Chapter 14
JESS
Pinch me.
That was my first thought when I looked out the window of the temporary apartment on our first morning in St. Louis — at the breathtaking fall foliage, golds and reds and bright yellows that made the whole street look like something out of a painting — and thought: I actually did it. We're actually here.
The apartment was on a tree-lined street in Clayton, four blocks from Forest Park and a twelve-minute drive from Barnett — Sarah Henderson's doing, and I was grateful for every bit of it.
When we packed for this move, we'd divided everything into two categories — what we needed immediately, and what could wait in storage until we had a permanent home.
It meant the move-in was almost embarrassingly easy.
The apartment was already furnished, and when we walked through the door that first evening, there was a beautiful floral arrangement on the kitchen counter — cream roses and eucalyptus, a card from Sarah that said welcome home — and Justin studied it a while before deciding it was acceptable.
"It smells good," he said.
"It does," I agreed.
He went to find his bedroom. I stood in the kitchen with Sarah's flowers and thought: okay. We're here. We're actually here.
Carter had come up with takeout that first night — nothing fancy, just Thai food from a place near his apartment that he said I was going to love, and he was right.
We ate at the kitchen counter because the table was in storage, Justin on a stool between us, narrating his assessment of the window seat in his room — optimal for Carter Junior, good sightlines, acceptable light — and I thought about how strange and right it felt, all three of us in this temporary kitchen in this temporary apartment in a city that was going to become permanent.
I called my parents after Justin went to bed. My mother picked up on the first ring.
"You made it," she said.
"We made it." I sat on the counter the way I'd been sitting on counters in my mother's kitchen my whole life. "It's good, Mom. It already feels good."
"Of course it does." I could hear my father in the background asking something. "Your father wants to know if Carter is there."
"Dad."
"He just wants to know."
"Tell him yes and that we're fine."
My mother relayed this. My father said something that made her laugh. "He says good. He likes that boy."
"I know he does." I looked at the floral arrangement on the counter. "We'll come down and see you soon — and you two have to come here, the second we're settled. You need to see the new place."
"We'll be there," she said. "Try and stop us."
I hung up feeling the warmth of parents who showed up without being asked and didn't make it complicated.
While I'd been on the phone, Carter had quietly cleaned up the whole kitchen.
I came back to find the takeout containers gone, the counter wiped down, the leftovers put away — and him leaning against it with his arms crossed and that look on his face, the warm certain one, watching me cross my own new kitchen in my socks.
“He’s down?” I asked.
“Out cold. I checked. Carter Junior’s got the window seat, he’s got the bed, all’s right with the world.
” He held out a hand and I went to him, fitting myself against his chest, and he wrapped both arms around me and put his chin on the top of my head, and for a minute we just stood there in the quiet of a half-unpacked apartment in a brand-new city.
“Thank you,” I said, into his shirt. “For today. For the kitchen. For the Thai food. For — all of it.”
“You don’t have to thank me.”
“I know. I’m doing it anyway.” I tipped my head back to look at him. “It’s late. You’ve been hauling boxes since nine this morning — you must be dead on your feet.”
“I’m fine.” He tucked a piece of hair behind my ear. “In no hurry to be anywhere.”
And he didn’t move his hands, and I didn’t move out of them, and the moment stretched, and something in the air changed the way it always did with us — fast, without warning. His thumb moved along my jaw. His eyes dropped to my mouth.
“Good,” I whispered, and I kissed him.
It went from soft to something else almost immediately.
He made a low sound against my mouth and turned us, walking me backward out of the kitchen and down the unfamiliar little hall toward the one room I’d managed to make up with real sheets, both of us moving quietly on instinct because of the sleeping boy behind the other door — and there was something about that, the enforced quiet, the way we had to hold it down, that made everything hotter.
“We have to be quiet,” I whispered against his mouth.
“Then you’d better keep it down, Ms. Calloway,” he murmured back, and the low tease in it went straight through me.
He got my shirt off in the dark of the new bedroom.
