CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX BLAIRE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
BLAIRE
I'm suddenly aware of exactly where this moment is headed as Bennet's kiss gets progressively more intense, and my mind is reeling with all the wrong things.
I should excuse myself and make sure I'm nice and fresh. Are my legs shaved? God, I ate tacos. Do I have lettuce in my teeth? Taco breath is a thing that exists, and I may currently have it.
I haven't been with anyone other than Colt, and I don't know how to do this any way other than how he did it, which wasn't exactly a masterclass in intimacy. And god, Bennet kisses so good it's making it very hard to think about anything practical.
He moves on top of me and my legs wrap around him on instinct, and I become very aware that I'm in a dress and there is nothing between us except my panties and his shorts, which is an amount of nothing that my nervous system is extremely interested in.
His mouth grazes my jaw, his teeth nipping the sensitive skin there. He rolls his hips into mine and the friction is immediate, and so fucking good.
"Oh fuck."
"Yes, let me hear you." He growls it against my neck and does it again.
"Wait." I push his chest and start scooting backward. "I need — holy shit. Uhm. Can I use your restroom? I just need a minute."
He sits back on his knees immediately. "Sure. Is everything okay? Did I do something you didn't like?"
Oh, he's worried. He's genuinely worried he did something wrong, and we are both so inexperienced in all of this in such completely different ways that it's almost funny and also incredibly endearing.
"You feel amazing, Bennet. I'm just a little nervous and in my head if I'm being honest, and I need to take a breath and have a quick talking to with my lady pleasure garden."
His head falls back with a laugh as he stands and extends his hand. "Of course. I'll show you the way."
I take it and he brings me to my feet, pressing a small kiss to my lips before he does. "You feel incredible, too. I'm really glad you're here."
He keeps my hand in his and leads me down the hallway toward his bedroom, the master bath just beyond. "Right through there. I'll clean up the food. Take as much time as you need."
"Thank you." I lift onto my toes and kiss him.
We laid in here earlier, but I was so far gone in my own head that none of it registered.
Now, alone, I actually take it in. The bedroom is pitch black in a way that feels deliberate.
It’s such a dramatic contrast to the rest of the apartment.
The furniture is dark, almost all of it, and there's something about his consistent gravitational pull toward black that I've find inexplicably sexy. He wears it; he decorates with it.
I'm walking past his dresser on my way to the bathroom when I notice the picture frames.
Something makes me slow down.
I lean in.
And all the air leaves my lungs at once.
It can't be.
My hands are moving before my brain has caught up, picking up the frame, bringing it closer to my face in the dark like maybe I'm seeing it wrong, like maybe the low light is playing tricks on me.
It's not playing tricks. Because Michael Bennett looks back at me from the photo, young and lanky and standing between his parents, all three of them smiling at whoever is holding the camera.
I know that face. I know those eyes. I know the way his smile pulls slightly more to the left than to the right.
My hands start shaking. My legs feel unreliable.
I sit down on the edge of his bed because I don't have a choice, the frame still in my hands.
I close my eyes, and the pieces that have been sitting just outside my reach for weeks snap together all at once with the force of something structural inside me collapsing.
My parents passed when I was younger.
You've had a good part of your life sealed off. Yeah, I've always been a private person.
Something happened when I was younger that made it hard to let people close enough. Left a mark I haven't figured out how to get past.
The immediate hatred. The way my name came out of his mouth like an accusation.
God, the way he unbraided my hair, the vomiting when I told him about what happened ten years ago.
The way he looked at me the very first second I walked into that conference room, like he already knew something I didn't.
The way he said fuck you, Blaire Alexander against my skin.
Oh god.
Oh god.
Bennet Sullivan is Michael Bennett.
He has known who I am since the moment I walked through his door.
He has known every single thing, and I have known nothing. He has been watching me from inside that knowledge this entire time and I have been—
Was all of this revenge? Not like I wouldn’t deserve it. But my heart is breaking apart, nonetheless.
The bathroom door is right there. I stand. My legs cooperate marginally. I put the frame back exactly where I found it, trying to remember the precise angle, and I walk into the bathroom and close the door behind me and grip the edge of the counter.
I feel like I can’t breathe.
I run the cold water and splash it on my face. I take deep pulls of air that don't feel like they're reaching my lungs properly.
I need to know. I need to know with certainty that this isn't my guilt conjuring something that isn't there. That I haven't spent so many years carrying Michael Bennett around that I'm now seeing him in the face of every tall, dark-haired man who is inexplicably cruel to me.
I open the bathroom door and walk out of the bedroom. My feet carry me down the hall on their own, because I don’t feel like I’m controlling any part of my body at the moment.
Bennet — Michael — is cleaning up the last of our carpet picnic, his back to me. He hasn't heard me come out. He's stacking the empty bottles into the bucket with the unhurried ease of someone who doesn't know the world just shifted on its axis in his bedroom.
"Michael?"
It comes out barely above a whisper.
He just...freezes.
Every part of him. His hands, his shoulders, his breath. Like someone hit pause on him from the inside.
His eyes shut. His fists close at his sides.
"Blaire." he says my name but doesn't move an inch, doesn't turn around, just holds completely still with his back to me like he's deciding something.
"Michael?" Louder this time. My voice wobbles on it and I don't try to stop it.
He sets down what he's holding slowly. Stands.
And then he turns and crosses to the sofa and sits on the edge of it and finally looks at me.
His face is open in a way I have never once seen it in all the weeks I've been in this building, every wall gone, every carefully constructed piece of Bennet Sullivan stripped back.
What's underneath is someone I recognize.
"Yeah, Blaire." His voice is very quiet. "Michael."