Chapter 4 Daisy #2
"You've never had it?"
"I've had satisfaction. Achievement. Victory." He sets his bowl aside, his eyes still on me. "I don't think those are the same thing."
"They're really not."
The snow keeps falling outside, thick and white and silent. The city has disappeared entirely: no lights, no movement, just the two of us in this pocket of candlelit warmth while the world outside holds its breath.
"Teach me," Adam says suddenly.
"Teach you what?"
"Joy. How to recognize it." He's looking at me with an intensity that makes my pulse skip. "You're the expert. You read all those books about happiness and love and feeling things. You know things I don't. Teach me."
"I'm not sure joy can be taught like garlic chopping, Adam."
"Try anyway." His voice is low. "I'm a fast learner."
He's looking at me like I have something he needs.
"Okay," I say quietly. "We'll start small."
"Read to me," Adam says suddenly.
I blink. "What?"
"You said normal humans read books when the power goes out. Read to me."
"You want me to read to you. Out loud. Like you're five."
"I'm not familiar with the practice. I'm willing to be educated."
His eyes are steady on mine, genuinely curious, and my chest cracks, just a little.
"Fine," I say. "But I'm picking the book, and you're not allowed to complain."
I return from the reading room with one of my mother's paperbacks, a romance that I've read so many times the spine is held together with hope and tape. The cover is exactly as terrible as you'd expect, the hero shirtless and brooding, the heroine in a dress that defies physics.
Adam looks at it. "That's the book."
"This is the book."
"Is he supposed to be attractive?" He squints at the cover, genuinely puzzled.
"Extremely."
"He looks like he has indigestion."
"It was the nineties. Everyone on book covers had indigestion." I settle back onto the couch, closer to the candles, and open to chapter one. "Are you ready?"
"I'm skeptical."
"You're going to love it."
"I'm definitely not going to love it."
He doesn't love it. For the first ten pages, he interrupts constantly: questions about the setting, complaints about the hero's decisions, observations about the economic improbability of the heroine's situation.
I answer some and ignore others, pushing through with the practiced determination of someone who has defended romance novels her entire life.
But somewhere around page eleven, the interruptions stop.
I glance up to find him watching me, not the candle, not the window. Me. His expression is unreadable, but there's a focus to his attention that makes my voice falter.
"What?" I ask.
"Nothing." But he doesn't look away. "Keep going."
I keep going. The story unfolds in the warm candlelight: enemies who don't want to want each other, proximity that becomes necessity, the slow erosion of walls built to protect hearts that have already been broken.
It's not my mother's best recommendation, but it's one of her favorites, her blue-ink annotations scattered throughout.
Oh, honey, don't fall for it. He's going to break your heart.
And then, three chapters later: Okay fine, I take it back, he's perfect.
I read until my voice goes rough, until the candles burn down to nubs, until Adam has shifted close enough that I can feel the warmth of him along my side. We're both on the couch now, his arm along the back of it, not quite touching my shoulders. Near. Careful. Like he's not sure of the rules.
"The hero's an idiot," Adam says quietly, during a pause between chapters.
"Is he?"
"He's been in love with her for two hundred pages, and he still hasn't said anything. He's just... waiting. Hoping she'll figure it out."
"He's scared." I close the book, keeping my thumb between the pages. "He's been hurt before, and he doesn't know how to trust that this is real. So he waits because waiting feels safer than risking rejection."
"But while he waits, she doesn't know. She thinks he doesn't care."
"That's the tragedy of it."
Adam is quiet for a long moment. The snow continues to fall outside, the city a soft white blur. The candles flicker.
"Was he right to wait?" he asks.
"No." I don't hesitate. "He was a coward. She deserved to know the truth, even if it was terrifying. Loving someone and letting them think you don't, that's not protection. That's cruelty dressed up in good intentions."
His eyes meet mine in the candlelight. Dark, serious, searching.
"Then I'd better not be," he says. "A coward."
My heart stops. Or it feels like it does, a suspended moment where the world goes silent and all I can hear is the blood rushing in my ears.
"Adam."
"Can I kiss you?" His voice is hoarse. Uncertain in a way I've never heard from him, the confident CEO stripped away until there's just a man asking a question he's not sure he wants the answer to.
"I know this, us, it's an arrangement. A contract.
