Chapter 16 #2
It started there. Not with a kiss. Not with some sweeping romantic gesture, not with him crossing the kitchen in two strides the way he would have in the old days when wanting her was simple and uncomplicated.
It started with his fingers on hers around a coffee cup, and the jolt that went through her body — familiar and foreign at the same time, like hearing a song she used to love in a language she'd almost forgotten.
She looked up at him. He was close. Close enough to see the pulse in his throat, the fine lines at the corners of his eyes that hadn't been there a year ago.
He smelled like coffee and clean cotton and underneath it, something that was just him — the scent she used to press her face into at night, the scent she'd tried to wash out of her pillowcase those first weeks in Sonoma and couldn't.
"I missed you," she said. It came out rough.
He lifted his hand. Slowly — giving her time to step back, to shake her head, to say not yet. His fingers found her jaw. Just his fingertips, barely touching. The lightest possible contact.
"Every day," he said.
She kissed him.
It wasn't gentle. Three months of anger and grief and stubborn love that refused to die — it all went into the press of her mouth against his, and he made a sound that she felt in her teeth.
His hand slid into her hair, and hers fisted the front of his T-shirt, and for a long, raw moment they just stood there in the kitchen, holding on to each other like people who had been drowning and had finally, finally touched solid ground.
She pulled back. Breathing hard. His forehead was against hers.
"Upstairs," she said.
He didn't ask if she was sure. He knew her well enough — still, after everything — to hear the difference between hesitation and decision. This was a decision.
They went upstairs.
#
The bedroom was the same. She'd half expected him to have changed it — new sheets, new furniture, some symbolic erasure of the marriage he'd wrecked.
But it was the same bed, the same navy duvet, the same heavy curtains she'd picked out from a catalog three years ago.
The room smelled like his soap and the eucalyptus from the tree outside the window.
Her sweater came off first. She pulled it over her head and dropped it on the floor, and his face changed — the careful control he'd been wearing for three months cracking open like ice on a river.
He'd seen her body a thousand times. He knew every mark, every curve, the small scar on her hip from a kitchen accident when she was nineteen.
But he was looking at her now like it was the first time and the last time at once, and the hunger in his face was so raw it made her breath catch.
"Come here," she said.
He crossed the room. His hands went to her waist — tentative at first, then firmer when she didn't pull away. His thumbs traced the ridges of her hips through the denim, and her whole body leaned into the touch, muscle memory overriding three months of distance.
She unbuttoned his shirt. Her fingers were steady but her pulse wasn't. Underneath he was thinner than she remembered — the hollows between his ribs more defined, the flat planes of his stomach sharper. She pressed her palm flat against his chest and felt his heart hammering under her hand.
"Lucian."
"Yeah."
"I need this to be different. You understand that? This isn't — we're not pretending nothing happened."
"I know." His voice was low, rough at the edges. "I'm not pretending."
She unzipped her jeans and stepped out of them, and he pulled his shirt off over his head, and then they were standing in the afternoon light in their underwear like two people who had never done this before — awkward and electric and terrified of getting it wrong.
He kissed her neck. Just below her ear, in the spot he'd always known made her knees soften. She tilted her head back and let him, her fingers digging into his shoulders, and the sound she made was small and involuntary and embarrassing and she didn't care.
His mouth moved down. Along her collarbone, across the top of her chest. He unhooked her bra with one hand — that old familiar ease, his fingers knowing the clasp the way they knew a keyboard — and pulled it away, and then his mouth was on her breast and she was arching into him with a gasp that tore out of her before she could stop it.
She pulled him toward the bed. They fell onto it together, graceless, his weight over her and then shifting as she pushed against his shoulder and rolled them.
She ended up on top, straddling him, her dark hair falling around her face.
She looked down at him — this man, this beautiful, broken, infuriating man — and something cracked open in her chest.
"I love you," she said. "I never stopped. I wanted to. God, I wanted to. But I didn't."
His hands were on her thighs. His eyes were wet again. "I know you didn't."
"Don't make me regret it."
"I won't."
She leaned down and kissed him, and this time it was slower.
Deeper. The kind of kiss that carries the weight of five years — the good ones and the shattered ones, the dinners and the fights, the silence of a mansion that was too big for two people and the silence of a cottage that was just right for one.
His hands slid up her back, tracing her spine, pulling her closer.
He was hard beneath her and she rolled her hips once, deliberately, and his breath shattered against her mouth.
She did it again. The friction was unbearable and perfect and she was already wet, had been since his fingers touched her jaw over the coffee cup, maybe since she'd decided three days ago and her body had known before her mouth did.
He rolled her onto her back. His mouth went to her neck, her chest, her stomach.
He kissed the scar on her hip — the one from nineteen, the one he'd always pressed his thumb against in bed like a touchstone — and tears pricked her eyes.
Not sadness. Something bigger than sadness.
Something that held grief and relief and the terrifying vulnerability of letting someone back inside your walls.
He hooked his fingers into her underwear and pulled them down, and his mouth followed the line of her hip, and then lower.
He knew her. That was the thing that broke her open — he knew her, the rhythms and the angles and the exact pressure that made her thighs clench, because he had spent five years learning this body and the knowledge hadn't gone anywhere.
His tongue found her and she gasped, her hand going to the back of his head, fingers twisting in his hair.
She said his name. Not like a request — like an answer to a question she'd been asking herself for three months. Is this worth it. Is he worth it. Can I survive wanting this.
Yes. Yes. And she was about to find out.
He didn't rush. He worked her with his mouth and his hands and the kind of focused patience that used to make her crazy, and she let the pleasure build without fighting it — her hips lifting, her back arching, her breath coming in short sharp sounds that she pressed into the back of her hand.
When she came it was hard and sudden and it wrecked her, her whole body shaking under his mouth, and the sound that came out of her was half sob and half relief.
He came back up. Kissed her mouth. She tasted herself on his lips and it should have been strange after three months of nothing but it wasn't. It was home.
"Now," she said.
He reached for the nightstand — habit, muscle memory — and she shook her head.
"No. Just you."
This was a choice too.