My stomach twists in a strange combination of relief and pain and I close my eyes, forcing away the image of his hands on her body, his mouth full of hers.
“After that, Perry came back here, and I moved to Nashville for school. We were together without ever really discussing it. She assumed we were, and I wanted to give her that. We saw each other maybe two times a year, and everything else I told you was true. She got to know me well on the trip, sure. But I was twenty-two. I was not the same man then that I am now and we grew apart very quickly.”
He lowers his voice, sounding pained. “And as a love affair, it wasn’t ever passionate, Mia. It was . . .” He curses, wiping a hand across his face. “Like in . . . how do you say it?” He looks at me and I look away, unable to resist the adorable way his lips push forward as he searches for words. “Cendrillon? The fairy tale with the stepmother?”
“Cinderella?” I guess.
He snaps, nodding, and continues, “Like in Cinderella. I think we both wanted the glass shoe to fit. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“She was the one I cheated on, two times. It is my most guilty thing, Mia. I realized I couldn’t do it anymore, that I’d done exactly what I always said I wouldn’t do, like my father, okay? I called to do the right thing for once and end things with her, and”—he pauses, taking a deep breath—“Perry couldn’t wait to tell me she turned down a design job in Nice so we could finally be together in Paris.”
I blink away, refusing to feel bad for him.
“So I . . .” He trails off, looking for the right word, and I’m more than happy to help him out here.
“You chickened out.”
He nods. “Okay, yes. And that really wasn’t fair to her. I should have ended things.”
“We both know I came here to escape my problems. But all this time you’re acting like some sort of benefactor, when you’re escaping, too. You used me to escape having to deal with her. You’re impulsive and do things without thinking, and, look, you married me. You convinced yourself you were being responsible, or doing the right thing by bringing me back, but you were really just making up for your past mistakes with Perry. I’m your way to make up for that. I’m your proof that you’re not your father.”
“Non,” he insists, voice as sharp as a blade. “I escaped into you, yes. But not because I was using you to prove something to myself, or make up for some mistake. I didn’t have to get your ticket; I didn’t have to track you down at the zoo. I know I’m not my father; it’s why I was disappointed with myself and how I treated Perry. I escaped into you because I fell in love with you.”
I let his words echo around the room until they’re drowned out by the sounds of horns and motorcycles and delivery trucks rumbling down narrow cobblestone streets late at night. I don’t even know what to think. My heart tells me to trust him, that he wasn’t intentionally keeping things from me for nefarious reasons, and that it really was just awkward and difficult to find the right time.
But my mind tells me it’s bullshit, and that if he wanted to develop real trust between us, he wouldn’t have used her nickname with me, he would have just told me who she was to him, that they lived together here, and how one of his closest friends is now his ex-fiancée. I want to shove him away for withholding information in our safest place: during role play, and the honesty it gave us.
It really isn’t that he has a past that bothers me. It’s the way he’s been keeping me in the dark, keeping me separate from the rest of his life, lying until he thinks we’ve reached some imagined milestone where he can be honest. And really, whether it’s intentional or not doesn’t matter. Maybe he didn’t think we would last past the summer, either.
“Have you felt real passion for me?” he asks quietly. “I’m suddenly very worried I’ve ruined this.”
After barely a breath, I nod, but in a way I worry I’m answering both questions: actual, and implied. The passion I feel for him is so intense it’s pulled me into his arms right now, even feeling as mad as I do. My skin seems to hum with warmth when I’m this close to him; his scent is overwhelming. But I’m also worried that he has ruined this.
“I’ve never felt this before,” he says into my hair. “Love like this.”
But my mind keeps looping back to the same question, the same dark betrayal. “Ansel?”
“Hmm?” His lips brush over my temple.
“How could you tell her about my accident? What made you think it was okay to share that with her?”
Ansel freezes beside me. “I did not.”
“She knew,” I say, growing angry again. “Ansel, she knew I’d been hit. She knew about my leg.”
“Not from me,” he insists. “Mia, I swear. If she heard anything about you—other than your name, and that you’re my wife—it would be from Oliver or Finn. They’re all still friends. This has been so weird for everyone.” He searches my eyes, lowering his voice when he says, “I don’t know why she talked to you. I don’t know why she went up to you tonight; she knows I would never be okay with her doing that.”
“You talked to her on the phone,” I remind him. “She came here in the middle of the night. You met her for lunch when you were even too busy to stay for breakfast with me. Maybe she doesn’t think the two of you are really done.”
He takes a few seconds to respond, but his hand spreads possessively across my breastbone, thumb sweeping up to the hollow of my throat. “She knows we’re done. But I’m not going to pretend like it was an easy breakup. It hasn’t been easy for her to know you’re here with me.”
There’s a softness in his voice I can’t handle right now, some sympathy for her and what she’s going through that makes me feel insane. Somewhere in my rational brain I’m glad he cares how this is for her; it means he’s not a complete asshole. It means he’s a good guy. But really, he fucked up so enormously, I don’t have the bandwidth to admire him while I’m still this angry.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t worry too much, I’m pretty sure she came out with the upper hand tonight.” I push him away when he reaches for me.
