Chapter 23 #2
I touch her face the way I did in the kitchen three weeks ago, the same hand on the same jaw, the same deliberate choice — and leans into it slightly, and I can see exactly what she is: clear-eyed, certain, present. With me.
It's different from before in the kitchen.
The kitchen was the confirmation, the sentence building to its conclusion.
This is what comes after. The two of us, three months in, in full knowledge of each other, and neither of us careful anymore in the way of people who aren't sure yet. We're sure. The kiss is sure.
Her hands are in my hair and mine are on her waist and we're warm despite December, and I think: there it is. This is what it's supposed to feel like.
Not complicated. Not careful. Just present.
Her hands move, palms along my jaw, fingertips mapping the side of my neck and up into my hair.
The kiss deepens—nothing performative, no techniques, just her, her heat and clarity, her mouth and breath and body pressed up to mine so close I can feel the staccato undercurrent of her pulse.
Her knees bracket mine on the porch bench, the blanket uneven now, both of us halfway unwrapped, and her hands are everywhere: face, hair, shoulders, the dip of my collarbone.
She bites my bottom lip, the softest drag, and for a second, I don't breathe.
"Delaney," I breathe out, not consciously.
She makes a sound, low and pleased, the kind of sound people make when they're not performing for anyone, and it goes straight through every layer of patience I've spent three months constructing.
I slide my hands to her hips, thumb the edge of her shirt where it meets denim, and she doesn't pause, just follows the motion, leans her whole body into me until I'm on my back.
With her above me, knees on either side, hair loose and falling forward, she tastes like the tea, the December night, and I want to know if her skin is as warm as I remembered last time.
I pull her shirt up at the side—just enough to touch bare skin, and she shivers, but not from the cold.
She kisses harder, like she's rewarding me for it, like that's the prize for getting it right.
I grip her tighter, adjust both of us so we're flush, and she moves with the shift, not tentative.
She's got my shirt bunched in both hands, and when she pulls away to look at me it's with the full, reckless version of her.
Cheeks flushed, eyes honest and wide in a way that could never be anything but.
She catches her breath. I can feel her chest rising against mine.
"Is this what you pictured?" she asks, low and not quite a joke.
"No," I say, and mean it. I hadn't pictured anything this alive.
She leans down again and this time I wrap my arm fully around her waist, pull her in until there's no distance at all.
We kiss until I forget where the blanket starts and the night ends.
I can't tell if it's cold or if I'm numb from how present she is.
I move my hand up her back, over her shoulder blades, and she's trembling—not nervous, not scared, just electric.
She slides her hand under my shirt, palm flat, and the skin-to-skin shock drags a noise out of me that I hope is too quiet for the neighbors.
Her lips are on my cheek, my jaw, my ear, her breath hot even in the winter air, and the words she says next are, "I want—" but she doesn't finish it, just presses her face to my neck like she's embarrassed to admit it.
I know what she wants. I want it too.
But not tonight. Not with the paperwork still technically in the way, not with her three weeks from the official end and both of us careful to do this right, the way everything else has been squared. But I want her enough to make it feel like a discipline.
Like something structural. Permanent. Forever.
I close my eyes for half a second and breathe through it, which is a mistake, because breathing means I get all of her at once — the cold in her hair, the warmth of her skin under my hand, the faint sweetness of whatever she put on her mouth before dinner, the sharp clean air around us and the impossible fact of her in my lap, wanting me.
“Delaney,” I grunt. It comes out rougher than I mean it to.
She lifts her head. Her eyes are dark in the porch light, her mouth a little swollen, her hair loose at her cheek where my hand has put it there. She looks thoroughly kissed and entirely herself, which is the part that does the most damage.
“I know,” she says.
I don’t think she does. Or maybe she does, and that’s worse.
I put my hand over hers where it’s still under my shirt, still flat against my skin like she has a right to be there.
She does. That’s not the issue. The issue is that I can feel the line from here, bright and thin and dangerous, and every part of me that is not the part responsible for making decent choices wants to step over it.
“You know what?” I ask.
“That you’re about to be very noble,” she says, and there she is again, the wry edge of her, the woman who can be trembling in my arms and still make me want to laugh.
I do laugh. Once. It’s not much of a sound. “I don’t feel noble.”
“No?”
“No.”
Her thumb moves against my ribs. Barely. Nothing more than a small, absent stroke, except there is nothing absent about it. I catch her wrist gently before she can do it again, not to stop her exactly, but because if she does it again, I’m going to forget every reason I have for being careful.
