Chapter 22 TESSA
Tessa
The whole house smells like garlic and tomatoes.
The windows over the sink are open, letting the evening breeze in off the water, and I’m standing barefoot in Ronan’s kitchen humming to myself while pasta water climbs toward a boil.
I showered and changed after his call this morning.
I kept the sweater. Mrs. Vale left at three.
The sauce is mine, the kitchen is mine, and I don’t realize I’m smiling until I catch my reflection in the darkening glass.
I hear the cane before I hear him. He’s using it without being told to, which I’m choosing to take as a personal victory, and then it stops somewhere behind me and warm hands settle on my waist.
“I knew it.”
I smile before I turn around. “You knew what?”
“That you’re impossible to stay away from.”
I tilt my head back to look at him. “You saw me twenty minutes ago.”
“I know.”
“And?”
“It was twenty very long minutes.”
His mouth finds the side of my neck before I can answer, and I laugh.
“You’re supposed to be setting the table.”
“It’s set.” I look. It is, right down to the folded napkins.
Then he reaches past me, takes the spoon out of my hand, and tastes the sauce. Considers it with the face he gives contracts.
“Excuse you,” I say.
“It needs anchovy.”
“It does not need—” He’s already in the pantry. He comes back with a tin and melts two fillets into the pan without looking at what he’s doing, stirs once, and hands me back the spoon.
I taste it. Damn it. “Fine.”
“You’re welcome.”
“When did you learn to cook?”
“Twenty-two. Nobody was going to do it for me.” One more thing this man taught himself because needing someone was never an option.
We cook side by side after that, and it’s a negotiation of its own.
He plants himself so his arm brushes mine every time he moves, and steals a piece of pepper off my board, and kisses the spot below my ear when I lean over the pot, and by the time the pasta goes in I’ve lost track of what I’ve salted.
There’s cooking that’s about food, and then there’s this, which takes twice as long and which I don’t want to end.
He’s reaching past me for the wine when I catch his jaw and kiss him.
I don’t plan it. One second I’m watching him move around his kitchen, sleeves rolled over those impossible forearms, and the next I’ve got a fistful of his shirt and his mouth on mine and I’m the one who started it.
He backs me into the counter, and the kiss stops being about supper.
“The sauce,” I manage.
He reaches behind me without breaking the kiss and turns the burner off.
His mouth is at my throat and my fingers are already at his buttons, clumsy with how much I want him. “I did these up this morning.”
“I remember.”
“I’ve been thinking about undoing them ever since.”
The sound he makes against my throat isn’t a word, and the kiss stops being patient.
He lifts me onto the counter, steps in between my knees, and pulls me to the edge. So much for supper.
He kisses me, tongue sliding against mine, one hand fisted in my hair and the other spread wide over my thigh, and I’m aching for him, still new enough at this to be surprised by it.
His sweater goes over my head and my arms don’t even think about covering.
His belt is next. My fingers work the buckle while he’s still kissing me, and when my hand slides in he swears against my mouth.
“Up,” he says, and I lift my hips, and my shorts go wherever the sweater went.
When he finally fits himself against me at the counter’s edge, my heels at the backs of his thighs, I’m past waiting.
“Ronan. Now.”
He stops with his mouth against mine. “If it hurts, you say so.”
“It won’t.”
And then he pushes into me, and oh. My body braces out of habit, a single breath—and then the bracing simply isn’t needed, and it lets go all at once.
He moves, and I stop thinking in sentences.
He shifts my hips at the edge, one small correction, and finds an angle I did not know existed.
“Harder.” The word is out of me before I know it’s coming, a word I have never said to another living soul.
He pulls back far enough to look at me, like he needs to be sure he heard it.
“Christ, Tessa.”
He gives me exactly what I asked for.
I can still feel yesterday’s faint bruise underneath it all. It stops mattering.
The feeling builds where I’ve never had it build, deep and gathering.
“Ronan—” I don’t know what I’m asking for. He does.
“I’ve got you. Let it come.”
It comes. His hands grip my thighs and my head goes back and my eyes close and I hear myself moaning from somewhere far away, and he doesn’t stop. He doesn’t stop, and it rolls through me so long and so deep that I lose track of everything but him.
When I open my eyes, he’s watching me. Jaw tight, breath ragged, a man at the absolute end of his control, holding on just long enough to see me finish.
“Tessa.” Wrecked. Barely my name at all.
Then his rhythm breaks and his hands haul me hard against him, and he doesn’t look away. Watching me is what finishes him. I feel the exact moment it does.
After, neither of us moves. His head drops beside mine, his breath loud at my ear, my heels still at the backs of his thighs. “Textbooks really undersold that,” I say, when I have a voice again. His smirk comes first. Then a low laugh, worn out and warm, and then his mouth on mine.
* * *
We eat at the island. Pasta, bread, the wine he’s been saving. He tells me a story about Frank and a rental car in Munich, and gets up halfway through it to fetch the rest of the bottle.
