Chapter Twenty-Nine #2
"I relocated an underused asset." His mouth pulls at one corner, and I take a drink of coffee before admitting, "I had a terrible day yesterday."
The teasing leaves his face. He starts to ask what happened, then stops himself. "Do you want to tell me about it, or do you want me to get you out of your head for a while?"
The question catches me anyway. Months ago he would have guessed, and I would have let him. I set the mug on the nightstand. "Get me out of my head."
His thumb shifts along the edge of the phone. "Okay." He doesn't reach for a solution or ask me to explain the whole day. He waits.
For a moment neither of us moves. Then Sam looks at the shirt again and says, "Open it."
Heat moves through me fast enough that the bad day disappears from the front of my mind. "That sounded suspiciously like an order."
"You asked for a distraction." His voice has gone lower. "If you want something else, tell me."
I slide the first button free without looking away from him. "No. Keep going."
Sam's jaw shifts. I open another button, then another, slow because I can. The shirt falls wider over my shoulders. His gaze follows the movement before returning to my face, and the fact that an ocean is forcing him to use words instead of his hands feels almost unfairly suited to us.
"Take yours off," I tell him.
He does. No joke, no argument. His black T-shirt disappears over his head and lands somewhere beyond the edge of the screen. The tattoos I know so well come into view one section at a time, and my body reacts with enough enthusiasm to make me annoyed at geography all over again.
Sam catches whatever happens on my face. "What do you want, Autumn?"
The borrowed shirt slips off one shoulder as I hold his gaze. "I want you to touch yourself while you watch me."
His breath changes. He does not make me repeat it. One hand disappears below the frame while the other stays wrapped around the phone, and I shift farther down against the pillows so he can see more of me. When my own hand slides beneath the waistband of my sleep shorts, Sam's eyes darken.
"Tell me," he says.
"Tell you what?"
His mouth moves, almost a smile. "You know exactly what."
I do. Heat climbs higher up my face, but I make myself say it. I tell him where I want my hand, how I want him to look at me, what I wish his mouth was doing instead of sitting six time zones away. Every sentence makes my face hotter. Every one makes Sam's breathing rougher.
He gives it back. Not a performance, not a string of lines that could belong to anybody. Sam tells me what he remembers about my body, what he misses, exactly where his hands would be if he were here. When he says he misses the sound I make when I stop trying to stay quiet, my fingers falter.
"That was dirty," I tell him.
"You seem upset."
"Deeply."
His laugh is low and brief, gone almost as soon as I move my hand again.
After that neither of us has much use for jokes.
The screen gives me pieces of him instead of the whole thing, his forearm tightening, his head falling back, the muscles across his stomach going hard when I say his name.
He watches me just as closely. An ocean keeps his hands off me, so I give him every direction, and each time, he waits for it.
By the time the pressure breaks, my free hand is twisted in his shirt beside me and Sam is breathing my name into a dark Chicago bedroom.
I close my eyes through the last pulse of it, then lie there listening to both of us recover through a phone speaker that suddenly sounds much too small for what just happened.
Sam is the first one to speak. "Better distraction?"
I laugh, still breathless. "Your methods are improving." I reach for the coffee, discover it has gone cold and make a face. Sam asks what is wrong, and when I tell him, he says that is what I get for abandoning a perfectly good beverage for international phone sex.
"You participated."
"Enthusiastically."
I pull his shirt closed around me again. The joke could carry us out of the moment if I let it. Instead I look at him on the screen. "I needed that. Not just the sex. The part where you asked and waited."
Sam goes quiet, but he doesn't look away. "I want to know what you want."
The sentence lands harder than I expect. I tell him it was annoyingly good, and his mouth pulls at one corner. "I can make it worse if you need me to."
"Please don't." I smile despite myself, and he does too. Then he tells me he misses me, plain enough that there is nowhere for either of us to hide inside the sentence. I tell him I miss him too.
A few minutes later Sam is falling asleep in Chicago while I am finally getting out of bed in London.
I prop the phone against my coffee mug long enough to find clean clothes, and he keeps his eyes closed while telling me the shirt is still his.
I button it over my tank top before ending the call. "Come get it."
His eyes open. "I plan to."
