Chapter 9
Chip
The appointment with Dr. Nazari ran exactly twenty-three minutes, which was four minutes longer than my last visit and eight minutes longer than I’d hoped.
He had me hold a clipboard and bend my knee through a range of motion.
He pushed once, hard, with both thumbs. He frowned at the chart. He frowned at the knee. He smiled.
“You can drop the brace by Friday,” he said. “Light skating Saturday if it feels good. Practice on contact next Tuesday. We’ll see you in three weeks unless something hurts in the meantime.”
From the parking lot, I called Coach Ronan, the trainer, and Cap in the order I was supposed to. I didn’t call my brother because he had Lena to look after, so I texted instead.
Chip: Knee cleared. Friday, brace off. Saturday, light skating.
Tonight was date night at Dane’s place. I drove there with the radio off because I didn’t want to be distracted.
Sable sat in the passenger seat, her seat belt harness on, staring out the window.
I pulled onto his road at 5:03, eight minutes earlier than I’d planned because I’d left home earlier than I’d planned.
I sat in the car and did the breathing exercise the team counselor had taught me, and Sable put her chin on my forearm and waited.
“Okay,” I said to her. “Okay.”
She huffed at me, and we got out of the car. If I didn’t go in now, then I wouldn’t go at all. His front door opened before I’d reached the gate, and I saw he was in a soft black T-shirt and jeans, and no shoes.
“I’m glad you’re early,” he said, and I focused on the dish towel slung over his shoulder.
“Only by eight minutes.”
“Come in.”
I went in, and he kissed me gently before closing the door.
The hallway smelled like cumin, chili pepper, onions, and something sweeter that I identified after two seconds as butter.
I noticed a Yankees magnet on the inside of the front door and one coat hanging from a coat rack.
On the wall was a framed photo of a younger Dane in a Little League uniform standing next to a man with the same jaw as Dane.
I stood still and looked at it for longer than I had meant to.
“My dad,” Dane said behind me.
“You look like him.”
“You can keep your shoes on if you want. I’m not religious about it.”
“It’s okay,” I said, and sat on the bench in the hallway to carefully unlace both shoes, lining them up parallel under the bench. Sable sat at my knee. Dane crouched in front of her and offered her the back of his hand. She bumped him with her nose and then leaned her shoulder against his shin.
“You hungry?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Good. Come see my famous chili. Oh, and Eli sent cheesecake.”
He served the chili in two heavy ceramic bowls with a slice of cornbread on each plate and poured us water. Then he sat across from me at his small round table with two chairs and a third pushed against the wall, and we ate.
He held my hand across the table for the second half of the meal. I ate one-handed until it was time for cheesecake, and he handed me a fork for my slice.
“You know, I keep thinking about how much I like you,” he said, his eyes on mine.
“I like you too,” I said with a smile.
“You want to go sit on the couch?”
“Dishes and then couch?” I asked hopefully because an untidy kitchen meant a messy mind for me.
“Of course.”
Dishes took a while. I oversaw the washing, and since I’m thorough, it wasn’t quick.
We chatted on and off about me being cleared to get back on the ice and about Dane’s work.
It was the easiest thirty minutes ever. When we went to sit on the dark brown leather couch, we didn’t touch at first. Sable circled and lay down on the rug in front of the fireplace.
Dane turned off the kitchen light, and the lamp by the couch was warm and steady.
There was no buzz. There was no flicker.
“Can I sit closer?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He moved closer. His thigh was against my thigh. He laid his arm along the back of the couch behind me without putting it on me yet.
“Can I put my arm around you?” he said.
“Yes.”
He put his arm around me. I let my head tip a little, so it landed on his warm shoulder. His shirt smelled of laundry detergent and a very faint cologne that he didn’t wear at the station.
Then he said, “Hi,” against the top of my head.
“Hi.”
“Can I kiss you?”
I wanted a kiss. “Yes.”
He turned his head, and I turned mine, and he kissed me.
