23. Rhodes
TWENTY-THREE
Rhodes
Settling: A house never stops moving. Doors that stick in August swing free in January, and no room in this city ever comes back to precisely the shape it held before.
I knock, then open the door, dropping my bags in the small foyer of Tallulah's villa. Libba left about an hour ago.
"Tell me you found the other charger," Tallulah calls from the kitchen. "The white one. Not the black one. We both know the black one is dead."
"It's in the bowl on your kitchen counter."
"How do you know that?"
"Because I put it there last night when I found it on the floor."
She appears in the doorway holding two cups, her hair still wet at the ends. She's wearing the leggings she flew here in and one of my button-down shirts that she hasn't admitted to taking. She hands me a coffee like she's done it every morning of her life.
"You're helpful at times. Let's sit on the terrace. The car's not here for forty minutes."
I follow her out. The light's gone all gold and slow over the water, the way it does in the late afternoon, hitting the lemon tree and the chairs still shoved crooked from our last lunch in Italy with the last of us.
She goes straight to the railing and leans on it, coffee in both hands, looking out at nothing in particular.
I stand next to her, close, and I don't check the doorway behind me, because there's no one to walk through it.
All week I've been counting sight lines, tracking who's on the stairs, keeping a foot of respectable air between us in every photo. Now the whole estate belongs to the two of us and a car that hasn't come. I put my hand flat against her back while she drinks her coffee. Nobody is here to see it.
"Can you believe Cain left us to lock up?” She asks. "Us. The two least responsible people he knows."
"Speak for yourself."
"Says the man who is on his family's payroll and probably couldn't tell me what half the people in those meetings are talking about."
I take a drink instead of defending myself. She’s smiling, and I let her have it. The joke lands close enough to something real that I don't bother correcting her.
She turns back toward the water, and I look at her instead. Her wet hair, my shirt hanging past her hips, and both hands wrapped around her coffee while the afternoon light catches the side of her face make me smile.
Every time she shifts her weight on that railing, I think about her riding me last night and how badly I want her on me now. Tomorrow night she'll be down the hall from me in New Orleans, and none of this will be mine to touch.
"How did we accumulate this much stuff to take back?" She asks. "It was a week. I have two bags even though I came with one."
"I'm not sure how to answer that. I'm going back with exactly the same amount of stuff that I came with."
"Well, maybe you're just a better packer."
"I've been accused of worse."
She laughs, and knocks her shoulder into mine.
Gravel crunches down the drive. The car is here. Tallulah looks toward the sound.
"That's us."
"Yep," I say but don't move. She heads in and after I can't wait any longer without it being weird, I follow her in. We gather the bags without talking about it.
I close the villa behind us and turn the key. Tallulah waits beside the car, one hand shielding her eyes from the sun.
In a few hours, we'll be on a plane home. For now, though, we're still in Italy, so when she reaches for my hand, I take it.
At the airport she has both boarding passes in her phone before I've found mine. She holds the tray at security while I dump my watch and belt, then hands me my things back in the order I need them.
"You're going to get us flagged," I tell her. "Nobody moves through security this efficiently without a nefarious reason."
"The reason is I want a pretzel before we have to board and you're slow."
At the gate, she takes the seat by the outlet and points me to the one beside it, never asking which one I want.
I get the aisle on the plane too, because she gave it to me at check-in without saying so, and I only figured it out when we boarded and she scooted past me to the middle like that was always the arrangement.
The meal is an insult. The chicken is gray with a roll and a square of cake. She peels the foil back and frowns.
"Trade you my cake for your roll."
"You had a pretzel. I need my roll."
"You could have gotten a pretzel." She's already moved the cake onto my tray, so I give her the roll. I don't really like the rolls, anyway.
The lights dim over the water. Somewhere past Ireland she stops fighting it and tips sideways, her head finding my shoulder like it has a standing reservation there.
I go still. If I shift, she'll wake, and if she wakes she'll sit up, and I am not ready to lose the weight of her yet.
I pull the thin blanket up over her arm, and she burrows in.