By the last week of the extension, the remaining tour work starts leaving my hands. Priti sits across from me one afternoon with her laptop open between us while I hand over the final routing. She asks good questions, writes down the answers and catches one logistical issue before I mention it.
When we finish, she closes her laptop. "I've got it from here."
Normally, that sentence would trigger an immediate inventory of everything she might not have considered. Instead, I look at her for a moment.
She waits. I open my mouth, then close it.
Priti smiles. "That looked painful."
"You have no idea."
"I'll call if I need you."
There are four things I remember on the train home that evening. I type the first one into an email, stare at it and hear Priti telling me she's got it.
I delete the draft.
Sam
Colt comes into Vibes alone and stays on the same stool through half a coffee. I can feel him watching me while I work. Normally, Colt will talk through anything. Today he rotates his cup against the bar and lets the silence get irritating enough that I finally look up.
"You've been staring at me for twenty minutes."
His eyebrows rise. "Because you've been weird for a week."
"I need to ask you something."
Colt's expression shifts, but he keeps both hands around his cup. "Then ask."
I look toward the back bar even though there is nothing there that requires my attention.
"I need help picking out a ring for Autumn."
When I look back, Colt is staring at me. His coffee stops halfway to his mouth before he sets it down carefully.
"Okay," he says, dragging the word out just enough to annoy me. "Now we're talking."
"Don't make this a thing."
"You just asked me to help you buy an engagement ring. It is already a thing."
"I haven't asked her yet."
"Thank you for explaining the sequence of events."
I glare at him.
Colt grins and leans both forearms against the bar. "When are you doing it?"
"After the baby is born, when she is here in Chicago."
His amusement disappears beneath something more serious. "Probably wise. Proposals go better with both people present."
Colt sets his coffee down. "When do you want to go?"
I look at him. "You're down to help me?"
"Sam, I would clear my calendar for this. I'm going to enjoy every second of watching you panic over a ring."
"I am reconsidering the offer."
"No, you're not."
Colt is worse in the jewelry store than I expected.
I assumed he'd provide one useful opinion, maybe stop me from buying something Autumn would hate and otherwise mind his own business.
Instead, he has strong feelings about settings, bands, stone height and every other aspect of jewelry design. I forgot he came from money.
The jeweler places one ring on the pad between us, and Colt shakes his head before I even pick it up. "Too much."
"You haven't looked at it."
"I have eyes."
"So do I."
"Then use them."
The jeweler has started looking between us like he's trying to identify the actual customer. I pick up the ring anyway. The stone is large enough that I can imagine Autumn staring at it for ten seconds before asking whether I robbed somebody.
I put it down.
Colt nods. "Good."
"Don't be pleased with yourself."
"I saved your marriage before it started."
"You're becoming unbearable."
The jeweler brings out another tray. We stay long enough that I stop noticing the time.
The ring I keep coming back to isn't extravagant.
An emerald-cut center stone sits inside a halo of diamonds, with smaller diamonds set into the platinum band.
It catches the light without becoming too much, and the low setting won't snag on everything Autumn touches.
I set the ring back on the pad but keep my finger beside it. "I want this one."
The jeweler pauses. "This exact stone?"
"This exact one."
Colt shifts closer and looks down at it. He doesn't make a joke.
After a moment, he nods. "That's her ring."
My chest tightens in a way I resent.
We finish the paperwork, and the box feels heavier than it should in the inside pocket of my jacket when we leave.
Colt waits until we're in the car before getting quiet. I notice because Colt being quiet usually means something unpleasant is about to happen. He stares through the windshield while rubbing his thumb over the side of his coffee cup.
"What are you doing?"
"Trying to decide whether I want to ruin a perfectly good afternoon."
"Then don't."
He ignores that. "I've been waiting a year for you to want something from me."
I lean back against the seat. The box presses against my chest when I move.
Colt turns toward me. "You've shown up for me and Summer more times than I can count.
You showed up when Summer left, when she came back, when I couldn't get my head out of my ass.
You feed everybody, fix everything and carry half the damn building on your back if nobody stops you. But you never ask for shit."
"This is getting dramatic."
"You've asked me for one thing."
I look out the window because he's enjoying this too much.
His voice quiets. "I'm glad you asked me."