28. Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Eight
REGAN
I’m in sweats and a tank top, hair still damp from the shower, a glass of wine on the coffee table and a vet journal open on the couch when I hear the knock.
It startles me because nobody knocks on this door.
The apartment entrance is around back and up the metal staircase.
The only person to knock on this door since I moved in has been the pizza delivery boy.
When I cross the room and peer through the glass panel, I have to take a step back.
Caleb is standing on my doorstep, Bear at his heels, holding a casserole dish covered in foil.
What’s he doing here? Bear’s appointment was four hours ago and went as well as our awkwardness could allow.
We survived twenty minutes in a small room together, barely.
Now he’s back. I get a grip and open the door.
“Maeve sent this,” he says, nodding at the dish in his hands. “She heard you were working late.”
“Oh,” is the best response I can manage.
I wasn’t working late. I should have been, but I closed the clinic at five.
Still, it was a thoughtful gesture, but doesn’t explain why it’s Caleb holding the dish and why Maeve didn’t bring it herself.
He’s standing on my doorstep in a clean shirt, and he drove here with food he could have left on the clinic step and he didn’t.
“Come in,” I say.
He hesitates for a beat. Then he steps through the door and into my apartment, and the space suddenly feels a lot smaller with him in it.
Bear goes straight for the rug by the bookshelf and lies down as if he’s been here before. Caleb stands in my living room and looks around. I watch him, wondering what his assessment will be and if he’ll notice how this place is the polar opposite of his Airstream.
My grandmother’s quilt is spread on the couch.
Throw pillows in sage green and cream are soft and plumped.
Fairy lights glitter in a string along the bookshelf.
The bookshelf itself, crammed with vet journals and anatomy textbooks on the top three shelves, holds romance novels on the bottom two.
A candle is burning low on the windowsill, a small framed photo of me and Tyler at graduation beside it.
Caleb takes it all in. He’s too big for the space. His shoulders fill the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. His boots look wrong on my rug. His hands look wrong holding Maeve’s casserole dish, gentle, careful, like if he squeezed too hard he’d break the glass.
He looks out of place. He looks exactly right.
“Where do you want this?” he asks.
“Counter’s fine.”
He sets it down, then stands with his hands in his pockets. Bear has already fallen asleep on the rug.
“Your dog’s made himself at home,” I say.
“He does that.”
“Unlike his owner.”
The corner of his mouth moves. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
“You’re standing in my kitchen, looking like you want to leave.”
“I don’t want to leave.”
The words hover in the space between us. He says them quietly, the way he says everything that matters, and I feel them in my chest, my throat, and the backs of my hands.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay.”
Neither of us moves.
“Wine?” I ask.
“I don’t drink wine.”
“Beer?”
“You have beer?”
“I live in Tennessee now.”
He almost smiles. I open the fridge and hand him a bottle. Our fingers brush on the glass. Neither of us pulls away, and the kitchen is very small, and he’s very close, and I can smell the soap on his skin.
“Regan,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“I can’t stop.”
I look at him. He’s staring at the floor. His jaw is tight. His hand on the beer bottle is white-knuckled.
“Coming here,” he says. “Thinking about you. Showing up at your truck with food. Sitting in that exam room today, pretending I don’t want to touch you. I can’t stop.”
My heart is doing something violent and fast.
“Then don’t,” I say.
He looks up, and the expression on his face is wrecked. His features are open in a way I haven’t seen since we were teenagers and he told me he wanted to marry me, his hands shaking but his voice certain.
He puts the beer down and steps forward. His hand comes up and his fingers brush the side of my face, like he’s checking I’m real.
“This is different,” he says.
“I know.”
“Last time was…”
“I know what last time was.”
“This is me choosing.”
This is me choosing.
I put my hand on his chest. His heart is hammering under my palm. This man. This stubborn, broken, terrified man who builds things with his hands and sleeps on a mat on the floor and won’t let anyone close to his soul. His heart is pounding so hard I can feel it in my wrist.
“Come here,” I say.
His lips scuff mine. Just a scuff, but enough to send heat pooling low in my belly. He scuffs again, then bites my bottom lip, gently, but hard enough to make me close to coming before he’s even touched me properly.
“You’re teasing me.”
“I’m savoring the moment.”
He kisses me. Slowly. His hand still on my face, his thumb tracing along my cheekbone.
His lips move against mine, and when his tongue slips inside my mouth, I meet it with my own.
His hands move to the back of my head, and we’re standing in my apartment making out like the teenage lovers we once were.
The kiss is nothing like our kiss in the workshop. That was a collision. This is a question, and I answer it by pressing my mouth harder against his and pulling him closer by the front of his shirt. He makes a sound low in his throat that I feel everywhere.
“Bedroom,” I say against his mouth.
He pulls back. Looks at me. “You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
I take his hand and lead him down the hall. Halfway down the corridor he pushes me against a wall, moving his hands to my butt and squeezing hard as his cock presses against me. His breath is hot on my neck, and I want to pull my sweatpants down and have him inside me now. Fuck foreplay.
I reach around to grab his cock, but he pulls my hand away and mutters against my neck, “Patience, Regan. Patience.”
With a frustrated sigh, I pull him down the hall and through the door to my bedroom.
It’s a small room, filled by a bed with no room for much else.
Fairy lights are strung along the headboard.
I send up a silent prayer of thanks that I changed the sheets this morning.
They’re crisp and white, and about to get tangled.
The window’s cracked open, cool September air flowing in and the sound of the creek somewhere below.
He turns me around so I’m standing in front of him, and we look at each other.