I watch the little plane crawl across the map. I'm going to miss this when it's gone.
She stirs when the cabin's gone dark and quiet.
"You know the deal," she murmurs, eyes still closed, head still resting on my shoulder. "Carriage turns back into a pumpkin when we land."
"Midnight sharp," I say. "Straight back to me pretending you don't steal my shirts."
"This was too small on you. I'm helping you."
"See, that's why you needed an extra bag on the way home."
"Why are you always pointing out my flaws?"
"I think it's kind of cute, not a flaw."
"Oh." She yawns. "Back to normal."
"Normal starts now," I agree.
Her hand finds my forearm beneath the blanket and stays there. I look down at it, as if I can see it beneath the blanket. If this is normal, I can work with it.
The wheels hit New Orleans, and her eyes open. The cabin lights come up around us. By the time the doors open, she's sitting straight in her seat with her hand back in her own lap.
My phone buzzes against my leg, then buzzes again. Beside me, Tallulah picks up her phone, the screen lighting her face in that flat white glow. I watch her thumb through something I can’t see.
I finally pick up my phone to see messages in a group chat with Deuce doing most of the texting, a message from Ridge, and four ESPN updates. None of it catches my attention enough to delve into them beyond making a note of what came through that I missed.
Neither of us says anything, scrolling, shoulder to shoulder, both of us disappearing into our phones.
"And it's gone," she says. "The whole week. Poof."
"That's why vacation is a double-edged sword."
"No kidding."
We get the bags off the belt. She's got a hand free before I do and takes her lighter one off my shoulder that I'd planned to carry for her. We walk out through the doors into that thick, wet air that means home more than any sign does.
Our driver is already at the curb, pulled to the side. It's a black Escalade. I'd recognize it anywhere because it's the same fleet of cars that has picked me up for years.
The drive Uptown is empty this late. Streetlights slide over the hood. She's quiet a while, still scrolling, then she puts the phone face-down on her thigh.
"Oak Moss," she says.
It's the first time she's said it all week. I'm not sure where she's going with this, so I just meet her gaze.
"It was nice," she says. "Not carrying it every single minute. I didn't realize how heavy it was until I put it down."
"I was surprised. I was certain it would come up."
"I know my dad well enough to know it wouldn't come with him to Italy. And it made me insane. Because I’m not an idiot. Silence doesn’t mean it’s fixed. They just keep moving, thinking I'll forget about the fight until one day it's done, and nobody ever said no to my face."
"Well, you got them to stop and listen. I don't see Tallulah Maybank forgetting any fight, and I have a feeling they know that, too. They're listening to you."
"Barely."
"Still counts. You know that ground better than any of them, and you've got years of notebooks to back you up. They're not going to be able to wave you off."
She looks over at me. I feel it without turning.
"I like your optimism. I'm not quite so optimistic, but I'm going to try to steal some of yours."
"Wisdom," I say with a smirk, tapping my temple. "Stick with me, grasshopper."
She laughs, picking her phone back up. A week in Italy and she's already back in the fight, both hands.
The driver turns onto our street. The house sits dark at the end of it. The porch light I left on a week ago is still burning.
The bags hit the floor of the front hall, and the sound is loud in a house gone so quiet. A week in a villa full of people talking over each other, and now it's just the tick of the hall clock and the two of us standing here.
"I'm beat," she says. "I'm going to turn in."
"You're not hungry? I can whip something up for us."
"I had your roll, remember? Seriously, though, I don't even think I could eat. I'm going to bed."
"Okay, get some rest. I had a fun week with you."
She smiles at me and grabs her two bags off the floor, walking toward her room. I start to help, but she's got it handled and didn't leave any room for me to do that, anyway, without being weird.
I stand there longer than I need to after her door closes.
I take my bag to my room, and then come back to the kitchen to figure out what I can eat.
Then, her door opens, and she comes back out, plugging her phone into the charger by the couch. I set both passports in the bowl next to the charger. Small things, landing things, the routine of two people who live here and nothing else.
