Chapter 8 I Took the Fall for You #3
And what came up under that, block after block, wasn’t Adam.
It was Ryan. How much I missed him. Days of silence in our own apartment, of handing files across a gap, and I wanted him back so plainly it embarrassed me.
The two of them kept surfacing together, and for once I made myself look at it instead of putting it away.
They were alike in ways I had never let myself line up.
The charm. The ease in a room. The way people leaned toward both of them without being asked.
But Adam used things. Situations, people, half-seconds.
Ryan worked a room too, and half the time he didn’t even know he was doing it, and when he did know, he was talking somebody down or smoothing something over, not taking anything for himself.
I was never going back to Adam. That was not even a question tonight.
The question that walked home with me was how many years I had looked straight at him and seen only what love let me see.
Or maybe I was overthinking all of it. Maybe it was just Ryan’s voice going around in my head. I’m afraid of the damage he could cause.
By our street I had settled the only thing I could settle.
I wasn’t telling him tonight. Not the coffee, not the curb, none of it.
I could see exactly what the choice was.
It was the same choice I had torn him apart for, holding something back and calling it protection, and I was making it anyway, at my own door, because I wanted him back more than I wanted to be honest about my evening.
Not never, I told myself. Just not tonight.
The apartment was warm and the lights were on low.
Ryan was at the counter with a file open, sleeves pushed up, and there was a plate by the stove with a second plate turned over on top of it to keep the heat in.
He’d cooked, and he’d left me mine. It was the first move either of us had made in all that time, and he’d made it before he knew whether I was coming home civil.
He looked up. Careful, not cold. He’d noticed the hour and he wasn’t asking about it.
I hung my coat on the hook and stayed standing at the end of the counter.
“I want to say something,” I said. “It’s short.”
He closed the file.
“I got loud at you. Shouted, in our own kitchen. I slammed a door hard enough to rattle the cupboards, and I’ve been hearing it ever since.
” I kept my eyes on him. “Most of what I said I still believe, and I can’t pretend I don’t.
But I called you jealous, and that was a cheap thing to say, and I knew it was cheap while I was saying it.
And the voice I used on you, I’ve never used that voice on anybody I love.
You didn’t have that coming, and I’m sorry for it. ”
Ryan didn’t move for a second. Then he came around the counter partway and stopped, a stool between us, like he didn’t trust the distance yet.
“I lied to you,” he said. “I stood in front of you and lied about what I was about to do, and then I let you find out where I’d really gone from him, on the floor, in front of everyone you work with.
” His voice stayed quiet. “I’m not sorry I went.
I’d go again. But you should have heard it from me, and instead I handed you a lie because it was easier. I’m sorry, Luke.”
Neither of us had touched the worst of it.
He hadn’t said another word about being afraid of Adam, and I hadn’t asked him to.
And I said nothing about my evening, the coffee and the curb and the mouth that wasn’t his, and I wasn’t going to.
He was apologizing to me for the lie, and I was standing in my own kitchen holding one that wasn’t two hours old yet, and I let him apologize anyway.
I knew exactly what I was taking, and I took it.
“Okay,” I said.
He looked at me a moment. “That’s the most words you’ve said to me in days, and half of them were about a door.
” It came out dry, worn thin, but it was his, the first thing all week that had sounded like him and not like a man being careful in a room.
“I missed you. It’s stupid. You were across the desk the whole time. ”
“Okay,” I said again, because my throat wouldn’t do better than that.
That was all of it. Nothing was solved. The two of us just stood there in the lamplight, and I looked at him, the pushed-up sleeves, the missing him, and he was right there in reach, and I was done standing on my side of the kitchen.
I crossed to him. He straightened up off the stool, and I put my hand on the back of his neck, and he came the rest of the way on his own.
His hands came up under my jacket and closed on my shirt like he’d been waiting to do exactly that, and I kissed him.
Soft, at first. Careful. All that silence had made us careful, his mouth barely moving against mine, his breath coming slow and unsteady through it, and for a moment that was everything, the two of us standing in the lamplight, in no hurry at all.
Then his grip turned in my shirt and pulled, and careful was done.
The kiss went deep and hungry, faster than either of us decided it, his mouth opening under mine, my hand leaving his neck for his hair, and the stool scraped and went over behind him and neither of us looked at it.
I had him against the counter, his hands dragging up my back under the jacket, his teeth at my lip, my mouth on his jaw and his throat and back on his mouth, deeper, past every place we would have stopped to breathe, both of us trying to close all that distance at once.
The last clear thought I had was that I had him back, and then I let the rest of it go.