met her gaze. “And yet you haven’t asked me to leave.”
“Yet,” she said.
“You’re in charge of this decision.”
“Stop saying that like it means something.”
“It does mean something.”
The words sat between us like an unfinished sentence.
Then she looked at the clock on the wall and made a face. “We should go back.”
I knew she was right.
I stood. “Yes.”
Neither of us moved.
If she kept looking at me like she did then in another five minutes, I was no longer willing to make promises about my self-control.
Kelly seemed to sense that because she moved. She grabbed the dress bag from the chair by the door, then paused with her hand on the knob.
When she looked back at me, her face had settled into something calmer than before.
“I’m glad you came up,” she said.
There was no easy answer to that.
Not one that would leave either of us intact.
So I gave her the simplest true thing I had. “Me too.”
Then she opened the door.
We went back to the compound together, and the whole drive I could still feel being near her made me physically certain whatever was happening between us was the beginning.