Chapter 9
HANNAH
The next two days happen like weather.
Not like a decision, not like a plan. Like something the atmosphere produces when conditions are right, inevitable and consuming and not particularly interested in my opinions about it. We fall into a rhythm that feels like it’s been here waiting for us.
Mornings on the deck with coffee.
Afternoons on the beach.
Evenings that start as one thing and become another without either of us forcing the transition.
He cooks. Correctly, this time, with actual attention and no camera, and I sit on his kitchen counter with a glass of wine and hand him things he asks for and we argue companionably about whether garlic can be overused —it cannot, I maintain this firmly— and the domesticity of it should alarm me and instead just feels like breathing.
I finish my book.
I start another one.
I don’t read very much of it.
The third evening he’s on my deck when I come out after a shower, hair still damp, and he looks up from his sketchbook and the way his eyes move over me, unhurried, warm, completely reverent and it does the thing to my pulse that I’ve stopped pretending it doesn’t do.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” I say, my mouth dry.
Neither of us pretends we’re just neighbors anymore.
I sit in my chair. Our chairs now. I’ve stopped correcting the possessive in my head.
I tuck my feet underneath me and he goes back to his sketch and the evening settles around us and I think: I could get used to this with a speed that should concern me and doesn’t.
“Come here,” I say.
He looks up. Reads my face. Sets down the sketchbook.
He crosses to my chair and I stand up to meet him and he cups my face in both hands the way he did on the beach, like I’m worth being careful with, and this time when he kisses me there’s no probably a mistake because I’ve already made the case, weighed the evidence, and ruled in favor of this.
In favor of him. In favor of Cruz.
In favor of me, actually— this version of me that puts on good earrings for a dinner that’s definitely a date and sits on kitchen counters arguing about garlic and lets herself want things without building a counterargument first.
I pull him inside.
This is what I’d forgotten.
Not the mechanics of it. I’m forty-eight, not amnesiac.
But I mean the specific quality of being wanted by someone who is paying attention.
Cruz is… present. That’s the word, the same word that keeps applying to him.
Present in a way that makes the space between my thoughts go quiet, and I have a very loud interior life, I always have, it is one of my defining characteristics, but here with the ocean coming through the open window and his hands learning me like I’m something worth knowing I am —finally, briefly, beautifully— just here.
Not Hannah Caldwell, senior partner.
Not the reliable one. The capable one. The one who holds everything together.
Just Hannah. Wanting this. Having it.
He is, it must be said, spectacularly good at this.
He’s also, and this undoes me more than it should, attentive in a way that isn’t performance.
He notices. Asks. Adjusts. Treats the whole thing like a conversation he’s genuinely interested in rather than a destination he’s trying to reach, and I had forgotten that this was possible, that someone could be this —here— and somewhere in the middle of all of it I feel the loosening thing again except it’s everywhere now, not just in my chest but in my shoulders and my jaw and the place behind my eyes where I store everything I don’t have time to feel during the day.
He undresses me like every inch is a new moment of wonder.
His lips brush lightly over my neck, collarbone, down to my breasts, nipples, one and then the other.
Every second, etching into a memory of what being with someone should be like.
It should be reverent. It should be special. And it should be felt.
I slide under the covers, but not for modesty, more for privacy, a cocoon for him and me. He pulls a condom from his wallet and holds it up.
“I’m covered,” I say softly and his brows shoot up.
“You’re sure?”
And then a little bit of the lawyer in me wonders what the hell I’m doing? He’s young. Obviously wanted by… millions of women.
“Are you clean?”
“Tested after my last partner.”
I bite my lip and his thumb comes out to stop me. “It’s okay, I’ll wear the…”
But my body is pulsing and I don’t want to wait any longer. I pull him toward me and he takes the hint.
His hand slides down my body. Imperfect, but holding its own. And honestly, every little extra here and there is a badge. A little roundness from one more slice of brie. A scar from sliding down the stairs when they iced over.
