Chapter 19
Lauren
By the time I invited Adrian inside, I had already decided I wanted him.
Desire had survived the divorce. I wanted Adrian when I saw his hands cradle Nora, when he bit back a laugh, and when memories of our old bed caught me filing invoices or washing bottles.
We had been on six dates.
After the first kiss, I expected Adrian to become careful to the point of lifelessness.
Instead, he remained himself. He challenged my opinion of a novel, laughed when I cheated at miniature golf, and told me I was wrong about a co-parenting schedule without acting as though disagreement threatened access.
A bookstore, where Adrian bought nothing because I accused him of using first editions as decorative hostages.
A morning hike that ended with both of us carrying Nora’s stroller up stairs marked ACCESSIBLE ROUTE.
Dinner at Maya’s, where she interrogated him only with her eyebrows.
Two quiet evenings that ended in kisses at my door.
Each time, he left when the evening ended. He did not make restraint look noble or send it back to me as an invoice.
On the sixth night, we stood in the hallway outside my apartment after a film neither of us understood.
“I think the horse represented tax policy,” Adrian said.
“The director said it represented grief.”
“Same thing in some states.”
I laughed, then stopped because his face was close.
He wanted me. I knew the particular stillness of him when desire was costing effort.
I unlocked the door.
“Come in.”
His gaze held mine for one beat. Then he followed me.
The apartment was quiet. Nora was spending the night with Maya, an arrangement made before Adrian and I chose the movie.
I set my keys on the table.
Adrian remained near the door.
“You can take off your coat,” I said.
“That seems reckless.”
“Very. There may be honest olives in the kitchen.”
His smile was nervous.
I had never seen Adrian nervous before sex.
The discovery gave me courage.
I crossed the room and kissed him.
He met me without hesitation. His coat slid to the floor. My hands found his shoulders, the familiar breadth of them changed only slightly by the months he had spent living without a private gym and an army of people arranging his days.
His mouth moved from mine to my jaw. I backed into the console table, knocking a framed print crooked, and caught his shoulder before a second collision. Neither of us reached to straighten it.
“Lauren,” he said against my skin.
I pulled him closer.
We reached the bedroom in pieces: a kiss against the wall, his fingers at the zipper of my dress, my hands impatient with his shirt. One button slipped free and struck the floor.
“That was bespoke,” he said.
“File a claim.”
I wanted to see whether his body still felt like home. It did not. Home was mine now. This was something else, and I wanted it anyway.
My dress fell.
Adrian looked at me.
Pregnancy and birth had changed my body. Softer stomach. Faint silver lines at my hips. Breasts fuller, though Nora had stopped nursing weeks earlier. I had learned those changes alone.
Still, I had to steady one hand on his shoulder beneath the attention in his face.
“Do not worship me because you feel guilty,” I said.
His eyes lifted to mine. “I don’t.”
“Then what?”
“I want you so badly I am trying not to frighten you.”
The honesty moved through me like a touch.
“Try less.”
He kissed me again.
His hands traveled my back, my waist, the curve of my hips. He kissed the silver lines pregnancy had left there. I moved his hand where I wanted it. When he followed too carefully, I pulled him closer, and he understood the correction.
When his mouth found my breast, pleasure struck hard enough that I gripped his hair.
Then memory arrived.
The gala bedroom. His hand over the place our daughter already existed. The phone vibrating while I chose not to tell him yet.
My body locked.
Adrian went still and lifted his hands away.
The floor was cool beneath my heel. The impractical tea candle Maya had given me burned on my dresser. Nora was safe with her. This was my apartment, my bed, my night to continue or end.
I grabbed his shirt and pulled him back.
“Don’t ask me for tomorrow.”
“I won’t.”
Fear loosened one kiss at a time.
We undressed each other completely. I sat on the edge of the bed and drew him between my knees. The scar near his ribs remained. The rest of him was leaner than I remembered.
His hand slid between my thighs. I guided him once, then let go. He remembered enough to make me close my eyes and paid enough attention to make me open them again.
“Still trying less?” I asked.
His mouth curved against my skin. “I welcome specific objections.”
The laugh caught in my throat and broke into his name when I came.
He rested his forehead against my stomach while I caught my breath.
“Condom.”
He reached for the one I had placed in the bedside drawer earlier.
The fact stopped him for half a beat.
“You planned this,” he said.
“I planned the possibility.”
“Lawyer.”
“Former husband.”
The old humor steadied us.
He rolled the condom on. I drew him over me.
The first press of his body inside mine was almost too familiar. Grief flashed with pleasure, sharp enough to bring tears.
His shoulders tightened as if he meant to retreat. I caught his face before he could.
“Stay.”
He did.
He moved slowly at first. I hooked a heel behind his thigh when I wanted more, and he answered. When he misread my next movement, his elbow sent a pillow to the floor.
“Overruled,” I said.
His laugh warmed my throat. He shifted, and the joke dissolved.
Pleasure rose again with grief still at its edge, but grief no longer owned the room. I held his face as it took me. His rhythm broke a moment later, and he let me see the instant restraint left him.
Afterward, neither of us spoke for a long time.
My skin cooled beneath his palm. The room smelled like sweat, laundry soap, and the tea candle Maya had given me because she claimed every adult bedroom required one object purchased without practicality.
Adrian lay beside me with a few inches between us. I crossed them and placed my head on his chest.
I pinched his side when his expression grew too solemn.
He laughed and caught my hand. When his fingers began to loosen, I turned my palm and linked them with mine.
His expression grew even more solemn.
“Do not make a speech.”
“I was not going to.”
“Liar.”
After midnight, he sat up to dress.
I watched him reach for his shirt.
The room already felt colder.
“Stay,” I said.
He looked at me.
I lifted the blanket.
He returned to bed.
We slept tangled together.
Sometime before dawn, Nora’s empty-room monitor light blinked from the dresser. I had left it on from habit though she was with Maya. Adrian noticed and reached toward it, then stopped.
“She’s fine,” I said.
“I know.”
We went back to sleep.
In the morning, I woke before him.
Sunlight crossed his face. He looked younger asleep, less like the man on every headline and more like the husband who once burned toast before my hearings.
He opened his eyes.
Regret did not arrive.
Neither did certainty.
I kissed him once.
“Coffee?” he asked.
“Tea.”
“Still impossible.”
“Still divorced.”
His smile held sadness and acceptance. “Yes.”
He made tea. Then he left.
Later, I wrote the date of our next dinner on my calendar.
Desire had not decided my future.
It had simply become one more thing I was allowed to choose.