2. Jamie #4
For the first time in three days, my future isn’t sitting on my shoulders pulling my focus. For a few hours, in the warm amber light of this hotel bar with a stranger who hasn’t asked me to explain a single thing, it disappears entirely.
Judging by the way the tension gradually vacates his face over the course of the evening, whatever followed him through those glass doors seems to disappear for him too.
I don’t ask about it, and he doesn’t ask about mine. Some things don’t need to be named to be understood.
By the time we leave the bar, the distance between us has disappeared in the way that distances do when two people have spent enough time choosing not to maintain them.
His shoulder brushes mine as we move through the lobby, natural and unhurried, neither of us adjusting or pulling back.
My hand rests against the small of his back as we step into the elevator, a small gesture that feels less like a choice and more like a correction of some kind, like everything is slightly more right with that point of contact than without it.
Neither of us pulls away, as the elevator doors slide shut.
The second they do, his hand finds the front of my jacket and curls into the lapel.
His breath is warm against my lips, smelling faintly of the whiskey we’ve been nursing for hours, and beneath that, something sharper, something like the salt of his skin when I lean in closer and catch the scent of him, clean, warm, undeniably him.
I don’t hesitate. My mouth finds his, definitely not a tentative brush of a first kiss, no, this is the kind of hunger that’s been simmering beneath the surface all night, coiled tight in my chest, in the way my fingers have been itching to touch him, in the way my pulse has been thrumming just a little too fast every time his knee brushed mine at the bar.
His lips are softer than I expected, yielding just enough to let me take the lead, and then, then he groans into the kiss, a low, rough sound that vibrates against my mouth and sends a jolt of electricity straight down my spine.
His free hand slides up to cup the back of my neck, fingers tangling into my nape, teasing the tips of my braids, and my knees weaken at the possessive pressure of it.
I press closer, my body aligning with his like we’re two pieces of a puzzle that have finally fit together.
The elevator walls are too close, the air too thick, but I don’t care.
I don’t care about anything except the way his tongue teases against mine, the way his teeth graze my lower lip, the way his breath hitches when I tilt my head just right and deepen the kiss until we’re both breathing each other’s air.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, a voice whispers that this is reckless, that I don’t even know his name, that in a few hours I’ll be on a plane to a city I’ve never lived in, with a life I’ve just dismantled.
That voice is quiet, drowned out by the way his thumb traces the line of my jaw, by the way his chest rises and falls against mine, by the way his body arches into me like he’s been waiting for this just as long as I have.
The kiss steals every coherent thought from my head. Every word, every plan, every carefully constructed version of the evening that I might have been building toward. All of it gone. There is only the warmth of his hand against my chest and the sound of my own pulse beating wildly.
His laugh breaks through the moment when my hand misses the elevator panel entirely, and I find myself laughing right along with him, forehead dipping toward his shoulder for half a second before I pull back enough to look at him properly.
“You’re terrible at this,” he says, and his voice has lost the last of the careful distance it carried when he first sat down beside me. “We both are.”
I shake my head and grin. “Can you blame me?”
“No.” The answer arrives so quickly and with such unguarded certainty that it catches both of us slightly off guard. Like he answered before he remembered to consider whether he should.
For a moment, we just stand there looking at each other, smiling at the way the evening has landed us here and how neither of us seems to have any objection to it.
His tie is still hanging over one shoulder. The same navy-blue tie that has been a quiet source of entertainment since the moment he walked through the door, loose and unruly against all that careful polish.
As the night’s progressed, I’ve started thinking of him as Blue. I can probably chalk that up to the tie, the first thing about him that seemed out of place. Loose over his shoulder, it was the first crack in his armor, and somehow it told me more than I needed to know about the man in front of me.
“Get over here and kiss me again, Blue.” The nickname comes from me easily, warm and entirely unplanned.
His smile falters for the briefest moment. Something moves through his expression, a flicker of surprise too quick to fully read, like a word he wasn’t expecting to hear. The realization happens in real time across his face, the brief pause before something clicks into place.
Then he closes the distance between us, and I stop paying any attention to where the elevator is going.