58. Connaught On Mayfair
Connaught On Mayfair
Rafe
The Connaught on Mayfair is not my scene.
The doorman’s overly polite, the marble gleams, it’s the kind of place where you feel like you should apologize for simply breathing. But it’s one night, and I’ve got money I never get to use for anything that isn’t for travel, instruments or responsible investments. So why not?
Why not be ridiculous, just once, for her?
The elevator takes us up, through floors I’ll never stay on again. I can feel her beside me, her hand in mine, the tremor of excitement she’s trying to hide. She’s been asking where we’re going since dinner, but I wanted to see her face when it happens, the exact moment the door opens.
It does, and I get what I paid for. She steps out and freezes.
The apartment stretches out in gold and glass, the city spilling out beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows like it’s bowing to her.
The chandelier above us looks like something stolen from heaven.
There’s a terrace, a marble bath the size of a swimming pool, a bed that looks like a dream I’m not supposed to have.
She just stands there, eyes wide, lips parted. The sound she makes isn’t even a word, just breath.
“Rafe,” she manages finally. “You didn’t.”
I lean on the doorframe, trying to play it cool even as my chest tightens. “I did.”
Her laugh breaks the silence. She spins once in the middle of the room, the city light catching her hair. “You’re certifiable.”
“Accurate.”
“You’re not the flashy type,” she says, a tease wrapped in wonder.
“I’m not.” I push my hands into my pockets. “But I wanted to see that look on your face.”
She stops spinning, stares at me like she’s not sure what to do with the words. “So you blew a fortune for that?”
“Worth every pound.”
She walks toward the window, the glow from the skyline cutting across her shoulders. “You know,” she says softly, “for someone who hides in cabins and eats at Waffle Houses, you’re alarmingly good at this whole romantic-grand-gesture thing.”
I shrug, coming up behind her. “Guess I’m a fast learner.”
When she turns, I can see the city in her eyes, lights and movement all reflected back at me through her. I've never seen how truly breathtaking it is, until now. My hand finds her cheek. “You like it?”
“I love it,” she whispers. “But you’re what makes it feel expensive. Someone that everyone else wants but only I get to hold.”
Something in me goes very still. For a second, all I can do is look at her, brush my thumb along her jaw.
“Good,” I murmur. “Because I don’t give a fuck about the room, just that you're in it.”
Her breath catches. The city is laid out below us, the glass holding back the world and I let myself believe that twenty-four hours might actually be enough.
I sink into the sofa, the kind that's worth more than my first car, probably the second too. Kasia curls up beside me, her head finding my lap, hair spilling across my legs like silk. In here it’s peaceful, soft lamplight, distant hush of air vents, her breath against my thigh.
I run my fingers through her hair tracing every strand, following the rivers it creates on my body.
We talk for a while, nothing intense. Just rambling sentences, memories, little jokes that belong only to us. Then the words run out and there’s just this stillness. The kind that’s too full to move.
I close my eyes, try to burn it into my mind, the weight of her against me, the scent of her perfume, the way the world stops taking pieces of me when she’s here.
If I can hold it long enough, maybe it’ll hurt less when I take her to the airport.
Gatwick, Heathrow—I can’t even remember which.
I don’t want to. I don’t want her to leave.
It hits me then, how this, her, here, is the best and worst idea I’ve ever had.
How to torture myself in the most perfectly awful way.
She stirs, tilts her head to look up at me. “What are you thinking?”
I look down, caught between truth and silence. “That I don’t want you to go.”
She sighs, lifting a hand to my face. Her thumb brushes the corner of my mouth. She studies me for a moment.
“I prefer the cabin,” she says. “Not because this isn’t gorgeous, it is. But look?” Her eyes drift around the room, then back to me. “We’re doing the same thing. A couch is a couch anywhere.”
I laugh. “Fair point.”
“You're more comfortable there, more yourself. I like it when you can just breathe and be,” she says. “That makes me happier than any chandelier or marble floor.”
I watch her, let the silence settle between us. The words sit in my throat. I want to tell her I love her, and I do. But what I really want to say is thank you for never wanting what I'm afraid everyone else does. For just being here, for treating me like I'm enough.
“I’m struggling for words,” I say finally. “That’s a hard-won honor for an obscene poet.”
She laughs softly, eyes crinkling at the corners. I don’t say anything else. Just let my fingers trace her temple, her jaw, the curve of her shoulder. She looks up at me, eyes calm, knowing. In the long stretch of that gaze, I realize I don’t have to say it.
She already understands.
She breaks the silence with a grin. “Well, at least this place has shampoo,” she says. “Unlike the cabin. I desperately need some after the flight and walking half of London.”
She stands, stretching, and the second she leaves my lap, something inside me dims like a neon sign flickering off.
It sends a jolt of panic through me. How attached she makes me.
How I wrote about this kind of thing for years without ever really feeling it until now.
I thought I understood love. But I didn’t. Now I do and it terrifies me.
What if she can’t handle it? What if I fuck it up?
What if anything ever happens to her? Maybe you only know you’re really in love when you start dreading the possibilities you can’t control…
and worse, the ones you can. Because how can I be trusted with something as delicate as her heart, in my hands?