“Mia, that’s not—”
“Just stop.”
He grabs my arm when I begin to walk away and spins me, pressing my back to the wall and staring me down with a look so intense it causes goose bumps to rise along my skin. “I don’t want this to be hard on either of you,” he says in a deliberately patient voice, “and I know the way I’ve handled it was all wrong.”
I close my eyes, pressing my lips together to quell the vibrating hum I feel at his firm touch. I want to shove him, pull his hair, feel the weight of him pinning me down.
“I followed you out of the apartment,” he reminds me, bending to kiss my jaw. “I know it isn’t my job to make sure she’s okay anymore. But if what she feels for me is even a fraction of what I feel for you, I want to be careful with her heart, because I can’t imagine what I would do if you left me.”
It seems impossible that words alone could make me feel like my chest is caving in.
He licks my earlobe, murmuring, “It would wreck me. I need to know that you’re okay right now.”
His hands grow busy on my body in a tight, desperate sort of way. Maybe to distract me, maybe to reassure himself. He works his way down my front, over my thighs, bunching my skirt in his fist as he pulls it up over my hips.
“Ansel . . .” I warn, but even as I turn my head away from his lips, I tilt my pelvis into his touch. My hands form fists at my sides, wanting more, and rougher. Needing reassurance.
“Are you okay?” he asks, kissing my ear.
I don’t turn away when he kisses my chin again, and not even when he moves higher, eyes wide and careful as he kisses my mouth. But when his hand moves between my legs, and he growls, “I’m going to make you so wet,” as his fingers slip beneath my underwear, I find the resolve to push his arm away.
“
You can’t fix this with sex.”
He pulls back, eyes wide in confusion. “What?”
I’m incredulous. “You think you can just calm me down by making me come?”
He looks baffled, nearly angry for the first time. “If it calms you down, if it makes you feel better, then who the hell cares how it happens?” His cheeks bloom with a heated blush. “Isn’t that what we’ve been doing all this time? Finding a way to be married, to be intimate even when things are scary or new or just too fucking surreal to process?”
I’m thrown, because he’s right. It’s exactly what we’ve been doing, and I do want to be pulled out of this moment. Distraction, coping, muddling through—whatever it is, I want it. I want to stop talking about all of this. I want him to push away all the doubts in my head and give me the part of him that only I get to see now.
“Fine. Distract me,” I dare him, teeth clenched. “Let’s see if you can make me forget how mad I am.”
It takes him a moment to process what I’ve said before he leans in again, teeth grazing my jaw. I exhale through my nose before my head falls back against the wall and I give in. His hands return to my waist, rougher now, yanking my shirt up and over my head before he works my skirt down my hips and into a puddle on the floor.
But even as he cups me in his hand, sucking in a jagged breath through his teeth and whispering, “Tu es parfaite,” I can’t touch him back with any sort of tenderness. I feel punitive and selfish and still so angry. The combination pulls a tight choking sound from my mouth and his hand stills where he’d been pushing my underwear aside.
“Be angry,” he rasps. “Show me what angry looks like.”
It’s a beat before the words bubble up, but when they come growling out, it doesn’t sound like me: “Your mouth.”
I unleash the girl who lets herself feel anger, who can punish. I shove his chest hard, both palms flat to pectorals, and he stumbles back, lips parted and eyes wide with thrill. I push him again, and his knees meet the edge of the bed and he crumples backward, scooting up to the headboard and watching me stalk him, climb on him until my hips are level with his face and I can reach down and grab a fistful of his hair.
“I’m not okay,” I tell him, holding him back as he tries to push forward, to kiss me, lick me, maybe even bite me.
“I know,” he says, eyes dark and urgent. “I know.”
I lower my hips and hear a primitive cry tear from my throat as his open mouth makes contact with my clit and he sucks, lifting his arms and wrapping them in tight bands around my hips. He’s wild and hungry, letting out perfect pleading growls and satisfied moans when I begin to rock and ride him, my fist in his hair.
His mouth is both soft and strong, but he’s letting me control everything—the speed and pressure and it’s so good but God, I want you in me so deep I feel you in my throat.
Ansel laughs against my skin and I realize I’ve said this out loud. Irritation washes over me like a heated blush and I pull away, humiliated. Vulnerable.
“No,” he whispers. “No, no. Viens par ici.” Come here.
I make him work for it, fingers coaxing and his soft pleading noises until finally he pulls my hips back down and urges me with fingers pressed into my flesh to chase my pleasure again, to give him this in this twisted game of me giving him what he needs by riding his face.
I’m prickling everywhere—along my neck and down my arms, feeling hypersensitive and overheated. But the sensitivity is nearly unbearable where he’s licking me, because it’s too good, it’s nearly impossible that I can be this close, so soon
so soon
so fucking soon
but I am.
The top half of my body falls forward, fingers white-knuckling the headboard, and I’m coming, screaming, pressing so hard into his mouth I don’t know how he can breathe but he’s savage beneath me—still—hands gripping my hips and not letting me budge for a second until my muscles go lax and he can feel my orgasm subside against his lips.
