1. The Braise #4
"Madeline." I sighed, knowing exactly what she meant and having no idea how to explain it to her without explaining everything else too. "I don't want to fight with you."
"We don't fight, though. That's the problem.
" Her voice had that edge back in it, some of the vulnerability packed away and traded for something she could actually swing.
"You don't fight, you don't fuss, you don't slip.
You're cool and calm and collected and a perfect gentleman who won't fuck me even though your dick is hard as my friend Elizabeth's wig. "
The laugh got out before I could do a thing about it. That was one of the things I had to be mindful with when it came to this woman. If I wasn’t careful, Madeline DuBois was gon’ laugh me right out my drawers on this trip.
"What's that they say," I asked, grabbing at the joke like a man reaching for anything that would steer this conversation somewhere she couldn't dig up ghosts, "hard wig, soft life?"
"What do you know about that?" She eyed me sideways.
"I run a kitchen full of women who forget I'm there the minute the tickets slow down. I get updates on everybody's love life whether I put in a request or not. I get all the tea, as Bloom says."
She laughed so hard, her head tipped back, and for a second neither one of us reached for the thing sitting underneath the joke, the door she'd named, the something she could feel and couldn't touch.
Her laugh began to fade, but she couldn’t hide her smile. "I just want you to want me the way I want you, and it feels like you do. But then some days I reach for you and you're somewhere I can't get to.”
I looked at Madeline and did the math any honest man would do.
Half the county would've traded places with me before I finished the thought.
A coveted woman, sitting on my lap in my pool in June sun, funny enough to keep up, extremely kind, raised by people who raised her right.
Best of all, no games in her. Everything about her was exactly what it looked like, which after the life I'd had was nearly exotic.
Any reasonable man builds something with this woman and thanks whatever God he prays to. Hurting her or make her feel less than the woman she was, was the last thing I wanted. I needed to be clear about that.
"You think slow means cold. In my kitchen, slow is what we do to the things that matter.
Anything worth serving, you don't rush it, you don't crank the heat because you're hungry, you let it become what it's becoming.
The fast stuff?" I shook my head. "That's for people I don't plan on remembering.
I've had plenty of fast, Madeline. I brought you here for the week I’ve never given to anyone else.
Ask yourself which one that sounds like. "
Her eyes searched mine, and then she squinted in confusion.
"So I'm a braise," she said. Dry, but the corner of her mouth had already surrendered.
"Short ribs," I said. "Top of the menu. Worth every hour."
She laughed despite herself and swatted water at my chest. I caught her hand and kissed the inside of her wrist, right where her pulse was still arguing.
"Jesus, you're so handsome," she said, and the way she looked at me wasn't the practiced kind of admiration I'd gotten used to fielding from women who wanted to be seen wanting me.
This was something she couldn't have staged if she tried, the look of a woman who'd meant to keep her guard up and lost track of it somewhere in my eyes without noticing.
And something in me realized, that my guard was falling too.
I pulled her back down onto me and she came with a squeal that turned into a moan fast, because I kissed her the way I hadn't let myself kiss her yet.
One hand spread at the small of her back and the other in the wet hair at her nape.
The kiss was slow, deep and thorough. I didn't stop until I felt the last of the morning's argument leave her body.
Her shoulders came down, her weight settled into me like something finally taken off the heat. She made a sound against my mouth that no man forgets, and I held her there and kept on, past the point of making a point, into territory that was starting to feel like the truth, because it could be.
A man could build a life out of mornings like this one.
My teenage crush in my arms in the water at the house my grandfather built.
I would be satisfied with a life like this.
This was generous, more than generous, more than I had any right to expect after everything I'd spent the last four months telling myself I didn't deserve to want.
She pulled back first, dazed, pupils gone wide under the brim of her hat.
"Okay," she whispered. "Okay…slow…I can do slow, if slow comes with that."
"Told you," I said. "Worth every hour."
She settled against my chest and I wrapped her in as the morning let us both pretend the question had been answered instead of seasoned and put back on the flame. She believed it because she wanted to. I believed it because I needed to.
We were both wrong.