She sees it. Every bit of it across my face, so she kisses it away. Doesn’t say a word. Just leans in and lets her mouth find mine, grounding me before I fall too far into my own head.
Then she holds out her hand. “Since the bathroom is the size of my whole house,” she says, a teasing light in her eyes, “and our time’s limited, I guess there’s plenty of room for you to join me?”
I look at her hand, the gleam of invitation there, and before I take it, I pull my shirt over my head and toss it onto the ridiculously reflective floor.
She laughs, bright, alive and I scoop her up, pressing my mouth to her ear. “You couldn’t have kept me away,” I growl softly.
Her laughter shivers through me, her back against my chest, the sound reverberating through me like the low hum of a stage before the lights come up. I press a kiss to her shoulder that evolves into a bite, just enough to make her gasp.
“Rafe,” she says, breathless, half laughing, “I do need a shower before I’m used as a food source.”
I laugh against her skin, hands tightening around her waist, and think there’s no universe where I ever let her go.
I thought this would turn into something wild, but it doesn’t.
Neither of us moves that way. We just fall into the rhythm of helping each other, soap, shampoo, the gentle, practical intimacy of it.
Her hands slide over my shoulders, mine over her back, the water running warm and constant between us.
She feels like clay under the wheel, shaped by touch and care.
I once did a charity shoot at a pottery studio, all cameras and mud and pretending to understand metaphor.
But the real thing is this: the weight of her under my hands, every curve, every line, is something I could never have sculpted from imagination alone.
We touch, and touch again. There are kisses, soft, grateful, full of the kind of longing that lives closer to prayer than hunger but it never tips into anything else. The world’s too still for that, too holy in its smallness between us.
After a while, I lean back against the tiled wall and just watch her.
The water sheets over her shoulders, flickers through her hair like light over river stones.
It’s hypnotic, unbearable. Dawn’s coming; I can feel it somewhere deep in my chest. There’s nothing I can do about it.
If I could, I’d run fast enough to turn the world backwards, stop the sun, steal another hour.
Instead, I stand there, in awe of her. The way she tilts her head under the stream, the curve of her throat, the little smile she wears when she thinks I’m not looking.
Then she tosses her hair back, eyes catching mine through the steam.
She sees how far I’ve gone, how lost I am, and she closes the space between us.
When she presses into me, I breathe her name.
The water hits our skin, steady as a heartbeat.
I hold her close, kiss her wet lips, and for a moment it feels like creation, the kind of beauty no amount of talent could ever make, only find.
We curl up under the rich linen, skin to skin, the city stretching out beyond the glass like it’s standing guard.
Kasia’s back fits perfectly against me, her body warm and clean from the shower.
I can feel everything, every deepening of her breath, every brush of her hair against my chin and it’s torture in the sweetest way.
The rest of my body longs for rest but certain parts are clearly waking up.
She must feel it too because she laughs, low and drowsy. “You know that’s not very subtle,” she murmurs.
“Try being in my shoes,” I mutter, voice rough. “Around you all the time. Naked no less.”
She laughs again, turning her head just enough for me to see the curve of her smile. “I am in your shoes. Just in reverse.”
It takes me a second to realize what she means. Then I go still, a little embarrassed and undone. The thought had never even crossed my mind, that she might be just as lost in it, just as wrecked. The symmetry of us. She hides it better, that’s all.
God, she makes me feel like a teenager again.
Not Obelus, not the version of myself who knows exactly how to tilt my head, how to move my hands on the mic stand to make the crowd lose their minds.
Just me, awkward and stunned, still trying to fathom that she’s real.
Maybe that’s what love is supposed to feel like.
When the scales finally balance. When you can stop performing.
I glide my hand down the dip of her hip, trace the soft line of her waist. She sighs, arching just slightly, and I lean forward to press my lips to her shoulder.
Then her spine. Then lower, slow, reverent until I reach the small cove at the center of her back.
She shivers when I kiss it, the sound barely a breath.
I pull her back against me, holding her tight.
We both sigh, almost in unison. The want between us is a live wire but neither of us moves to cross it.
There’s a shared fear, unspoken but understood: that if we give in, the night will slip away even faster.
That maybe if we wait, if we just feel this ache a little longer, we can stretch time itself. The words fill my head.
A kiss against flesh, my name on your breath,
My world is sleeping under London’s chest.
We bend to desire, hidden by design,
Every heartbeat asking, will you be mine?
Normally, I’d grab my phone, scribble it down, chase the melody before it fades. But not tonight. I can’t move. I won’t. I just hold her tighter, pray my memory is good enough to keep it.
I press a kiss to her into the curve of her neck and feel her start to drift, her breathing evening out.
She must be exhausted, travel, the day, the flight, all of it.
Guilt flickers through me for putting her body through this whirlwind, for being selfish enough to want her here just to fill my own emptiness.
But I can’t regret it. Not when she’s this soft, this still, melting into me like something I might’ve dreamed into being.
Her muscles ease one by one, the tension leaving her completely.
I try to stay awake, to hold her in the moment a little longer, to feel the weight of her against my chest. But eventually, the pull wins.
The dark comes and as I fall, it feels like being dragged from a blooming spring back into the underworld, where the air is frigid, barren, and she’s out of reach.