I feel ravaged and worshipped as I slip, boneless, to the bed. I feel his fear and his love and his panic and finally, I let loose the sob that’s been held back in my throat for what feels like hours. In a quiet rush, I know we’re both sure of one thing: I’m leaving.
He moves to my ear, and his voice is so jagged it’s barely recognizable when he asks, “Do you ever feel like your heart is twisted inside your chest, and somebody has their fist wrapped around it, squeezing?”
“Yes,” I whisper, closing my eyes. I can’t see him like this, the sadness I’m sure I’ll see on his face.
“Mia? Mia, I’m so sorry.”
“I know.”
“Tell me you still . . . like me.”
But I can’t. My anger doesn’t work that way. So instead of waiting for me to answer, he bends to kiss my ear, my shoulder, whispering into my neck words I don’t understand.
Slowly, we catch our breath and his mouth finds its way to mine. He kisses me forever like this—and I let him—it’s the only way I can tell him I love him even as I’m also saying goodbye.
IT SEEMS TO go against every instinct I have to be the one getting out of bed first, and dressing in the dark while he sleeps. As quietly as I can, I pull my clothes from the dresser and dump them into my suitcase. My passport is just where he said it would be—in the top drawer of the dresser—and something about this tears at the thin lining still holding me together. I leave most of my toiletries behind; packing them would be loud and I don’t want to wake him. I’m going to seriously miss my fancy new face cream but I don’t think I would be able to walk away from him if he was awake, watching me silently, and especially if he was trying to talk me out of this.
It’s a trickle of hesitation I should listen to—maybe a message that I’m not sure this is the best idea I’ve ever had—but I don’t. I barely even look over at him—still mostly clothed and sprawled out on top of the covers—while I’m packing and dressing and searching the desk in the living room for a piece of paper and a pen.
Because once I step back into the bedroom and I do see him, I can’t imagine looking away. Only now do I realize I hadn’t taken the time to appreciate how ridiculously hot he looked last night. The deep blue button-down shirt—slim-cut to fit the wide stretch of his chest, the narrow dip of his waist—is unbuttoned just beneath the hollow of his throat, and my tongue feels thick with the need to bend down, suck on those favorite transitions of mine: neck to chest, chest to shoulder. His jeans are worn and perfect, faded over time in all the best, familiar places. At the thigh, over the button fly. He didn’t even take off his favorite brown belt before falling asleep—it’s just hanging open, his pants unbuttoned and slung low on his hips—and suddenly my fingers itch to pull the leather free of the loops, to see and touch and taste his skin just one more time.
I probably can’t, but it feels like I can see the trip of his pulse in his throat, imagine the warm taste of his neck on my tongue. I know how his sleepy hands would weave into my hair as I worked his boxers down his hips. I even know the desperate relief I would see in his eyes if I woke him up right now—not to tell him goodbye, but to make love one last time. To forgive him with words. No doubt true makeup sex with Ansel would be so good I’d forget, while he was touching me, that there was ever any distance between us at all.
And now that I’m here, struggling to be quiet and leave without waking him, it fully registers that I can’t touch him again before I go. I swallow back a tight, heavy lump in my throat, a sob I think would escape in a sharp gasp, like steam under pressure, pushed from a teapot. The pain is like a fist to my stomach, punching me over and over until I want to punch it back.
I’m an idiot.
But damn. So is he.
It takes so many long, painful seconds for me to pull my eyes away from where he lies and down to the pen and paper in my hands.
What the hell am I sup
posed to write here? It’s not goodbye, most likely. If I know him at all—and I do, no matter how small a drop that knowledge felt last night—he won’t leave the rest of this to phone calls and emails. I’ll see him again. But I’m leaving while he sleeps, and given the reality of his job, I may not see him for months. This isn’t exactly the right moment for a see-you-soon note, anyway.
So I opt for the easiest, and the most honest, even if my heart seems to twist into a knot in my chest as I write it.
This isn’t never. It’s just not now.
All my like,
Mia
I really need to figure out my own messes before I blame him for shoving his in the proverbial box, and keeping them under his proverbial bed.
But fuck, did I want this to be now, yes, forever.
Chapter TWENTY
IT’S STILL DARK when I step out onto the sidewalk, and the lobby door swings closed behind me. A taxi waits, headlamps extinguished while it idles at the curb, its shape swathed in a circle of artificial yellow light from the streetlamp above. The driver glances at me from over the top of his magazine, expression sour, face lined in what appears to be a permanent look of distaste.
I’m suddenly aware of how I must look—hair a mess and last night’s makeup still smudged around my eyes, dark jeans, dark sweater—like some sort of criminal slinking off into the shadows. The phrase “fleeing the scene of the crime” rings through my head and I sort of hate how accurate it feels.
He steps from the cab and meets me at the back of the car, trunk already open and smoldering cigarette suspended from his frowning mouth.
“American?” he asks, his accent as thick as the puffs of smoke that escape with every syllable.
Irritation grates at my nerves but I only nod, not bothering to ask how he knew or why because I already know: I stick out like a sore thumb.
Either he doesn’t notice my lack of response or he doesn’t care because he takes my suitcase, lifts it without effort, and deposits it in the trunk of the car.
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