Page 118 of Never Alone
I stood under the water for longer than I needed to.
I didn't think about Nicholas. I didn't let myself. I thought about Tessa in the kitchen, in one of my T-shirts, with her hair down. I thought about her hand on my jaw at the door. I thought about the way she'd kissed me—full, no hesitation, the kiss of a woman who had decided this was hers now.
By the time I came out, I had Nicholas back in the box where he belonged.
Tessa had made eggs and toast. She'd put a mug of coffee at my place. She watched me eat the way she watched everything—present, attentive, the small smile that was hers for me and not for anybody else.
I finished. I set the fork down.
"Tessa."
"Yeah."
"Come here."
She came around the table.
I caught her hand on the way past and pulled her into the bedroom.
I had thirty-four years of waiting in me.
I had Tessa in the morning, in our bedroom, in nothing but the T-shirt that had been mine and was hers now. I had the way the curtain made the light gold on the floor. I had the bed unmade because we'd left it unmade together, and her sidesmelled like her, and my side smelled like her, and there was no part of the bed that wasn't ours.
I had her.
I pulled the shirt over her head.
She'd had her hair down at the door this morning. She'd been pinning it up since the bakery—pulling it back into a knot at the base of her neck the way she pulled all of herself back, the way a woman who'd spent eight months making herself smaller pulled herself back without thinking. She'd stopped doing it with me. Sometime in the last week, she'd stopped doing it with me.
She wasn't pinning it up now.
It fell down around her shoulders when I lifted the shirt. Honey-blonde, a little wavy where she'd slept on it, longer than I'd realized when it was up. I put my hand in it and felt the weight of it on my palm, and held the back of her head and kissed her like a man who'd been waiting thirty-four years to be allowed to.
Her mouth was warm. She tasted like coffee and like Tessa. Her lips parted under mine, and her hand came up to my jaw and stayed there. She made a small sound into my mouth—not the sound, never the sound, a small one—and I felt it on my tongue, and my skin went hot all over.
I pulled back to look at her.
She had a smile I hadn't seen on her face before. Slow. Pleased. The smile of a woman who wasn't holding anything in.
I'd been seeing the controlled version of her face for six weeks. I hadn't known there was another version.
There was another version.
"Cole."
"Yeah."
"Slow."
I'd been planning to.
I went slow. I put her on the bed, and I went slow.
I kissed the place at her throat where her pulse was. I kissed the line of her collarbone—she had a small cluster of freckles there I'd been wanting to map. I kissed her shoulder. The hollow under her ear. The faint freckle high on her cheekbone I'd noticed across the kitchen for weeks and not let myself look at.
Her skin was warm. Soft in the way a woman's skin is soft when she's lived with another body close to hers all her life and never been touched the way she deserved to be touched. I tried to touch her that way now. Slow. With my mouth. With my fingertips. With my whole hand, flat, at the small of her back where it fit.
"Don't stop."
