Before
BEFORE
I decide I must be dreaming.
Yet days pass, and I continue to awaken in a nineteenth-floor palace beside a man who does things no boyfriend has before.
Every morning, Michael brings me coffee in bed. Then we head to work—him to his swanky architectural job, me to a temporary assignment collating loan data for a company that buys and sells mortgages, which is just as boring as it sounds. But boring doesn’t matter, because in the evenings, we snuggle on the couch and watch campy horror movies other guys always made fun of me for adoring. Michael holds me close through all the tense parts, which he pretends is for my sake, but every time the villain pops out, he jumps, and I tease him relentlessly for it.
We kiss. We twine together in the orange dimness of the bedroom and talk until our eyelids get heavy.
We also don’t have sex. Which I love.
And hate. Mostly hate.
On weekends, Michael introduces me to a Washington I’ve never seen. We hike the majestic, up-and-down trails of Mount Rainier National Park while he teaches me to properly weight a pack and layer my clothing. We power up mountainsides, then lie in the sunshine and munch on dried fruit. Back at home, we curl on opposite ends of the couch, our freshly scrubbed feet touching while he reads his fifty pages and I write a travelogue about our hike.
One evening, Michael sets his book aside, then scoots around to my side and peeks at my computer screen. When I don’t flinch, he raises a golden eyebrow. “You don’t care if I read it?”
“No,” I say, more distracted by his nearness than anything else. I’m aching to kiss him, but if I do, this paragraph will never get finished.
“I thought writers were private about their work.”
“There’s not much I’m private about.” I gesture at my computer. “There’s not even a password on this thing.”
He snuggles closer, solid and tempting against my side. “So someone could just go poking through your email if they wanted?”
I chuckle. “There’s only one ‘someone’ in this condo, and he’s not pathetic enough to snoop.”
“True.” His gaze roves over my face. “I’d come up with something way more ingenious.”
For a moment, we just stay like that, until I close the computer and stash it behind a throw pillow. God, I could stare into his eyes for hours. It’s like floating in the ocean, except that I want to touch the ocean in extremely inappropriate ways.
He tucks a long strand of hair behind my ear. “No secrets, then?”
“Not here. What about you? Any closeted skeletons I should know about?”
He doesn’t blink. “Nothing I won’t tell you eventually.”
I pause, wondering what exactly that means, but in another moment, he’s kissing me. My arms wrap around him almost by themselves and, as predicted, the paragraph doesn’t get done.
Some nights, we stay up late and blare Journey from the living room speakers while dancing around in our underwear. When I confess my unrepentant love for kettle corn, Michael invests in a home popper and experiments until he discovers the exact ratio of brown sugar and butter that makes me moan.
The first time it happens, he grins like a wolf. “I love that I just made that sound come out of your mouth. I can’t wait to take a stab at it without any food involved.”
I cram a fistful of popcorn into my mouth and waggle my eyebrows. “‘Take a stab’? Are you being punny right now?”
“Maybe.” He stalks across the kitchen and leans down to kiss me. Or pretends to. At the last second, he filches a piece of unchewed popcorn with his teeth.
“Hey!” I try to steal my treat back, but when that fails, I settle for retaliation. I surreptitiously fish an ice cube from the glass of Scotch he’s just finished, lean up for my own fake kiss, and drop the frigid chunk down the back of his shirt.
He leaps away, bellowing and laughing. Within minutes, we’re on the floor—concrete be damned—making out like teenagers, the popcorn forgotten.
Day by torturous day, I familiarize myself with every inch of Michael’s body, except those inches I crave the most. I feel him against me often enough to know he’s blessed in that department—because of course he is, he’s ridiculous, which would annoy me if I wasn’t so excited about it—but his fingers never stray past the waistband of my panties. He doesn’t even take off my bra. Instead, he makes it his mission to discover erogenous zones I didn’t know I had, sliding his lips along my rib cage, raking his fingernails over the tender expanse of my inner arm while exploring my mouth with his tongue.
