Page 100 of Mile High Ex's Dad
“Of course you did.”
“Are you accusing me of generosity?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
His eyes stay on me. “Take your time.”
I sip the champagne just to have something to do with my hands.
It’s good. Cold. Dry. The bubbles go straight to my head, or maybe that’s just him. The room feels warmer than it should. My body feels strangely loose and alert at the same time, as if every nerve in me has decided to wake up together.
He’s looking at me like I’m the only thing in the room worth seeing.
I’ve never been looked at that way before.
Wanted, yes. Desired in pieces, maybe. Ethan wanted parts of me once, or the version of me he thought he could improve, reshape, make smaller and prettier and more convenient. Even when he touched me in the beginning, it always felt like something he was measuring. Assessing. Taking.
This is different. This man is looking at me like nothing about me needs fixing before he puts his hands on me.
The thought lands low in my body and stays there.
I should be careful. Instead, something in me breaks.
Maybe it’s the champagne. Maybe it’s exhaustion. Maybe it’s months of feeling ugly and abandoned and humiliated after Spain, after Ethan, after watching him slide into a new life with a blonde woman like I was a shirt he’d outgrown.
Or maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe I just want him.
I set down my glass.
He notices at once.
I don’t let myself think. If I think, I’ll stop. And I don’t want to stop.
I lean forward and kiss him.
For one half second, he goes very still. Then he puts his glass down, catches the back of my neck, and kisses me back so hard my breath leaves me.
It’s not polite. Not tentative. He kisses like a man who made up his mind the second I touched him and has no interest in pretending otherwise. His mouth opens over mine, deep and hungry and controlled in a way that somehow makes it worse. Better. My whole body lights up at once.
I make a small sound into his mouth and feel him smile against me.
Then he stands, reaches behind him, and locks the cabin door. The click of it goes straight through me. When he turns back, I’m already waiting for him.
God. What is wrong with me?
Nothing, some reckless part of me answers. Nothing at all.
He comes back to me slowly, watching my face, giving me every chance to panic or pull away. I don’t. I can’t. My body has already made the decision.
His hand slides into my hair and he kisses me again, slower this time, but only at first. Then I open for him and something changes. The restraint is still there, but now it’s carrying heat under it, and I feel the full force of it in the way he takes his time with my mouth, in the way his thumb strokes under my jaw, in the way he keeps me exactly where he wants me without making me feel trapped.
I’ve never been kissed like this. Not by anyone.
I grew up learning not to expect care to come easily. Not to depend on it when it did. An orphan learns certain things early. How to read moods. How to stay useful. How to make herself easy enough to keep around. Even later, even as an adult, some part of me was always waiting for warmth to be temporary.
But with him, for these few impossible minutes in the sky, I don’t feel temporary.
His devotion is in the attention. In the way he touches me like there’s nowhere else he needs to be. In the way he keeps looking at my face, as if what I feel matters as much as what he wants.