But my body still responds. I’m not dead. I’m feeling more alive than ever.
And then he slides over me.
He lifts my chin. “Look at me. I want to see you.”
He sees me. He really sees me.
I nod as he separates the folds of my body and in one smooth motion, he unites us.
And I wonder if I’ve ever really known what this should feel like.
It’s like going under water and getting that first big breath of air when you come up. It’s like riding a roller coaster when there’s that anticipation when it’s click, click, clinking toward the top, right before you fall over. And it’s like a thousand suns are inside of me, waiting to burst out.
“Fuck… Hannah. God, you’re so fucking beautiful.”
His cock is definitely the biggest I’ve ever had and it’s not longer before my body is at the peak…
But I hold on.
I don’t want this to end.
And that thought is even more scary than facing life alone with two girls when I was a single mom.
“Hannah, baby, let go. I can see you’re waiting. I’ll be there with you. Promise.”
Oh God, he’s so good.
I inhale a deep breath and my body explodes in every single direction all at once. I’m writhing like I’m possessed.
Maybe I am.
But it’s beautiful and when I’m starting to come down, he grunts and I feel his body pulsing inside of me. He thrusts through the rest of my bodyquakes.
He kisses my lips softly. “Beautiful.”
He insists that I stay laying there. Cruz gets up and gets a warm washcloth and he cleans me. I didn’t know men could be like this. It’s… new.
And too much.
And then I cry.
Quietly, unexpectedly, not dramatically— just a few tears sliding sideways into the pillow with my back to him while I process the fact that I didn’t know I needed that until it was over, all of it. The dinner. The beach. The hands finding each other in the dark.
And this, especially this.
I feel him go still behind me.
Then he pulls me closer, rolling me toward him. Not making it a thing, not asking me to explain or reassure him or perform that I’m okay. He just gathers me in against his chest with one arm and puts his chin against the top of my head and lets me be exactly where I am.
“You don’t have to explain,” he says quietly.
Which makes me cry a little more, briefly, and then stop.
We lie there in the dark with the ocean doing its steady work outside and I feel his heart under my hand —solid, present, a little fast, the same as mine— and I think about what I said on the beach: I needed to find out if I still knew how.
How to want something for myself.
How to be a person who takes up space in her own life.
Turns out I still know how.
Turns out it just needed the right conditions.
Later —much later, the kind of later that’s nearly early— I tell him about the years after David left.
Not the legal facts of it, not the case I built and won, but the other part. The part where I sat in my car in the school pickup line and felt the specific terror of being forty and starting over and not knowing whether I was enough on my own.
“I decided I had to be,” I tell the ceiling. “There wasn’t another option. The girls needed me to be and so I was.”
Cruz is quiet for a moment. “And then you just… kept being?”
He’s so right.
“And then I just kept being.”
“Until you forgot to check whether you still wanted to.”
I riase my head to look at him in the dark. “When did you get this perceptive?”
“I’ve been paying attention,” he says simply.
I look back at the ceiling. Outside the window the sky is doing the pre-dawn thing, the darkness going slightly gray at the edges, and it occurs to me that I have been awake all night for the first time in years and I feel— not tired.
Something else. Something lighter and more complicated than tired.
“My rental ends in five days,” I say.
His hand, resting on my waist, doesn’t move. “I know.”
“Yours too.”
“I know.”
Neither of us says what comes next. The question hangs in the pre-dawn gray and the ocean fills the silence and I don’t try to build the case or stress-test the structure or prepare the counterargument.
I just let it exist.
“Go to sleep, Hannah,” Cruz says softly.
“I’m not tired.”
“You’ve been awake for twenty-two hours.”
“I’m a lawyer. I’ve tried cases on less.”
He laughs, quiet and warm, and pulls me closer, and I close my eyes in the gray pre-morning with his heartbeat steady under my cheek and the Atlantic doing its ancient, indifferent, beautiful work outside.
I’m asleep within four minutes.
I know because I’m counting.
Then I’m not.