The first one was soft and closed-mouth—a hello kiss—I kissed him back the same way.
The second one, he tilted his head a little, as if asking with the angle of his mouth.
I opened mine, and the kiss got longer and warmer and slower.
I lost count of the seconds for the first time since the parking lot at Strike Zone.
He pulled back half an inch.
“Still good?”
“Still good.”
“Tell me if anything is too much.”
“I will.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
He kissed me again. His hand, the rough one, came up to the side of my jaw. He pulled back a second time about a minute in.
“Can I take this off?” he asked as he gently tugged on the hem of my gray flannel overshirt. The one I’d put on over a plain white T-shirt because the gray flannel was a Tuesday shirt and today was a Tuesday and I wanted to keep one thing on schedule.
“Yes.”
He took it off and folded it. He put it on the arm of the couch and kissed me again, then moved to my neck. His teeth grazed my pulse point, and I made a sound I had never heard myself make before, a small one, in the back of my throat.
His hand on my jaw tightened a fraction, and he murmured, “Yeah?” against my skin. I said, “Yeah,” even though I didn’t know exactly what I was saying yes to, except that I was saying yes to him.
An interval of time passed that I didn’t measure because, for the first time in possibly my entire life, I wasn’t measuring it.
He was half over me on the couch. My back was against the cushion.
His weight was along my left side, and his forearm was under my shoulder, so I wasn’t being pinned, just held.
His other hand was on my hip, low, fingertips resting just above the waistband of my jeans.
He hadn’t moved that hand for at least a minute. Asking.
I put my hand over his hand and pressed it down.
“Yeah?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Tell me if—”
“I will.”
He kissed me again, and I rolled my hips up. Once. Just to find out.
He inhaled sharply against my mouth. “Chip.”
“Yes.”
“You good?”
“I’m… I want… can we keep… ” The sentence wouldn’t finish. I pulled back half an inch and looked at him. “Can we keep going like this without taking my pants off? I’m not ready to… y’know. I mean, I want to do this, but I don’t want to do more than this. Tonight.”
“Yeah, Chip. Yeah, that’s good. That’s perfect.
Same. I’m the same.” He smiled against my mouth and shifted, his hips came down against mine, slow.
The friction of denim on denim, the heat through both layers, and the deliberate roll of his pelvis were sensations that blew my control to nothing. He did it again.
My hand went to his lower back, and I pulled him closer. He made a sound, a low one, and pressed his forehead against mine, rolling his hips again, slow, slow, slow. I started moving with him. Apparently, it was a thing my body knew how to do without having to read a manual on it.
“Look at me,” he said.
I looked at him. “What?”
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
“This is everything,” he whispered. His hand on my hip moved up under my T-shirt to the bare skin at the small of my back. I jolted a little because I hadn’t been ready for the temperature differential, and he stopped immediately.
“Too much?”
“No. Just… different. Keep… please… ”
“Yeah.”
He kept going. His hand on my back, hot.
His hips rolling against mine in a rhythm we had apparently negotiated without speaking.
The denim was rough. The heat under it wasn’t.
I could feel him through the fabric. For half a second, I was aware in a clinical-detached-narrator way that the hardness against me was Dane Rourke’s erection and that I had Dane Rourke’s erection pressed against me, and then I pulled him closer and shut my eyes.
“Stay with me,” he said.
“I’m here.”
“Chip.”
“Yeah.”
“Open your eyes.”
I opened them. He had stopped moving. His face was very close. His hand on my back was still.
“I want you to know it’s me,” he said. “I want you to know who you’re with.”
“I know who I’m with.” My voice came out rough in a way I hadn’t known it could come out. “Dane. Dane Rourke. Station Eight. Pretty blue eyes.”
He smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s me.”
“Please move,” I said.
He moved.
He pressed his forehead harder against mine when I made the noise I made.
His breath stuttered against my mouth. His hand at my back fisted briefly in my T-shirt as my orgasm hit me.
Dane followed me over and then held very still on top of me while I came down.
