Chapter 19
FINN
Iwake up in a bed the size of a small life raft with Darcy asleep on my chest, and my first thought of the day is that I have never woken up anywhere better.
I've had amazing mornings. Sunrise over the Serengeti.
First light on a sheer face of granite with a thousand feet of air under me.
This beats all of it. Hell, it isn't even close, and I'd say so out loud except the woman responsible for this feeling is drooling slightly on my shoulder and I don't want to wake her.
It should rattle me, how right this feels.
Waking up somewhere with no urge to run for the nearest exit.
No flight booked to the next adventure. No inkling at all to even flex a muscle if it means disturbing this moment.
I keep waiting for the familiar rattle of impatience to show up.
It doesn't. That's the part that would scare me, if I could locate anything this morning besides ridiculous, undeserved luck.
We found the bed around one. Slept around two.
Her alarm is set for ten minutes to six, she warned me, because teachers don't get snow days in May, and there are three minutes left on it.
I spend all nine memorizing the weight of her—one leg thrown over mine, her dark hair under my chin and sticking to my bare shoulder, her hand curled against my ribs like she's holding on to something that's keeping her from drifting away.
I'm hard again, because she's naked and warm and pressed against my hip and I'm a living man, but that's not going anywhere this morning. First bell at the high school waits for no one, and I made my peace with that last night. Mostly.
The alarm goes off, piercing the quiet. Darcy makes a sound like a badger being evicted.
"Morning," I say.
Nothing. She burrows into my chest, pulls the blanket over her head, and goes still, a woman attempting to fake her own disappearance in her own bed.
"Darcy."
One hand emerges from the blanket. It holds up a single finger. Not that finger. An index finger, meaning wait, and I lie there grinning at her ceiling like an idiot while the finger retreats back under the covers.
At two minutes after six she surfaces, resigned, and sits up.
The sheet falls to her waist and I stop grinning because the view demands my full attention.
Soft, firm breasts bounce slightly with her drowsy movements, those dusky pink nipples just begging me to suck them into my mouth again.
If she didn't have to be somewhere, I'd already have her pressed beneath me for another round of the incredible sex we enjoyed last night.
She squints at me. She appears to register that I'm real. Then she leans down, kisses me once, briefly, morning breath and all, and says the first words of her day.
"You're still here."
"I'm still here." I push her hair out of her face. "That a problem?"
"Mm." She considers it with her eyes closed. "No. Shower. School." A pause. "Words later."
She climbs over me to get out of the bed, taking her time about it on purpose. She grabs my shirt off the floor instead of anything she owns, and puts it on, fastening just two buttons.
I have seen that shirt on me in boardrooms and on magazine covers. It has never once done what it's doing right now, hanging open to her sternum with the hem grazing the tops of her thighs, and the want that goes through me is immediate and unambiguous. Fuck it. The day can wait one more minute.
I catch her wrist and pull. She comes back down onto the bed with zero resistance, laughing into my mouth, and the laugh goes quiet fast, because my hands are up under that shirt on the warm bare length of her back and she's stretched out on top of me with nothing between us but my own good intentions, which are thinning.
She kisses me like the clock isn't real.
I let one hand drift down and take a slow, thorough handful of her, and she makes a low sound into my mouth and grinds down against me once, deliberate, a preview of a conversation we are absolutely not going to get to finish this morning, and one minute becomes about four before she plants a hand on my face and pushes.
"School, Finn."
"I know. Doesn't mean I have to make it easy for you."
"You're the worst."
"I know. Go." I let her go, despite the hard-on that's going to stay with me most of the day.
She disappears into the bathroom wearing my shirt and a look that makes me realize maybe I gave up too quickly.
The water starts, and about thirty seconds later, the singing starts.
Off-key. Committed. Something from a musical, I think, although the melody has been through a lot.
She hits a note that has never existed in modern music and holds it, proud of it, and I put my hand over my mouth even though there's nobody here to see me grin.
I lie there listening, happier than her terrible singing deserves, and I don't reach for a joke about it, even privately. It just gets to be true.
Then I get up, find my jeans, and head out of the bedroom.
Her kitchen is a galley the width of a canoe, built sometime during the Cold War if I had to guess.
There are two burners—and one of them appears to be merely decoration.
The live one lights if you turn the knob to high, count to three, and back it off, a trick I figure out through stubborn determination and a prayer that I don't start a gas leak.
The toaster is worse. It has a hair trigger and no code of conduct, and it launches the first two slices airborne while my back is turned.
I field one of them off the counter's edge with a reflex I usually save for rockfall.
There are approximately fourteen inches of usable counter space, and the pan lives in a drawer that also contains a whisk, a corn cob holder shaped like corn, and a manual can opener old enough to vote. I bang my head on the same janky cabinet twice.
