Chapter Twenty-One
Max
The drive back is quiet in a good way; it doesn’t need filling. Gio is at the wheel, and Rudi is in the passenger seat and Cal’s hand is in mine in the back and the city moves past the window in streams of light. And it feels normal.
When we get to the penthouse building Gio and Rudi both get out, and Rudi opens Cal’s door. Only Cal’s. When I turn to open my own, I see Gio blocking my door with his back to me.
Cal frowns, noticing the same, and steps out. Walks around to the other side of the car and has a short conversation with both of them in front of my door, his voice too low to hear. Then he opens my door himself.
“Rudi’s just going in ahead of us,” he says with a reassuring smile. “There was a crew working on one of the lower floors today, they just want to clear it.”
I nod. I look up at the building as I step out—up and up, floor after floor, until the top where the penthouse sits above everything else.
“I haven’t seen the view from the balcony yet.”
His eyes are like two stars in the darkness, and it feels like he sees me better than anyone else. With a smile, he takes me by the hand and we walk with Gio slowly before Rudi gives us the all-clear to go up.
The view is the whole city, the river and half the sky.
I stand at the railing with the cold air moving around us and I don’t say anything for a while because there isn’t anything to say that would add anything.
Just looking at the view speaks for itself.
The lights reflect off the water in long broken lines.
To the left, I can see the bridge, and to the right, the skyline stacks itself up against the dark.
“I love the river,” I say finally.
“I know.” Cal’s beside me for a moment, then he’s not.
He comes back with a blanket—soft and thick—and settles it around my shoulders without asking, without ceremony, just wraps it around me and then leans on the railing beside me. I smile just to myself, because he somehow can tell what I need even before I realize it.
“I bought this place right after graduation,” his words land somewhere in the sky above us while he’s looking at the water. “When my father was gone and I didn’t have a choice but to be here, after everything. The first thing I did was find an apartment with a view of the river.”
I peek at him. His eyes sparkle with the reflection of the city lights and the shadows paint his face in sharp edges.
“Why the river specifically?” I ask, though I think I already know the answer.
“Remember in your senior year, you had that apartment on the east side?” he breathes, and doesn’t take his eyes off the water.
“The one with the window seat. You used to say the river view was the only thing keeping you sane during finals. You said, ‘I could stare at the water all day.’ And you told me one day you’d ‘buy the perfect house overlooking the Charles’ in Boston so you could do just that: look at the river all day. ”
I’m very still. Patrick made me give up that apartment right after graduation because he wanted us to move into his.
Cal bought this penthouse because of a view I mentioned in passing during my senior year. He graduated and went back to a life he didn’t want and the first thing he did—before anything else, before settling in, before figuring out what came next—was find himself the view I loved.
He intended to come back here. This was always supposed to be—he was always going to come back for me.
This place wasn’t meant for just him. It was meant for us.
I spin around.
The blanket turns with me and I’m facing him while he’s still looking at the river. His sharp jaw, the dark beard with just a few threads of silver catching the city light, the curl of his hair, the way he holds himself at the railing like he’s done this a hundred nights… alone.
“Are you telling me,” I return, “that you bought this enormous, fancy, extremely gorgeous penthouse for me, Calogero Renzetti?”
He turns his head. Something moves across his face—a flicker, fast, like a match striking—at his name on my lips, his real, full name.
He steps into my space, his hands finding the railing on either side of me and he looks down at me. He doesn’t say anything for a moment. His eyes are very clear.
I sink my teeth into my bottom lip, holding a smile back and anticipating his words, his touch… him.
He doesn’t deny it, but he ignores it.
“Noticed you didn’t drink any wine tonight, Sims.” His voice is low, and I know it’s the tone he uses in a deposition when he already knows the answer. “Any particular reason why that might be?”
I run my hands up the front of his shirt, the soft linen warm under my palms. I move them up, as slow as possible.
“Because I’ve followed all your rules, Renzetti.” I bite each word out with my fakest innocent tone. “Every single one. And if you don’t kiss me soon, I will start breaking them—one by one—until you do.”
He tilts his head in consideration, but his eyes mirror the heat I feel under my hands. “Is that a threat? I think that’s contempt of court.”
“It’s a promise.”
He’s still watching me with that careful expression. I feel a smile trying to escape, but I refuse to let it free because I need him to understand that I am completely serious.
I reach up and find the top button of his shirt and undo it. Just one. My fingertips rest against the small triangle of his chest it reveals; against the warmth of his tan skin and the dark hair there.
His breath leaves him. Not smoothly—it stutters slightly on the way out, just once, and I feel it against my fingers. And I beg the universe to let him break just this once.
I continue to push all the boundaries, tracing my fingers up from the open collar, slowly with both hands, along his throat, pressing them against the back of his neck with my thumbs across the edge of his jaw where his beard starts. I leave my hands there, curled under his jaw.
I can feel his pulse; the rise of his chest as he inhales a deep breath.
He closes his eyes for a second.
“I’m going to kiss you now, Max.” His voice is so faint I almost don’t hear it and he opens his eyes, fire behind them. “Okay?”
A small nod in response is all I give. My eyes stay on his.
I feel the warmth of his hands as they leave the rail and slide under the blanket, against my hips. While one stays, the other continues to burn a path up my back.
He leans down. His lips meet mine and the whole city goes quiet.
Not literally. The city is doing exactly what it probably always does—lights and noise and the constant low hum of ten million lives happening simultaneously.
But inside the blanket, inside the small warm space between us, everything narrows down to this.
To his mouth, which is softer than I expected and more certain, to his hand that has found the nape of my neck under the blanket, to the way he kisses me like he has been thinking about exactly this moment for a very long time and intends to do it properly, steadily. And he takes his time.
I forget to think.
My hands curl into the front of his shirt and I hold on. His lips caress mine and press, and he peppers small kisses in with the deep ones. Every second feels like it lasts forever and is over too fast at the same time.
I press my fingers into his beard, feeling a sense of freedom and urgency to run them through his curls. Then, they trail back down under the collar of his shirt, against his chest. And that’s where they stay because the warmth of his skin on mine lights me up from the inside out.
After a minute—two, maybe, I’ve lost track of time entirely—he pulls back just enough to look at me. I try to remember how breathing works. I’m not entirely successful as my breath comes out staccato.
He watches my face and a smile starts at the corner of his mouth before bursting to life across his face.
He kisses me again, softer this time, but he squeezes the back of my neck just a little, sending lightning down to my core.
“Worth it,” he says quietly, reverently with his eyes closed and face tilted to the stars.
“Nine years. Worth every second of that wait.” He looks down, placing his forehead against mine.
“But I’d prefer to never wait that long for something that earth-shattering ever again.
I’d prefer to kiss you like that every second of every day. ”
I laugh. It comes out slightly breathless, which I refuse to be embarrassed about because it’s completely justified and based on the pattern of his own breathing, he feels it too.
He pulls the blanket tighter around my shoulders. He kisses me again, brief and certain, like punctuation.
Then he takes my hand.
“You’re shivering,” he says.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
I am.
He turns toward the door and leads me inside, the blanket still around my shoulders, his hand warm around mine, and the city lights slide across the white walls of the penthouse.
And I think about river views and coffee syrups that were barely touched and that kiss.
That kiss that I’d like to play on repeat tonight in my dreams. And tomorrow in real life, too.