Truly(87)

The bedside alarm clock read 5:09.

Tuesday.

“You can’t do anything about it,” he said. “People think what they think. They do what they’re going to do.”

She wondered if he was thinking of his father or his ex-wife. Or of the old lady in Sardinia—Bibiana.

“It’s early,” Ben said. “We should go back to sleep.” The comforter shifted, cool air finding its way beneath it as he rose behind her. His hand moved down to her stomach. He left it there, a flat weight against the softest part of her. A declaration that he had no real interest in going back to sleep.

Heat crept outward from his palm, settling deep between her legs.

In the U.P., her family would be waking soon. Her mom always rose early on the last day. She’d be packing the household, making lists of last-minute wedding tasks, fretting about getting Dan on a plane to Jersey, and wondering just what May was doing.

May would have to get up soon. Face the day, shower and dress, borrow Ben’s laptop to book a flight. That flight she should have looked into days ago.

All those phone calls she should have made.

When she rolled to her back, Ben was there, looking down at her. His brown eyes, dark in the dim room. His face so familiar, she might have known it for years.

I could draw you, she thought. I could draw you a thousand times.

But she knew she wouldn’t. She didn’t want to risk turning Ben into another fantasy, more memory than man.

This was what she had left. This morning. These moments in the dark. Because as soon as they got out of the bed, she would begin leaving.

Unless you stay.

She closed her eyes.

Shut up, shut up, fantasy brain.

When she opened them, he was still there. “I can sleep on the plane,” she said.

He rubbed his thumb over her cheek. “Don’t move.”

With one hand planted on the bed beside her torso, he reached across her body and retrieved the glass of water he’d used to bring her ice cubes last night. He took a long drink.

“Here,” he said. “Sit up.”

She did as he asked. He handed her the glass. She drank the last few inches of tepid water. “Thanks.”

“Put it down.” She set the glass back on the table.

He caught her by the waist while she was still turned away and eased her down to the bed. “Now I can kiss you.”

When his head lowered, she cupped his face, her fingertips resting lightly against his jaw to feel his mouth opening over hers. She concentrated on these tactile impressions—every movement, every contraction and sensation a physical expression of his desire. The flexing muscles. Each stroke of his tongue, cool and wet. His solid body pressing her down into the mattress.

The warm reality of Ben.

She wouldn’t think about her guilt, or about what she felt for him—whether he felt it, too. Whether each of them was here in the bed separately, unknown and unknowable, or whether they had something together that neither would admit.

She couldn’t think about it. Not without ruining everything.

May stroked her hands down Ben’s naked back and lived in the warm slide of his skin and the beat of her own heart. Touch by touch. Moment by moment. Breath after breath, as they roused to life and to the pleasure they could give each other.

There was only now.





CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE


He overdid it on breakfast. It was one of those things—he saw himself putting too much food in his basket at the market, watched himself calculating cooking times and thinking about garnishes, and he knew it was way over the top. He simply didn’t care.

May was leaving, and he was quietly flipping out.

Time had gone funny on him, moving in lurches and gasps. The seconds had ticked by slow as anything in bed this morning. In the dim light that snuck through the half-open bedroom door, he’d watched her face when he clasped her hands and lifted them above her head. He’d sunk inside her, captivated by her short, harsh breaths and the way her pleasure so closely resembled pain. Drawing it out, he’d kept his thrusts slow and controlled through her orgasm, then rolled onto his back and guided her hips in a rocking rhythm that kept him just shy of where he needed to be.

He’d stayed there with her for an eternity. A lifetime of May rising and falling over him, her soft skin beneath his hands, his mouth on her nipples, his fingers tracing the shapes of their joined bodies.

But afterward, time sped up. She got out of the bed, and he was somehow dressed, choosing produce at the market while she showered. He was behind the counter in the tiny kitchen, mixing dough while she talked on the phone. Chopping shallots while she bent over his laptop a few feet away.

And then time buckled again, and they were eating, side by side, his hair wet from the shower while the pans he’d used to make way too much food soaked in soapy water in the sink.