She notices. Of course she notices.
Her expression shifts — not hurt, not embarrassed, something more aware than that. Something that understands being wanted is not the same thing as being taken from.
“I don’t want you to think I’m asking you to prove anything,” she says.
“I don’t.”
“Or that I’m trying to rush this because I’m scared you’ll disappear if I don’t.”
My chest goes tight in a way that has nothing to do with wanting her and everything to do with wanting to take every person who ever taught her to think that and put them very far away from her.
“You don’t have to earn me,” I say, running my hand along her spine.
She looks at me.
“You don’t have to keep me interested. You don’t have to make the pace worth it. You don’t have to offer me more because you’re worried what happens if you don’t.” I keep my hand around her wrist, my thumb against the beat of her pulse. “I’m here.”
Her mouth trembles once before she gets it under control.
“I know that” she says softly.
“I know you do.” I look at her. “I’m saying it anyway.”
The porch is quiet around us. Somewhere down the street, a dog barks once and then thinks better of it.
The heater inside the cottage clicks on through the old walls.
The whole town feels held at a distance, like the night has decided to give us this one small, contained space and ask nothing of it.
Delaney’s hand relaxes under mine.
“I do want you,” she says.
“I know.”
“I’m not confused about that.”
“I know that too.”
Her eyes narrow slightly. “You’re very calm for a man who just made that noise.”
“I am not calm.”
“No?”
“No,” I say, and because she deserves the truth of it, I add, “I’m about thirty seconds from making several bad decisions and pretending they’re reasonable because I want them.”
That gets me the laugh. Small, breathless, real.
It also gets her mouth back on mine.
This time I don’t try to make the kiss gentle.
I keep it careful, but careful is not the same thing as gentle, and she seems to understand the distinction immediately.
She shifts closer, both hands on me now, one at my neck and one fisted in the front of my shirt, and I let myself have that much.
Her weight against me, her mouth against mine, the sound she makes when I slide my hand beneath the hem of her sweater and find warm skin, the narrow line of her waist, the give of her breath.
She says my name like it costs her something.
I have been patient since October.
I have been deliberate. I have done the right thing by inches, by days, by entire months of wanting her and not taking more than the moment could hold. I believed in the sequence because the sequence mattered, because she mattered, because the way something begins has consequences.
But there is a limit to theory when Delaney Hart is in your lap with her hand under your shirt and her mouth at your throat.
I turn us carefully, one arm firm around her back, and lower her onto the blanket.
She looks up at me, hair spread dark against the wool, face flushed from the cold and from me, and I stop.
Because there is a version of me that could keep going.
There is a version of this night that could become the thing both of us want badly enough to justify it.
I can see it. I can feel it in the way her knee shifts against my hip, in the way her hands are still holding on, in the way she is looking at me like I am not a question.
That is exactly why I stop.
I put my forehead against hers.
“March,” I say.
Her breath leaves her in a soft, frustrated sound that almost undoes me.
“I know.”
“I want you,” I say, because I need her to have no possible room to misunderstand this. “Delaney, I want you so much I can barely think straight.”
Her eyes close.
“But not like this,” I say. “Not with a date on a filing somewhere still pretending it has a say. Not when the first time I take you to bed should belong completely to you. To us. No leftover legal shadow. No technicality. Nothing Jason gets to be adjacent to.”
Her eyes open again.
There it is — the thing I was trying to reach. Not disappointment. Not rejection. Something softer. Something that understands I am not stepping away from her. I am drawing the line around us.
Around what this is and what it deserves.
“You’re very inconvenient,” she says.
I smile before I can stop it. “I’ve been told.”
“I was doing a very good job of seducing you.”
“You were doing an excellent job.”
“Historic, even.”
“Documentable,” I say.
That makes her laugh again, and the sound goes straight through me.
Then her hand comes up to my face, palm against my jaw, thumb brushing once over the corner of my mouth. “March,” she says.
“March.”
“But until March,” she says, and her voice changes just enough that every disciplined part of me stands at attention, “there is room in the pace.”
I hold her gaze.
“Yes,” I say. “There is room in the pace.”
She smiles.
It is a dangerous thing, that smile.
Then she pulls me back down to her, and I let myself go because this much I can give her.
This much can belong to us without taking from the thing we’re protecting.
Kissing her in the cold, my hand at her waist, her fingers in my hair, the blanket twisted beneath us and December moving around the edges of the porch.
Wanting her openly. Letting her feel it.
Letting myself feel the fact that she wants me back.
Not complicated.
Not careless.
Just present.