Chapter 5 #3
I sit back against the vinyl. Wipe my face with the backs of my hands. The driver keeps his eyes forward and his mouth shut, and I silently thank him for being the one decent man in Chicago tonight who understands that a crying woman at four in the morning needs silence more than conversation.
"Happy fucking birthday, Sloane," I whisper to the window. My handprint fades on the glass as the condensation dries, and I watch it disappear because staring at nothing is easier than thinking about what I just did.
The ride to Wicker Park takes twelve minutes.
I pay in cash, walk up the steps of my brick three-flat with my single shoe dangling from one finger and my feet numb against cold concrete, and let myself into an apartment that is exactly the way I left it.
Record player silent. Cupcake with its melted candles still on the counter.
Wine bottle still half full next to the glass I was drinking from when I made the worst and best decision of my life.
Everything froze the moment I walked out the door.
Nothing in here has changed. Everything in me has.
I head for the shower, stripping as I go.
I stand under the spray, press my hands flat against the tile wall, and let the water find every place he touched.
My neck, where his hand wrapped around my throat and held me.
The insides of my thighs, still burning from the scrape of his jaw, and his mouth pressed tender kisses against the sting.
The soreness between my legs that flares under the heat, and I press my hand against myself and hold it there because the ache is the last physical proof that tonight happened outside my own head.
I wash him off now before I lose the willpower it takes to erase his scent from my body.
His cologne runs off my skin in the steam, swirling down the drain.
I stand there and watch it go. Twenty-six years of keeping every man at arm's length, every boyfriend at second base, every wall reinforced with lipstick and liner and vintage armor.
The first man I let past all of it is the one I can never have.
I let him inside my body and he has no idea he was the first. He called me tesoro and he doesn't know my name.
He held my face in his hands and said "then we do this right" and his voice cracked on the word right, and the memory of that crack hits me under the hot water and I fold forward against the tile and press my forehead to my hands and cry.
Not sad tears. Not exactly. These are the tears that come when you've been brave enough to have the best night of your life and clear-eyed enough to know it can never happen again.
I'm rebuilding the armor already. I can feel it happening.
The hot water strips away his cologne and my body starts closing back up, folding in on itself, pulling the walls back into place one muscle at a time.
By tomorrow morning I'll pin the victory rolls and line my eyes and paint my lips cherry red and walk into Midnight Boutique and smile at my customers and no one will know that under all of it there's a woman who gave everything she had to a man who called her tesoro and meant it.
The water runs cold before I'm ready to get out.
I dry off, pull on an old t-shirt that smells like nothing and nobody, and crawl into my brass bed where the white linens are cold and smooth against my shower-warm skin.
An hour ago I was wrapped in dark sheets that smelled like cologne and sex and the warmth of a man who held me against his chest and told me he wanted to talk in the morning.
My sheets smell like laundry detergent and the loneliness of a bed that has only ever held one person. Hell of a downgrade.
My phone sits on the nightstand where I left it. I pick it up, scroll to his contact.
Massimo.
I consider pressing the delete button. One tap and the number disappears. One tap and the temptation vanishes and I go back to being the woman who collects beautiful disasters and never lets anyone close enough to leave a mark.
My thumb hovers, but I hold it steady. But just barely.
I can strip off his cologne. I can pin the rolls back up.
I can rebuild every wall I took down tonight.
But I can't delete the only thread connecting me to the man who made me feel like I was worth more than a wish in a velvet box.
Call it stubborn. Call it stupid. Call it the most on-brand Sloane Whitmore decision I have ever made.
I set the phone face-down on the nightstand, pull the covers to my chin, and stare at the ceiling where early morning light creeps through the curtains, pale and thin and ordinary. The pillow beneath my head smells like my shampoo and disappointingly not of his cologne.
The apartment is too quiet. Too empty. Too much like it was before tonight except now I know what it feels like to have a man's heartbeat under my ear, and the silence where that sound should be is unbearable.
I roll onto my side and pull the covers tighter. His contact is still in my phone. The marks from his hands are still fading on my skin. And every minute puts more distance between this bed and the one I left, but the ache behind my ribs isn't fading with it.
Some mistakes are worth keeping.