Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(116)

“Jesus.”

“I know, right? Anyway, at that party, I guess I was saying ‘fuck you’ to Henry.” He was quiet.

She lifted her head. His gaze wouldn’t quite meet hers. “Wait, no, that came out wrong. That’s how it started, as a fuck-you to Henry. But that’s—I—”

“Hey. I’m happy to have been the lucky beneficiary of the fuck-you party for Henry.” He pushed her spiky bangs off her forehead, the pad of his thumb moving gently across her skin, starting a line of heat there that connected to other vital parts of her. “He didn’t deserve you, you know. I hope you know that. I hope I’m stating the painfully obvious.”

She sighed. “In my better moments, I do know that.”

“I will do my best to remind you of it, often.”

“Often.” A word that suggested time stretching before them, a relationship, all kinds of possibility. She felt full of emotions, like things too close to bubbling over on the stove. She touched his face, rough with dark stubble. His eyes were not quite as sad as they’d been on New Year’s Eve, but she thought it would still be fair to describe them as haunted.

“Are you hungry? You must have gotten up at the crack of dawn.”

“I’m starving,” she admitted.

He helped her extricate herself and stand, then stood, too. “Food first? Shower first?”

“Oh, God,” she said. “That’s a tough call. Food.”

Watching him get dressed—watching how he hopped on one foot to insert himself in his jeans, how he disappeared into his shirt, that flat expanse of abs still peeking at her, and then reappeared, hair ruffled, already smiling for her—made her want to start the process again, to peel him out of his things and go another round. She reached into her satchel for a new pair of panties—turquoise lace bikinis—then dressed herself, as he watched with narrowed eyes. She half-expected him to intervene, but he didn’t, just watched like someone too polite to dive in to Thanksgiving dinner before grace was said.

He led her down a narrow hallway into the kitchen. There was the dishwasher, with a neon-orange Do Not Use Me Post-it note, and the range, which looked as if it had cooked when Jimmy Carter was president. The ceiling was high, sunlight rushed in through enormous windows, and his things were scattered over the counters and on the kitchen table.

His things. She had never realized how much intimacy there was in being able to see the mundane details of a person’s life, not until she had been introduced to Miles in this slow, backward way. She’d had sex with him before she’d gotten to see that his refrigerator was papered with New Yorker cartoons and photographs, before she’d had a chance to note that his dishes looked like hand-thrown pottery, before she’d glimpsed the T-shirt tossed over the chair or the stacks of unopened mail or the yellow do-it-yourself home-repair book.

He got out a loaf of thick-sliced multigrain bread, jars of mayo and mustard, a clamshell of fussy greens, waxed-paper deli packages of ham and provolone. He began assembling two sandwiches on those slightly warped, irregular plates, blue glaze over a stony-looking first coat.

“Did someone make those for you?”

He lifted the tape on the lunch meat and spread the packages open. “My ex-fiancée was a potter.”

An ex-fiancée. The history behind the sad eyes? “The plates are beautiful.”

He didn’t volunteer more and she didn’t push it. “Do you want me to make my own sandwich?”

“Just as easy to make two as one. Unless you want to make it so you can decide how much of what you want?”

“Nah.”

She watched the flex and shift of the muscles and tendons in his forearms as he made the sandwiches, the dark hair straight and feathery but definitively masculine. He worked slowly, carefully, spreading mayo and mustard to the edges of the bread, distributing the lettuce evenly. The same guy who would cook dinner alone in the kitchen, who would run his dishwasher every night.

Hard to reconcile him with the guy who’d abandoned himself so completely to burying his face between her legs earlier. She loved that contradiction.

They ate sitting across from each other at the kitchen table. He took big, manly bites and chewed with his mouth closed. He got points for both of those features.

He swallowed and stared at her for a moment, and she knew something was about to happen even before he asked, “How long can you stay?”

As long as you want me to.

She was worried about this, this lack of caution on the part of her subconscious. It concerned her that it might say something against her better judgment. She’d open her mouth and words like that would fall out. Or she’d beg him for something. Like me as much as I like you.