"Turns out I'm exhausted but can't sleep."
She's looking at me in the dark den, still in my shirt, and the space we've kept between us since we landed is gone.
I walk up to her and kiss her slowly. Her hands come up to hold my face, and she walks me backward toward my room.
I take my time with her. I know how she likes the flat of my palm up her back, and exactly where to put my mouth on her neck to make her go quiet. We end up in my bed, tangled close, breathing into each other's mouths while the house stays completely still around us.
"One more," she breathes.
I already know better.
"One more," I say anyway.
She kisses me again before the words are all the way out.
Her hands slide under my shirt and over my stomach, and I pull it off without breaking the kiss. She pushes me onto my back and straddles me, settling one knee on either side of my hips.
She drags her mouth down my neck, across my chest, and my head falls back against the pillow.
"Tallulah."
She smiles against my skin.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"Liar," she whispers as she keeps going.
She gets my pants open and slides her hand inside. My breath catches, which makes her smile.
"There it is."
"Don't start."
"You started it."
Her hand moves over me slowly.
"You are entirely too pleased with yourself," I say to her.
Precum beads at the tip of my dick, and my balls are already tight enough to ache.
"I've had a productive week."
I catch her wrist before she can wreck me and kiss the inside of it.
Then I roll her beneath me and strip off what's left of her clothes.
I drag my mouth down her stomach and finish on the inside of her thigh.
I know exactly how long I can tease her before she grabs my hair and tells me to stop being an asshole.
"Rhodes."
"What?"
"You know what."
I grin against her skin.
"Use your words."
"I hate you."
"That's not very specific."
She laughs, then gasps when I give her what she's asking for. By the time I come back up her body, she's flushed and breathing hard, and every smug thing I had planned to say disappears when she pulls me down and kisses me.
I reach toward the nightstand for a condom. She takes it from my hand and tears it open. Watching her roll it down over me nearly does me in. She rolls it down slowly enough that I know she's fucking with me.
Her eyes lift to mine.
“You want me, Rhodes?”
I would laugh if I weren't so anxious to get inside of her.
“I’ve never wanted anything more.” I can barely get the words out.
She presses her fingers into my ass cheeks as I line up at her entrance. She's so wet I can feel the heat of her before I'm anywhere near her. I kiss her, then push inside her slowly. She lifts to meet me, and the first full press of her around my cock knocks every joke out of my head.
This is nothing like Italy, nothing like the frantic minutes we stole wherever they'd fit. I go to change the angle and her hips are already there, a half beat ahead of me. I slow down to see whether she'll do it twice, and she does.
I give her the rhythm she likes. Her legs tighten around me.
There's no clock on this one and no door we have to worry about who might walk through. I take it slower than she wants and then slower than that, until she's got a fistful of my sheets and she's calling me names I didn't know she had.
When she finally explodes on me, she goes long and loud enough that she takes me with her.
Afterward, she doesn't scramble for her clothes or check the time. She stays.
Her breathing slows against my chest until I realize she's asleep.
The hall clock ticks outside my room. I've lived in this house long enough that I stopped hearing it years ago. Tonight I hear every second.
Tallulah shifts closer and slides one hand over my chest. Her knee settles across my thigh.
I look down at her. This was easier in Italy. There, we were in borrowed rooms, sneaking quickies on a boat tied to someone else's dock, or having sex on beaches we would never see again. We could call every kiss temporary because the whole fucking country was temporary.
This is my bed and her clothes are on my floor. Her room is down the hall.
She moves again, pressing closer without waking, and I tighten my arm around her before I can think better of it.
On the plane, we agreed we'd go back to normal. I meant to. I really fucking meant to.
But normal was Tallulah sleeping down the hall while I didn't know what her mouth tasted like, and passing her in the kitchen without remembering the sounds she makes when I touch her. Normal was being able to look at her and see Coop's little sister before I saw anything else.
I can't get back there. Maybe she can. That thought sits worse than the guilt. I stare at the ceiling and listen to her breathe.
One more was a lie. I knew it before I said it.