I coil ever tighter. I’m like a tropical storm, spinning and swelling, drawing sustenance from the turquoise sea and yearning to make landfall, at which point I’ll probably explode with enough force to annihilate everything in sight.
One evening in bed, I gasp against his lips. “I’m pretty sure the whole building’s going to collapse when we finally get naked together. I’ve never wanted anyone so badly in my life.”
He chuckles. “Just the building? I’ll consider it a failure on my part if we don’t level this entire block.”
“Eleven days,” I say.
“Eleven days.” He dips his head to lap at the hollow of my neck, and I have to forcibly stop myself from tearing his boxers off.
A week later, we take a two-hour drive to a mountaintop observatory just to see what the night sky looks like beyond the bright dome of the city. Michael swings the Audi through one switchback curve after another and parks in the empty lot up top.
We emerge into the cool velvet evening. Overhead, some divine giant has sprayed frosty chips of crushed diamond across the sky with such enthusiasm that I can only stare upward, open-mouthed.
Michael cranes his head, too. We let glittering wonder flow into us. I feel simultaneously ageless and newly born, and utterly privileged to exist in a world that contains such majesty. In the darkness, Michael’s hand finds mine.
“Holy shit,” he says, after ten minutes of star-drenched silence. “There’s an entire philosophy written up there.”
My mouth curls. I love it when he gets reflective. “Really? And what’re you reading, up there in the sky?”
“A whole book. About how infinitesimal we are. But also about how we’re the exact opposite of tiny. I mean, think about it. No one else will ever experience this moment in this same way. Only you and me.” His thumb draws circles on the back of my hand. “No other two people, not in the whole endless life of the universe, will stand on this mountaintop on this night, seeing these stars and holding each other’s hands. It’s a gift for us and no one else, ever. Which makes us anything but insignificant. It makes us infinite. It means we live entire lives full of moments that no other soul will experience. It makes us giants .”
My attention veers from the sky to him. I would never have thought to look at it that way. Not in a million years. I stare up at his hopelessly beautiful face, my lips parted, my heart swelling to an impossible size.
And then, although I swear the moment can’t get any more perfect, it does.
“Mina...” In the starlight, his eyes turn warm and expansive. “I’m desperately in love with you. I want you to know that.”
“I’m desperately in love with you, too.”
That’s it. It’s just...easy. True. A statement of fact that surprises nobody.
On the way home, Michael holds my hand atop the gearshift. I study his profile, wondering if I can possibly board that plane in four days.
I can’t imagine it.
Not that this man is perfect. Nearly a month together has allowed me to ferret out some flaws, and in a way, Michael’s coworkers weren’t wrong. He’s never an asshole to me, but he does reserve his charm for the handful of people he finds engaging—me, the chess-whiz doorman in our building, his friend Ben from work, who I went to school with once upon a time and seems to be the only person at Forsythe & Winter Michael truly respects.
Others don’t get much from him. He’s briskly courteous in public, but his patience wears thin when people find themselves confused by situations that seem straightforward to him, like when the girl at the grocery store fumbles to make change or the barista on our block misspells Mina as Nemo and spends a good five minutes calling the name of a cartoon fish before we realize it’s my hazelnut latte that’s ready. Then, Michael’s words grow clipped enough that annoyance peeks through the polite facade.
He also doesn’t need nearly as much sleep as I do. He stays up late and wakes up early. On weekdays, he reads his fifty pages in the morning, which grants me some extra time, but the condo doesn’t offer enough in the way of sound dampening that I can continue to sleep while he clunks around making breakfast. So I nap after work. Otherwise, I’d fall to pieces, completely incapable of surviving on the five or six hours that somehow sustain him.
No one’s perfect, though, and I don’t expect even the incomparable Michael Drake to remake that rule. I actually like that he isn’t Prince Charming.
I’d be suspicious otherwise.
After getting home from the observatory, we take our usual places on the couch and sip wine in the dark.
“I haven’t bought my ticket yet,” I say.
He sucks in a breath and sets his glass on the coffee table. It’s hard to tell in the dimness, but I swear his hand shakes. “Why not? Are you not making enough at that mortgage place?”