But I can't stop thinking about—" He breaks off, jaw tight.
"If you don't want this, say so. Nothing has to change. I just need to know if—"
I kiss him.
It's not graceful or practiced. I move too fast, my nose bumping his, and he makes a surprised sound against my mouth that might be relief or might be a different kind of wanting.
His hands come up to frame my face (careful, so careful, like I might shatter) and then he's kissing me back, slow and thorough and devastating.
I take his hand and lead him down the hall into my reading room.
We tumble toward the window seat he built for me, the one with the ridiculous cushions and the view of a city disappearing under snow, and for a second we are all elbows and nerves.
My nose bumps his. His knee finds the wrong angle.
He laughs into my mouth, startled and helpless, and the sound caves my chest in.
"Sorry," he breathes. "I'm… tall. And out of practice. And you kissed me like you meant it and my brain briefly left the building."
"Come back." I tug him down onto the cushions. Candlelight catches the snow behind the glass; flakes smear the night into white static. "Your brain can clock in later. Your mouth has a job."
He kisses me properly then (less bump, more hunger) and his hands hover at my waist like I'm stamped FRAGILE in three languages.
"You can hold me," I tell him. "I'm not going to shatter."
"You might." His palm finally settles, huge and warm. "I might. Daisy, I have wanted to do this since the garlic and I am trying not to handle you like a merger document."
"Handle me like a person who will bite you if you stay gentle too long."
I demonstrate. My teeth catch his lower lip. He makes a sound I have never heard from him (low, surprised, filthy) and the last of his restraint gives. The careful giant disappears. What's left is a man who gathers me into his lap on the window seat like the storm outside is a private audience.
"The book," I murmur when we break for air, clutching the paperback that somehow migrated under my hip. "I lost our place—"
"Mark it with your spine later." He takes it from me, checks the dog-eared page with absurd tenderness, and slides it carefully under the cushion beside us so it won't fall.
"Your mother's. Blue ink. I'm not crushing Annie's paperback while I learn how to touch you.
Even I'm not that much of a villain. Villains don't rescue margins. "
"You're narrating again."
"I'm nervous. Narration is how I survive nerves. Also how I survive wanting you this much without blacking out."
"You're learning fast."
"I'm motivated." His mouth traces my throat. "Teach me joy, I asked. This feels adjacent."
Clothes become a negotiation. My sweater.
His button-down. Candles throw gold across the ink on his forearms as he peels my jeans down with awkward concentration, frowning when the zipper catches, swearing softly when it finally gives.
I laugh. He looks up, mortified and hard in his slacks, and the contrast is so Adam I could cry.
"Don't laugh at the logistics," he mutters. "I'm doing supply-chain problem-solving with your pants."
"Is that what we're calling this?"
"I'm calling this me on my knees in a blackout because my wife tastes better than pasta." He hooks my underwear aside, looks up at me once, and then puts his mouth on me.
The first stroke of his tongue is tentative. The second is not. He settles between my thighs on the window-seat cushions with the same intensity he brings to quarterly projections: focused, relentless, adjusting when I gasp, doubling down when my fingers yank his hair.
"Adam… oh my God—"
"Too much?" He pulls back just enough to ask, his voice wrecked. "Tell me."
"If you stop now—"
He licks a filthy stripe that steals the rest of my sentence. "Noted." His mouth closes on that aching bud and draws, and my heels dig into his shoulders. Snow whispers against the glass. Somewhere a candle pops. "You taste like the months I wasted keeping my distance."
"Don't… don't stop to regret—"
"I'm not regretting. I'm inventorying." Two fingers slide into me while his tongue works, and the dual pressure makes me arch hard enough that the paperback shifts under the cushion. "Tight. Hot. Pulling me in. Daisy, fuck, tell me when you're close so I can watch."
"Watching is creepy."
"I want to see you. Close your eyes if you need to. I'm keeping mine open."
I come apart the first time with snow light on my face and his name cracked open in my throat.
He doesn't stop. He gentles, then builds again, like joy is a skill he's refusing to fail.
The second orgasm hits meaner (legs shaking, laughter mixed with a sob) because this is real, this is actually real, and the man who didn't know where the candles were is eating me out on a window seat like I invented winter.
When he finally lifts his head, his mouth is shiny and his expression is wrecked pride.
"Hi," I pant.