Truly(72)

He lifted his head. It was too dark for him to see his heart in her eyes. Too loud inside his head for her to hear the fear hammering against her hand.

But he could anyway, and so could she.

“Don’t go.”

“This is me,” she said softly. “This is me not going.”

He kissed her then. He had to kiss her, to try out every way he could move his mouth over hers—hard and soft, deep and reverent—and he had to move his tongue against hers and cup her breast in his hand because he was so fucking grateful and so fucking lost.

“You make me want to be a decent person,” he murmured against her lips. “It’s just awful.”

She laughed then, and put her head against the bricks and closed her eyes with her hair tumbling down and sticking to her face and her neck. “You’re the strangest man I ever met.”

He kissed her collarbones and the swell of her breasts. Her hands smoothed over the back of his head. “I want you,” he said.

“I got that. I think you more or less have me. I’m cool with it.”

“You’re cool with it?” He smiled and kissed her again, so much lighter now. She’d transmitted some of her buoyancy to him, intoxicating him with her mouth and her taste and her dark brown eyes. He tried to reciprocate. He kissed her long and lingering, with every shred of longing in him. Every broken shard of devotion she’d somehow collected together and remade.

And then with one last, light brush of his lips over hers, he stepped away.

She slumped against the wall. Very beautiful, very bright.

Very drunk.

“Not tonight, though,” he said. He trailed his thumb over her flat top lip. “You had too much to drink.”

She closed her eyes as he moved to trace her wide cheekbones, memorizing all the shapes of her face. Her arched eyebrows. The broad bridge of her nose. The point of her ear.

She sighed. “That feels good.”

“I want to make you feel good.”

She nuzzled her face against his palm. “Me, too.”

“But not tonight.”

Turning her head, she kissed his palm. “Sure I can’t change your mind on that?”

“I’m sure.”

“Because I didn’t have that much to drink. I’m a Wisconsin girl. We can hold our liquor.”

She turned his hand over, staring abstractedly at the scars on the back. Reaching out a fingertip to touch one.

“Not tonight,” he repeated.

“All right.” She wrapped her fingers around his, lowered their hands, and squeezed. “Take me home, then, fella. Find me a Band-Aid in your bathroom cupboard. Give me a glass of water and some aspirin.”

“I can do all that.”

“Maybe I’ll get lucky and you’ll rub my feet.”

“Do they hurt?”

She nodded. “Like a motherfucker.”

The unexpectedness of the word startled him into laughter, and she laughed, too. Beaming that smile straight at him, nose to nose. Eye to eye.

He wondered, for the first time, how he was going to give her up come Tuesday.

But it wasn’t time to think of that.

He stuck out his elbow. “This way, my lady.”

He was a terrible white knight, but she didn’t seem to care.





CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR


“This is even more crowded than last time.” May scanned the cavernous space full of people waiting to board the Staten Island Ferry. “And even less exciting, since I’ve already done it once. Tell me again why we’re here?”

“I think you were doing it wrong,” Ben said.

“What does that even mean?”

“New York,” he said. “You’ve been doing it wrong.”

“That’s so arrogant,” she said. “Actually, that’s another thing I don’t like about New York—the arrogance. You guys are so sure it’s the best place on earth that when someone doesn’t agree, they must be doing it wrong. I mean, how ridiculous is that? New York is objectively messy and dirty and loud. There’s no way for me to be wrong about that.”

“You don’t like it messy and dirty and loud?”

“No.”

“Funny,” he said. “That’s my favorite kind.”

The wicked smile he gave her liquefied her underpants, but she didn’t let on. She’d been getting a grim sort of satisfaction from seeing his scowl deepen. The more she ran down the whole ferry experience, the darker the lines carved themselves around his mouth. If she kept being uncooperative, he’d probably snap at her again. And then …

Then what?

You’ll snap back.

She thought maybe she would. It seemed essential—vital, even—that she let the conflict happen, and she make herself a part of it. She was tired of avoiding inconvenient truths.