16. Delilah
DELILAH
I fall asleep with my phone on my pillow like a teenager.
Kane said goodnight at twelve forty-seven. I checked the timestamp three times. He'd sounded like he didn't want to hang up, dragging the conversation out until we ran out of tiles to talk about, and then sitting in silence for a while before finally saying he'd let me sleep.
Sunday morning I lie in bed and replay it.
The thing that keeps snagging is how reluctant he sounded. Not forced or performing it. Just not ready for the call to end.
I wonder what would have happened if I'd said come upstairs instead of goodnight.
No. I know what would have happened.
That's the whole freaking problem.
I get up and make coffee in the small kitchenette in my suite and try to think about something else. The Fisk lead and the rebuild. The paint samples I have to pick between by Wednesday that all look the exact same shade of purple.
I open my laptop and look at the options again and find I can't concentrate on any of them.
By afternoon I give up pretending.
I text him at four forty-five.
ME: I need to finish our argument from yesterday.
KANE: We finished it.
ME: We finished the phone version. There was more to say.
Three dots blink in and out of existence.
KANE: Is that so.
ME: Come up when you have a minute.
Another pause, longer this time.
KANE: Give me five.
I put my phone down and look around the room, which is neat and quiet and gives me nothing to do with my hands. I straighten the throw on the chair. Move my laptop six inches to the left. Move it back.
The knock comes in four minutes.
Kane's standing in the doorway wearing a gray Henley—soft, close-cut, the sleeves pushed up to his elbows—and dark pants that sit low on his hips.
There is nothing remotely remarkable about any of it, and yet I'm immediately, irrationally furious at how unfair it is that he can look this good doing absolutely nothing.
His hair's still damp at the edges like he just got out of the shower. There's a shadow of stubble along his jaw that wasn't there yesterday afternoon, and I want to be annoyed that he didn't bother dressing up to see me except I know that this is how he looks when he's not performing for anyone.
Somehow, that makes it ten times worse.
"Hey," I say, hoping I don't sound like the dry-mouthed, awkward teenage self I just regressed to.
"Hey." He stays in the doorway. "I'm here to see a girl about an argument."
Despite myself, I laugh. "Come in."
He walks into the suite and stands in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets, watching me.
Okay. So I guess we're doing this the uncomfortable way.
"Yesterday at the bakery," I start, then find myself at a loss for words. "When you… when I…"
"Are you having a stroke?"
"No!" I rack my brain for coherent sentences and realize that I cannot form a single one. "Fuck. This is hard."
"Is that right?"
"Yes. You're—" I gesture wildly. "Distracting."
"How so?" He steps closer, a faint smirk on his lips. "Am I smelling too much of Dior Sauvage?"
I slap him lightly on the arm. "Stop. You know what I mean."
"I'm afraid I don't."
"You're harder to tolerate in person."
His mouth moves. Not quite a smile. "How so?"
"Because you know what looking at me like that does to me." My voice comes out less steady than I'd like. "And you do it anyway."
He doesn't look away. "Is that a complaint?"
"Yes."
"Noted."
I want to go to him. I stay where I am.
"Have you been thinking about me today?" I ask, taking the long way round to fuck-knows-where I want this conversation to go.
"Yes," he answers immediately.
"What were you thinking?"
He mulls it over. "I spent most of the day thinking about kissing you."
The admission sucker-punches me. He delivers it flatly, without any particular drama attached, and I hate that it works on me more than it would if he'd said it differently.
My brain does something embarrassing and thoroughly millennial. Like short-circuits directly into an extremely inappropriate mental slideshow of every single time Kane's kissed me. On the stairs at New Year's. In my mother's bathroom. Against the wall in his kitchen.
That one time in February when he put me on the counter and—
Nope. Not going there.
Except I'm already there. I'm fully standing in the middle of my guest suite having a complete internal meltdown about a man who just admitted he spent his entire day thinking about my mouth.
This is fine. I'm fine. Everything is fine.
Narrator voice: She was not, in fact, fine.
"That's…" I clear my throat. Try again. "That's very honest of you."
"You asked."
"I did." My face is on fire. "I'm regretting that now."
"Are you?"
No. Absolutely not. I want him to keep talking. I want graphic detail. I want a full breakdown of every single thought he had, timestamped and annotated.
What I say instead is, "Maybe."
His mouth curves. "Liar."
Okay, rude. Accurate, but rude.
"Fine," I admit. "I've been thinking about you too."
His eyes grow darker at that. Hungrier.
I don't have time to build a face for my reaction before he closes the distance between us.
He cups the side of my face and kisses me, and I forget entirely that I had a plan.
His mouth is gentle on mine at first. Slow. Testing whether I'll push him away.
I don't.
My hands move up his chest, fingers curling into the soft fabric of his Henley, and he makes a sound low in his throat that goes straight through me. His other hand finds my waist, pulling me closer, and the kiss deepens.
Heat spreads through my body. His tongue sweeps against mine and I remember why I truly asked him up here in the first place.
The world disappears. Everything except the way he tastes and the pressure of his hands and the fact that I've been starving for this without letting myself admit it.
I press closer, wanting more, needing—
Kane pulls back.
Not far. Just enough to break the kiss. His forehead rests against mine and his breathing comes rough and uneven.
"Lilah," he says.
I'm still gripping his shirt. Still trying to remember how words work.
"That wasn't—" He stops. Tries again. "I shouldn't have done that."
My brain slowly comes back online.
"Why not?"
"Because you haven't forgiven me yet."
I know that. God, don't I know.
But I still imagine him here in eight hours, both of us asleep, naked in bed. How easy it would be to let it happen. How much I want it to. How much I always want to close whatever the remaining gap is with him, and how badly that has gone before.
I step back.
He lets me go without any resistance.
"Am I wrong?" he asks, no smugness in it. "Have you forgiven me?"
"No." I'm honest about it. "Does it feel like that to you?"
"Not really. I know you haven't." He looks at me steadily. "But I missed you enough to let myself hope for half a second. That's all that was."
I missed you.
I don't say anything for a moment.
And then the frustration kicks in.
"You know I hate when you do that," I say.
"Do what?"
"Say something like that. The honest, quiet thing that makes me want to tell you it's fine, that I'm not that hurt, that I forgive you.
" I shake my head. "I'm the one you lied to.
I'm the one who got kidnapped because of the thing you built behind my back for twenty years.
And somehow you say I missed you enough to hope and I'm standing here wanting to make you feel better about it. "
He doesn't argue with me. That's the other thing.
"You're right," he says.
"It's infuriating."
"I'm aware."
He moves toward the door, and I watch him do it, and my hand reaches out and catches his wrist before I make a conscious decision to stop him.
He goes still.
"I want you to stay," I say.
He turns back, careful but open.
"And I'm scared of what I'll forgive if you do." I let go of his wrist. "So I need you to go."
Something moves across his face. He nods once.
"Okay," he says.
He doesn't try to talk me out of it. Doesn't make it complicated. Just picks up the thread of what I actually asked him to do and does it, and then he's out the door and it clicks shut behind him and I'm alone.
I sit down on the edge of the chair.
I'm upset.
I know I asked him to leave. I know it was the right thing to do. If he'd stayed, I would have let things go further, and further would have felt good for as long as it took for me to remember why I had all these rules in the first place.
But I'm still upset that he did it.
Which is completely ridiculous. He respected what I said. He didn't push or negotiate or find a reason to linger in the doorway. He just left.
If he'd stayed, I would have been furious.
But part of me wanted him to stay anyway.
I sit with that for a while, the sky darkening outside my window, paint samples forgotten.