I have cooked at nineteen thousand feet in a windstorm. I have cooked on a glacier with one pot and a stove the size of a soda can. This kitchen is the hardest venue I've ever worked, and I'm having the best morning of my adult life in it.
There are eggs, a heel of good bread, butter, and a coffee station by the window that's better stocked than most cafés.
Grinder, pour-over, a shelf of fixings arranged with a teacher's discipline.
I make a full pot's worth—strong enough to grow legs—and pour myself a black cup.
I leave the rest for her to do whatever she does to it, because I already know better than to build her coffee for her.
The eggs come out right. The toast comes out half-scorched, but I count it all as a success.
Darcy emerges dressed for school, hair damp, and stops in the kitchen doorway, taking in the scene of table set for two, eggs done, me barefoot and bare-chested at her stove holding a spatula.
"Breakfast is served," I announce, with the full flourish, because a man should honor his venue.
She doesn't say anything. She crosses to the coffee station, pours a cup, doctors it—cream and a long, thoughtful spoon of sugar—and drinks half of it standing at the window with her eyes shut, morning light on her face, my shirt swapped for teacher clothes and the whole day about to take her away.
I stand there with my spatula and watch her like it's appointment viewing.
I hold my questions because she hasn't said I could speak yet. I'm learning the protocols.
Halfway down the cup, she turns around, and the woman I know comes online behind her eyes.
"You made breakfast."
"I made what I hope can pass for breakfast."
"In my kitchen." She sits at the little table, two chairs, barely room for our knees, and looks at the eggs like they're a masterpiece. "The left burner doesn't work."
"We negotiated."
She eats like she's late, which she almost is, and I watch her do it and drink my coffee.
My knee is against her knee under the table because there's nowhere else for it to go, and I wouldn't move it if there were.
Outside the window Main Street is waking up.
Somebody's delivery truck beeping. Somebody's barking dog.
"Can I ask you something?" she says. "Your life in the city. The billionaire living, the company, all of it. Do you like it?"
I think about how to answer that instead of just performing an answer, which is new for me before eight in the morning.
"I love it," I say. "That's the true version.
I built it out of nothing and it works and there are days it still feels like getting away with something.
" She nods, watching me. "And I'm homesick.
Have been for years. Not for here, exactly, or not only.
For..." I look for the right term. "For a home I never let myself have.
Someplace that's mine that isn't a glorified hotel with my name on the deed.
I've got property on three continents and the closest thing I have to this" –I tip my head at her lethal toaster, her window, her half-finished coffee— "is a storage unit in SoHo. "
"That's a long time to be homesick," she says.
"Yeah, well." I turn my coffee cup a quarter turn. "Didn't know that's what it was until recently. I thought it was a real estate problem."
She puts her hand over mine on the table. She doesn't make it a moment. She just leaves it there and keeps eating with her other hand, and that, right there, is the whole difference between Darcy and every room I've ever worked.
My phone buzzes on the counter, face-up. MERRITT LAND PARTNERS scrolls across the screen, and under it: Site visit scheduling, Breckenridge parcels.
"Do you need to get that?" she asks.
"No." My answer comes out a beat too fast. I reach over and flip the phone face-down. "Just work. It'll wait."
It's not a lie. It's just the first true thing I haven't told her, and I feel the size of it immediately.
Breckenridge is real. The site visit is real.
The version of my life where I get on that plane and go build the dream I described to her in a barn two days ago is real, and it's lying face-down on her counter next to the toast I caught in midair.
I do what I always do. I change the channel.
"Twelve minutes," I say, nodding at her clock. "Go be a hero to your students. I'll get the dishes."
"You don't have to."
"I know I don't."
She grabs her folders and her keys. At the door she stops and turns around, and I get a goodbye kiss with her hand fisted in my collar—the kind of kiss that has no business happening on a school-day timeline. When she pulls back her eyes stay closed for one extra second.
"Lock up behind you," she says.
My eyebrows arch. "What will Mrs. Johnson say?"
She grins. "Let her talk. I don't want to be late for class."
She's down the stairs before I have a word ready, which never happens. I stand in her doorway, listening to her footsteps and grinning at nothing.
I wash the pan, dry it, and figure out where it lives. I fold my jacket over my arm, deciding to leave my shirt behind since it's been drafted into other service. I lock the door behind me and I go down the stairs into full Monday-morning daylight on Main Street.
Mrs. Johnson is watering the flower boxes in front of her shop, two doors down. She takes in the whole picture: Me, seven thirty in the morning, coming down the bookshop stairs in yesterday's jeans with no shirt under my jacket.
"Morning, Mrs. Johnson," I say, and tip an imaginary hat.
"Morning, Finn." She goes back to her flowers, smiling at them like they told her a secret. I have no doubt that by noon the whole town will know about this. I find I don't mind, which a week ago would have required a doctor's note.
In my pocket, the phone buzzes again.
I don't look at it.