“No, they’re paying me fine. I’m just not sure I want to go anymore.”
He leans close and cradles my cheek. “But you have to. It means so much more than just you getting on a plane. I know that. You do, too.”
I pull back to get a better look at him, trying to fight the prickle invading my throat. “Are you saying you don’t want me to stay?”
“No. God. I’d cut off my arm for you to stay. But...I wouldn’t cut off yours. If that makes sense.”
I shake my head. I wish I didn’t understand him with such frustrating precision. I also wish I didn’t suspect him of being right. “What if you came with me?”
He makes a pained sound and swings away. I feel his absence like a cold gust of winter.
“I can’t, Mina.”
“Can’t? Why not? You must have plenty saved up, from what I can tell. And I know you’d have to quit, but...is your job really that irreplaceable? You barely talk about it. It doesn’t seem like you even like it all that much.”
He stares out the window, his profile lit by the glow from the harbor. “It’s not that simple. I have...obligations.”
I frown. Obligations sounds so unlike him that I can’t imagine what that means. “To who?”
“My brother.”
I blink, rapid-fire. “I thought you two didn’t talk.”
“We didn’t .” He rubs at his temples. “For almost a year after Lily died. But lately he’s been...going through a hard time, and I’ve been helping him. Or trying to. We haven’t actually seen each other yet, but we’ve been talking again over the past couple months. This might finally be my chance to fix things. I have to be here for it.”
The past couple months . I’d almost forgotten Sarah’s and Brooke’s insistence about him behaving strangely, but this explains it. Finally.
I start to reach out. Except Michael withdraws in a way I’m not accustomed to, his shoulders hunching.
My heart softens. “Then you’re right. You should stay, until things are back on solid ground. How long do you think that’ll take? Six months? A year? I could wait. We could go after, when you’re ready.”
He stabs a hand through his hair, which flops right back over his forehead the moment he lets go. “But that’s just it. That’s what people always say. And then they never go. They never live . I can’t let you fall into that trap for my sake. I just know if you don’t go now...”
He doesn’t finish, but he doesn’t have to. When he looks up, his expression does it for him.
“When I brought you here,” he says, “I knew you’d break my heart. And I’m prepared for that. I’m okay with it.”
Something inside me snaps clean in two. “What if I’m not?”
His eyes grow suspiciously bright, even in the dark. I imagine a death-row convict on execution day would look exactly like he does right now.
“I won’t pretend I’m noble enough to stop you from staying,” he says. “But that’s not what I actually want for you, Mina. I want you to go and spread your wings. All those dreams you had as a kid? I want every last one of them to come true.”
I inhale sharply. “And you?”
“Will be right here. Hoping to fucking god that you come back to me once they do.”
“Michael, I—”
“Don’t.” His forehead pleats. “Because I’m about a millisecond away from asking you to forget everything I just said. So don’t answer. Just...think about it. Please. You don’t have to decide anything yet. We still have four days.”
Four days . It sounds like a blink. It sounds like an eternity. But I do know one thing. If I give myself to him, if we consummate this sublime fever dream, I won’t ever tear myself away.
Later, in the bedroom, Michael murmurs in the dark. “Tell me something?”
My eyes are still open, pointed at the ceiling, and I turn my head. I’d thought he was asleep already. “Of course,” I whisper back. “Anything.”
“Would you still love me, without all this? The car, the condo, the job? The money? What if I was nobody? What if I had nothing?”
My brows knit. The question surprises me, but I did just ask him to torpedo his entire life for me.
“Let me make something clear.” I nestle close, pressing a kiss to his smooth chest. “You could get fired, go broke, gain a hundred pounds, shave off all that gorgeous hair, and move into a cardboard box, and I wouldn’t love you any less than I do right now.”
He chuckles, low and warm and rough, which somehow wields enough power to make my stomach clench with desire.
“You’re lying,” he says, but pulls me closer. “The part about the hair’s a dead giveaway.”
I ponder that, wondering whether he has something to tell me. But by the time I decide to ask, he’s already asleep.