He didn’t laugh or make a joke about it.
I dragged him down with my hand at his lower back, so he wasn’t holding any of his own weight up. He buried his face in the side of my neck. He was warm and shaking just slightly, his breath was hot against my collarbone. His hand at my back never moved.
I put my other hand in his hair.
He let me.
We stayed like that for a long time.
He moved off me eventually because he had to, though I made a small noise of protest. “Two seconds, hang on.”
He went to the kitchen and returned with a damp towel and a dry one, then handed me both without saying anything, turning his back to give me privacy in his own living room.
I cleaned up, handed the towels back, and fretted a little over him touching the things, but surprisingly, I got over it.
When he came back and sat down beside me again, I lay down with my head on his chest, and his arm came around me and stayed.
“Are you okay?” he said.
“God, yes.”
He pressed a kiss to my hair. “Pulse?” he said after a minute.
“Don’t know. Haven’t checked.”
“Want to?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
I listened to his heartbeat instead of mine. It was slow and steady as he stroked my hair.
I lay there for a while. Sable came over and put her chin on the couch beside my hip and stayed.
He scratched behind her ears with his free hand.
She closed her eyes. The lamp was warm. The cheesecake dish was still on the coffee table.
There was a stain on his ceiling near the corner that I hadn’t seen before because I hadn’t been horizontal in this room before.
The stain was small and old and well-painted over.
“What are you thinking about?” he said.
“Your ceiling has a leak history at the southwest corner. Probably an old roof valley issue. Repaired, but visible if the angle is right.”
He laughed for a long time. I listened to it through his chest. “Of course,” he said. “Of course you are.”
“And you.”
“What about me?”
“I’m thinking about you, also.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“What about me?”
“I like you a lot. I mean a lot. I can’t put it into words, and it might take a few weeks. But I wanted you to know I was working on it.”
He was quiet for a count of nine, then he said, “I’m working on things too.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
It was 9:42 when I sat up. I’d half-fallen asleep on him. We ate chili, and I hadn’t brushed my teeth in eleven hours.
“I love cuddling you, but I should go,” I said on autopilot. “Unless I can stay and cuddle.” It felt vital for him to know that I wanted to stay. “Only I don’t have a toothbrush.” That was an important thing, and I couldn’t stay if I didn’t have the chance to brush my teeth.
“I have a spare.”
“And I can stay in your bed after I’ve checked it?”
“Always.”
“I know it’s weird to have to check it, but sometimes—”
He stopped me with a kiss. “Nothing you do or say is weird.”
I regarded him skeptically. “I know I’m weird. The ’tism is strong in me.”
“Weird by whose standards? Not mine. I like you just the way you are, stats and all.”
He gave me a clean T-shirt that was too big at the shoulders.
I checked the bed. It wasn’t the nest of covers I had at home, but if I tucked in the blanket from the end of the bed around me, I could make my own weighted cover.
He gave me a new toothbrush from a packet of three he had under the sink.
He let me brush my teeth alone in his bathroom because I needed two minutes to pull myself together, and he didn’t make a thing of it.
When I came out, the bedroom was dim and the window was cracked.
He was already in bed on his back, on the side closer to the door, wearing a T-shirt and pajama pants, waiting.
“This side okay?” he said, patting the empty side.
“Yes.”
Sable settled on the rug at the foot of the bed. “She’s good here,” I said as I got in. He held up his arm. I lay down and put my head on his shoulder, and he pulled me into him.
The room was quiet. The window let in the sound of one car going past on Park Avenue and a far-off siren that wasn’t for him because he wasn’t on duty tonight.
The sheets smelled clean. His skin smelled of him.
I shifted a bit to tuck in the blanket on one side, and when he drew me closer again, I immediately relaxed.
He breathed out, long, against the top of my head, and settled, and his breathing went slow and even after a while. Sable sighed in her dog way, and I burrowed into his arms and closed my eyes.
I felt calm and settled and I liked this.
No.
I loved this.