21. Karissa
Chapter twenty-one
Karissa
The thing about Noah Easton is that he doesn't know how to do nothing.
I figure this out on a Tuesday.
He shows up at the bakery at two in the afternoon. That gray-blue jacket, no tie, looking like he rerouted his entire day and is pretending he didn't. He orders a coffee. Sits at the counter. Opens his phone, closes it. Opens it again.
"You're going to break that screen," I say.
He sets it face-down. "I'm fine."
"You look like a man who's never had an unscheduled hour in his life."
A pause. Then, low: "That's not inaccurate."
I refill his cup without being asked. He watches me do it.
Neither of us mentions the other night. Or the morning. Or the fact that this is the third time this week he's been here for no reason that fits neatly into an explanation.
We don't need to.
It starts the way most things between us start. Sideways.
Theo has a half-day. He blows through the bakery at noon, grabs a brownie without asking, and announces that there's a street fair on Atlantic that he and Eric are going to, and that Karissa should come because she looks like she needs sunlight.
"I get sunlight," I say.
"From the walk between Noah's and this building. That doesn't count."
Noah, who has been sitting at the counter for forty minutes, glances up from his phone.
Theo points at him. "You too. You look like a person who works too much."
"Theo—"
"I'm not wrong." He looks at Noah, completely unimpressed by net worth or tailoring. "When's the last time you did something that wasn't for a reason?"
Noah considers this like it's a legitimate question. Which, coming from Theo, it is.
"Define reason," Noah says.
Theo grins. "That's a no." He grabs his jacket. "Atlantic Avenue, two o'clock. Don't be weird about it."
He's gone before either of us can respond.
I look at Noah. Noah looks at me.
"You don't have to—" I start.
"I'll come," he says.
***
Atlantic Avenue in March is a particular kind of chaos.
Food vendors just back open after the winter, a live band doing something with steel drums that has no right to be this good on a day this cold, kids in jackets they'll shed by four o'clock, a stand selling hot sauce with names that are either funny or threatening depending on your mood.
The air still has an edge to it, but everyone's out anyway, like the whole block agreed to pretend it's warmer than it is.
Noah stands in the middle of it like a man who has landed on a foreign planet and is finding, against all expectations, that he likes the gravity.
"You've never been to a street fair," I say. It's not a question.
"I've attended outdoor fundraisers."
"That's not the same."
"No," he agrees. "It's not."
Theo disappears with Eric within approximately four minutes, which is fine. This is normal Theo behavior. He surfaces periodically to show us things. A vendor selling custom sneaker laces, a guy doing origami cranes. Then he disappears again.
Noah and I walk.
Not for the arrangement. Not for cameras. There are none here, no press, no board members, no Diane. Just sidewalk and crowd noise and the smell of kettle corn and whatever he's wearing that I've been trying not to think about for three weeks.
"Pick something," I say, stopping in front of a food cart.
He looks at the menu. "What do you recommend?"
"That's not how this works. You pick."
He studies the options with the same focus he gives a balance sheet. I don't point this out.
"The empanadas," he says finally.
"Good choice."
We eat standing up. He doesn't seem to know what to do about that. No table, no service, paper plate, elbows in the crowd. He figures it out. I enjoy watching him figure it out.
"You're staring," he says, not looking at me.
"You're interesting when you're uncomfortable."
"I'm not uncomfortable."
"You held that empanada like it might have terms and conditions."
He looks at me then. And something happens. Something shifts in his face, a crack in the precision, and he laughs.
Not a polite sound. Not controlled. An actual laugh, low and surprised, like it got out before he could stop it.
I feel it everywhere.
The band switches to something slower and Theo reappears to announce he and Eric are staying for another hour, so we don't need to wait. He says this with a completely straight face and zero subtlety.
Noah and I keep walking.
The crowd thins toward the end of the block. We end up at a low concrete wall near the edge of a small park, and I sit on it, and after a moment Noah sits next to me.
Close. Not arrangement-close. Just close.
"Can I ask you something?" I say.
"You're going to regardless."
"Before the arrangement." I watch a kid chase a dog across the grass. "What did your Tuesdays look like?"
He thinks about it. "Gym at five, calls by six-thirty. Meetings. Market analysis. A dinner most nights."
"And you liked it?"
"It was effective."
"That's not what I asked."
A beat. The band is still audible from two blocks away, a soft pulse under the traffic.
"I don't know," he says. "I stopped asking."
I look at him. He's watching the park, jaw set, that particular stillness he uses when something is closer to the surface than he wants it.
"What happened today?" I ask. "When you came in. You looked like you needed somewhere to be."
"I had a call cancel."
"And you came to the bakery."
He doesn't answer.
"Noah."
"Yes," he says, quiet. "I came to the bakery."
The admission sits between us and neither of us moves away from it.
We walk back as the sun gets low and the vendors start packing up. Theo texts that he's already home and added the grocery list to the fridge app because he used the last of the peanut butter, which means he's fine and I don't need to worry, which is its own kind of relief.