That’s when the calendar opens itself up in my head, uninvited. Four weeks, give or take, to the last week of August. The bread goes to sawdust in my mouth for exactly one breath.
He comes back and picks the story up where he left it. I put my hand over his on the counter and hold it harder than the story calls for, and he turns his hand over and laces our fingers and keeps talking, and doesn’t ask.
After, he takes the blanket off the porch rail and we sit out on the terrace with what’s left of the wine, the sky burning itself down over the water, his arm around me and my back against his chest. We talk about nothing.
The seals. The boat, and where a person might go on a boat like that with a free afternoon.
He’s different out here. That’s what I keep noticing. The man who told me to get out of his house sat in rooms like a fist. This one has his thumb moving idly along my arm.
I’m the one who hears the terrace door.
Sadie stands in the open slider with her car keys still in her hand, and takes it all in. The blanket. The wine. Me in her brother’s sweater, tucked against his chest.
I try to sit up. Every professional cell I have left fires at once—she hired me, she is the closest thing I have to a boss in this arrangement, and I am currently wrapped around her patient, wearing his clothes—and Ronan’s arm tightens and keeps me where I am.
“Well,” she says.
“Don’t,” Ronan says.
“I wasn’t going to say a word.” She absolutely was. I watch her put it away for later. “I texted you twice.”
“My phone is in the kitchen.”
“Your phone is in the—” Sadie stops, because Ronan Sinclair does not leave his phone anywhere. She looks at him again, slower this time. Her brother, outside, at dusk, wrapped around another person.
She blinks more than the wind explains, and covers it by stealing the arm of his chair and taking a sip straight from his glass. Then her eyes find me over the rim of it, and she gives me a glad, unguarded smile. My shoulders come down from around my ears, and I stop composing my resignation.
Still, somebody has to say hello.
“Dr. Sinclair.”
“...Tessa.”
A pause. Then we both laugh at ourselves, and she waves a hand. “I think we’re well past that. You’ve seen his charts and apparently everything else.”
“Sadie,” Ronan says.
“What? It’s an observation.”
She stays twenty minutes. She tells a story about Ronan at nine years old and a bet involving the neighbor’s dog that he makes one attempt to veto and then endures.
When she finally stands to go, Ronan comes off the chair in one motion. No cane, no hand braced on the armrest, nothing—just up, steady, his arm settling around my shoulders in front of his sister on purpose. And Sadie, halfway through her goodbye, stops talking.
It isn’t the arm around me that stopped her. It’s him, standing on his own two feet on his own terrace with the last of the light behind him.
“The last time I was here,” she starts, and doesn’t finish it.
The last time she was here, there was a hospital bed in the guest room.
She crosses to him fast and hugs him hard, arms around his neck. His arms come all the way around her, and over his shoulder I watch Dr. Sinclair, emergency physician, lose a short, decisive battle with her own eyes.
“Okay,” she says into his shoulder. “Okay.”
Then she steps back, wipes her face with the heel of one hand, entirely unembarrassed, and points at me. “You. Walk me out.”
At the front door, her voice drops to just us.
“Tessa. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Don’t be silly. It’s the job.”
“It isn’t.” She stops, and starts again. “I sent you up here to keep him alive. That’s all I asked for. He stood up on that terrace tonight without thinking about it, and I have never seen him this happy. Not once.”
I smile. It’s all I can manage.
Then she looks at me properly, and it’s a doctor looking. “You okay? Nobody ever asks the nurse.”
Upstairs, in the bottom of my bag, a letter with a date in it sits next to a badge and a folded gait belt.
“I’m fine,” I tell her.
“All right,” Sadie says, and lets it go, and hugs me too, which I wasn’t ready for.
At her car she runs through the discharge instructions—make him rest, keep him out of the gym unsupervised, call her if he overdoes anything—a doctor to the last step of the driveway. Then she stops, one hand on the open door.
“You have my number too, Tessa. Not just for him.” She gets in, window down, already backing out. “I’m here for you. You know that.”
I stand in the drive until her taillights clear the gate.
By the time I get back to the terrace, the last of the color is going out of the sky and the tide is keeping its own time somewhere below the lawn. Ronan pulls me down against him and rearranges the blanket over us both, and I fit against him, my ear over his heart.
That’s when I hear it.
Low, under his breath, barely anything—the song.
My song. The rise and the turn and the long soft drop at the end, all of it, whole, moving through his chest under my ear while his thumb keeps its slow line along my arm.
He doesn’t know he’s doing it. He learned it quietly, completely, keeping it to himself—weeks of me humming over dressings and dishes and charts, thinking it was mine alone in the room.
He’s been listening the entire time.
I don’t tell him what the song is. I don’t tell him what he’s just given me. I close my eyes and lie very still and let him hum it to me, in a house that stopped feeling like a job somewhere when I wasn’t paying attention.