I got his after it, and had to stop for a second just to look at him in the dark — the broad shoulders, the hard ridged plane of his stomach, the cut lines of muscle disappearing below his waistband, a body that did violent impossible things for a living and was standing in my bedroom letting me put my hands all over it.
A grown man built like something out of a magazine, and mine, at least for tonight. I dragged my palms down his abs and felt them jump under my hands and thought, a little wildly, that I was too old to be this undone by a man’s stomach. I was exactly that undone anyway.
He walked me back until my knees hit the mattress and followed me down onto it.
He took his time with the rest of my clothes, unhurried, kissing every new inch of skin as he uncovered it, and I had to bite down on the sounds I wanted to make, fisting my hand in the new sheets, because the walls were thin and the boy was close and that only wound it tighter.
When he settled between my thighs and closed his mouth over my clit I had to press the back of my own hand to my lips to keep quiet.
He was patient about it, merciless, working me with his tongue until I was arching up off the bed and shaking, one big hand splayed flat on my stomach to hold me down, and when I came it was silent and enormous, my whole body going taut, my free hand fisted in his hair.
He kissed his way back up my body while I was still trembling.
“Carter,” I breathed. “Now. I need you.”
He reached for his wallet on the nightstand, the small familiar pause, the tear of foil.
I took it from him before he could, and he went still as I wrapped my hand around him — hard and hot against my palm — and stroked him once, slow, then leaned up to kiss the head of him before I rolled the condom down his length.
The sound he made low in his throat, half a groan and half my name, nearly undid me. Then he was pushing into me slow, both of us groaning into each other’s mouths to keep it down, and when he was fully seated he went still and rested his forehead against mine.
“You okay?” he whispered.
“Move,” I whispered back, “or I’ll never forgive you,” and I felt him huff a laugh against my mouth before he did.
He kept it slow because he had to — a fast pace would have made noise, the headboard, the bed — and the restraint of it was its own kind of torture, deep and unhurried and controlled, his hips rolling against mine while he watched my face in the dark.
I wrapped my legs around him and pulled him deeper and had to turn my face into his shoulder to muffle the sound I made.
He got a hand between us, his thumb finding me exactly right, and worked me back up while he moved, patient, relentless, until I was clinging to him with my heels digging into the small of his back.
“Come on,” he breathed in my ear. “Quiet. Just like that. I’ve got you.”
I came a second time with his name silent on my lips and my whole body clenching around him, and he followed me a few strokes later, burying a groan in my hair, holding me so tight I could feel his heart going.
We lay there after, tangled and damp and breathing hard. A bedroom in a brand-new city — a city I’d moved to for reasons I was no longer pretending were entirely about the job.
Reluctantly, he got up.
I watched him dress in the dark — the quiet efficiency of it, a man who had learned somewhere young how to leave a room without disturbing it — and I felt the first faint thread of something I didn’t have a name for yet. It would have been so easy to say stay. The word was right there.
I didn’t say it. He didn’t offer. And I told myself it was about Justin, about the first morning, about not confusing a six-year-old — and all of that was true, and none of it was the whole truth, and I wouldn’t understand the rest of it for weeks.
He leaned over the bed and kissed me, slow and soft.
“Welcome to St. Louis,” he said against my mouth.
“Drive safe.”
“Always.” He brushed my hair back one more time. “Call you tomorrow.”
And then he was gone, the front door clicking shut behind him as quietly as everything else that night, and I lay in the dark of my new bedroom listening to his car start four floors down and telling myself that this — the careful goodbye, the separate beds, the door closing soft — was exactly how I wanted it.
There was one other thing I lay there thinking about, in the warm wreck of the sheets, and it surprised me a little.
I wanted him with nothing between us. No condom. No barrier. Nothing.
We'd been careful every single time — his doing, mostly, that same quiet efficiency he brought to everything, a condom produced and handled without ceremony before I'd even had to think about it.
And I'd been grateful for it, and I'd also started, lately, to resent the half-second of foil and pause, the last little wall standing between his skin and mine.
I hadn't been on the pill in years. Hadn't needed it. There'd been no one, and no reason, and I'd let that piece of my life go quiet along with the rest of it.