It also means my apartment is not an option tonight, and some part of me has already registered that before I let myself think about why.
Noah walks me toward my block. He doesn't say he's walking me home. He just does.
At the corner before my street, I stop.
"Theo's home," I say. Just that. Like it explains something. It does.
Noah looks at me for a long moment. "My apartment isn't far."
"I know it isn't."
Neither of us moves for a second. Then he holds out his hand, not asking exactly, and I take it.
We don't talk much on the walk. There isn't anything that needs saying yet. The city goes quiet around us in the particular way it does right before full dark, streetlights coming on one block at a time.
His building doorman nods like this is nothing new. Maybe it isn't, to him. It is to me.
Inside, the door closes and the city noise cuts off completely, and it's just the two of us in a room that smells like him.
He watches me look around like it's the first time. Which it isn't, but it feels like it.
"Karissa."
"Don't make it complicated," I say quietly.
"I'm not."
He reaches up and tucks a loose strand of hair behind my ear. Unhurried. Careful. His thumb traces the edge of my jaw and stays there.
I close the distance myself.
The kiss starts soft, the kind that asks instead of assumes. I answer it. My hand finds the front of his jacket and he steps closer, his palm flat against my jaw.
His jacket comes off first, then mine, a trail from the doorway toward the rest of the apartment that neither of us bothers to be careful about. He kisses me.
He walks me backward toward the bedroom without breaking the kiss, one hand splayed warm at the base of my spine, the other dragging the zipper at my side down slow enough that I feel every tooth of it give.
"You're deliberate," I say against his mouth.
"You noticed."
"You're deliberate about everything."
"Only the things worth getting right."
My dress pools at my feet. His shirt goes next, and I finally get my hands on him.
The flat plane of his chest, the heat coming off his skin, the muscle that shifts under my palms when I drag them down.
He lets me look. Lets me touch. Stands there and takes it with his jaw tight and his eyes gone dark, and knowing I'm the reason undoes something low in me.
Then he stops letting me lead.
He lays me back on the bed and follows me down, mouth moving from my throat to my collarbone to the curve of my breast, thorough, patient, like he means to use every minute of the night.
His tongue drags over me and I arch off the sheets.
His hand slides down my stomach, lower, and when he touches me exactly where I want him, the sound I make isn't one I bother to hold back.
"Noah."
"I know." His voice has dropped, rough at the edges. "I've got you."
He works me open with those same certain fingers, patient and unrelenting, reading every hitch of my breath and answering it, until I'm gripping his shoulder and his name is the only word I have left.
He watches my face the whole time. That's the part that gets me. He wants to see what he does to me.
"Please." I don't mind being the one asking. Not tonight.
The last of what we're wearing ends up somewhere neither of us tracks. He settles between my thighs and pauses there, forehead to mine, both of us breathing hard in the space before.
Then he pushes into me, slow, all the way, and the stretch of it pulls a sound out of me I feel more than hear.
He stills. Lets me adjust. Kisses the corner of my jaw.
"Okay?"
"Don't you dare get careful now."
I feel him smile against my skin. Then he starts to move, and neither of us is smiling anymore.
No wound is driving this. Nothing to prove, nothing to survive.
Just his hands, unhurried and certain, and mine learning the same thing about him.
He sets the rhythm deep and steady and stays there, controlled even now, working me higher with every stroke while I come apart under him by degrees.
My nails find his back. His breath goes ragged against my ear.
Still he doesn't rush it. He wants to feel me get there first.
"Let go," he says, low. "I've got you."
I do. It breaks over me hard, my whole body drawing tight around him, his name coming out of me in pieces.
He works me through all of it, watching, and only when I'm wrung out does he let himself follow, burying a low sound against my throat and holding deep, the deliberate control finally spending itself with me and nowhere else.
For a moment neither of us moves. Heartbeats and heat and the weight of him, his mouth resting at my temple.
Later, tangled in his sheets with the city glowing faint through the window, his fingers trace slow lines along my spine like he's memorizing something.
"You're quiet," he says.
"I'm thinking."
"About?"
"That I came here for a street fair and wound up here instead."
He huffs something close to a laugh against my shoulder. "I'm not sorry about it."
"Neither am I."
His arm tightens around me, and for a while neither of us says anything else. I listen to him breathe and let myself believe, just for tonight, that this is simple.
***
I wake before the sun is fully up, in a bed that isn't mine, in an apartment that smells like him, and for a long time I don't move.
Noah is still asleep, one arm heavy across my waist, none of the precision he wears like armor anywhere on his face.
I think about calling Theo, checking in, doing the responsible thing. I think about how easy it would be to slip out before he wakes and pretend this was simpler than it is.
I don't do either.
In the morning, I don't let myself say the thing sitting in my chest out loud. Not yet. I just stay exactly where I am and let that be its own kind of answer.