“I don’t know how to do this slow,” he says.
“Yes you do.”
I reach for the hem of his shirt and pull it up.
He lets me. His chest is broad, scarred in two places below the left collarbone, tattooed on the right shoulder.
I’ve seen him shirtless before, but not like this.
Not with the fairy lights catching the ink and the scars and the rise of his breathing.
My mouth presses against the scar below his collarbone. He goes still.
“Regan.”
“I’m here.”
He reaches for the hem of my tank top. Pulls it off slow, watching my face the whole time, and when it’s gone, he looks at me and I let him look. His eyes widen in appreciation when he realizes I’m not wearing a bra.
“Jesus,” he says. Low. Almost reverent.
“That good or that bad?”
“That’s me running out of words.”
I laugh. A full-bellied laugh that’s surprised out of me, and his face does something I’ve never seen, a crack in the seriousness, a warmth that breaks through like light.
He kisses me again, and this time his hands move.
They cover waist, my ribs. His thumbs trace the underside of my breasts, and I shiver and press into him.
His mouth drops to my neck. My shoulder.
The curve of my collarbone. When his lips wrap around one of my nipples and suck my breath catches.
His hand plays with the other nipple, and by now I’m so wet it’s getting embarrassing.
He pulls his mouth away from me. “Lie down,” he says.
I do. He tucks his thumbs into the waistband of my sweats and lowers them, slowly, his fingers trailing down my thighs. My underwear follows. He kneels at the edge of the bed and looks at me, and I’ve never felt more naked or more seen.
“Can I?” he asks.
“Please.”
His mouth meets me. He’s gentle at first. Slow, patient, kissing my lips, running his tongue up the length of me. Then his tongue flicks across my clit. My back arches off the bed. I grip his head, his buzz cut rough under my palm.
“There,” I say. “Right there.”
He listens. His mouth works me with a focus that makes my thighs shake, and I say his name, once, then again, and his fingers slide inside me, and the sound I make isn’t one I’d ever make in front of anyone else.
“Fuck,” I breathe. “Don’t stop.”
He doesn’t stop. His sucks my clit hard and his fingers push deeper inside me until I’m gripping the sheets and my breathing is coming in pieces and the orgasm hits like a wave cresting, slow and then all at once, my hips lifting off the bed and his hands holding me steady and his name the only word I can find.
He comes up. Wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Looks at me with dark eyes and a jaw that’s tight with wanting.
“Come here,” I say.
Without taking his eyes off me, he unbuttons his jeans and pushes them down with his briefs. He’s hard and thick, and as I watch him roll the condom on, the want in my body is a live wire.
He settles over me. His weight on his forearms, his hips between my thighs. He pauses. Forehead against mine. Breathing.
“This okay?” he says.
“Yes.”
His tip hovers at my entrance, then he pushes into me, slow. My breath catches, his breath catches, and for a second neither of us moves. The feeling of him inside me is something else, full and deep, and satisfying like nothing else I’ve known.
“Fuck,” he whispers. “Regan.”
“I know.”
He moves. Slow. Deliberate. Not the frantic pace of the workbench. This is something else. His hips rolling against mine, deep and steady, and his eyes open, watching my face. It’s so intense for a second I look away.
“Look at me,” he says, like he read my mind. “Stay with me.”
I stay. My hands are on his back, feeling the muscles shift. His mouth is on mine between thrusts, soft, open kisses that taste like beer and want. He rolls his hips and hits a spot that makes me gasp, and he does it again, and again, and my nails dig into his shoulders and he groans into my neck.
“Harder,” I say.
He gives me harder. Still slow, still deep, but with an edge now, his hips snapping forward and pulling back, and the sound of us together in the quiet room, skin and breath and the bed shifting against the wall.
“You feel so good,” he says. “You have no idea.”
“I have some idea.”
He laughs against my throat. Short, broken, and surprised. And then he shifts his angle and his hand slides between us and his thumb finds my clit and the combination of him inside me and his hand on me and the look on his face, focused, intent, like I’m the only thing that exists, undoes me.
I come so fucking hard and his eyes never leave me, watching every second of it.
“My turn,” he says, and I wrap my legs tight around him, keeping him as deep as he can go.
He follows a minute later, his rhythm breaking, his body going taut, a low sound against my shoulder that’s more vulnerable than anything he’s ever said out loud.
Afterwards we lie there. His arm across my hip. His face against my hair. The fairy lights making soft patterns on the ceiling.
The sweat cools. Our breathing slows. Bear pads down the hallway and settles on the rug beside the bed with a heavy sigh, like he’s been waiting for us to finish.
“Your dog looks like he disapproves,” I say.
“He’s very judgmental.”
I turn my head. Caleb is on his side, watching me with something close to a smile on his lips.
“Stay,” I say.
He doesn’t answer right away. His hand moves on my hip. Thumb tracing a slow circle.
“Stay the night,” I say. “In this bed. With me. Don’t leave before I wake up.”
He’s quiet. The request is bigger than the words. We both know it. The man who always leaves. Who left at eighteen without a word, and again after the workbench, and every time the distance between us got small enough to be dangerous.
“Okay,” he says.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He pulls me closer. My back against his chest. His arm around my waist, heavy and warm. Bear snores on the rug.
The fairy lights go off on a timer, and the room goes dark. Through the open window, the creek and the crickets and the October night air, cool on my bare shoulders.
He’s still here. Breathing against the back of my neck. Slow and steady and real.
This is what it could be. This is what we could have.
I close my eyes and, for the first time in a decade, I fall asleep without wondering where he is.
He’s here.