Page 84 of A Song for Another Woman

I put one hand along her jaw and make myself look at her before I close the distance. “I’m here,” I say.

Her eyes close. “Then kiss me like it.”

So I do.

The first touch of her mouth almost takes my knees out. For once, I have no poetry for it. I only have my hand shaking at her cheek, her fingers clutching the front of my shirt, and the rough sound that leaves me when she kisses me back.

She doesn’t come to me soft. She comes to me shaking. She comes with hurt still in her body.

I pull back first, barely. “Are you sure?”

Her lashes lift. “Cade.”

“I need to hear it.”

Something in her face changes. The old impatience is there, but underneath it is tenderness. “I’m sure. I want you. I want this.”

My chest aches. “If anything feels wrong, you tell me.”

“I will.”

“If you need to stop?—”

“I’ll tell you,” she says, her thumb brushing over my bottom lip. “But I don’t want to stop.”

I kiss her again, slower this time. She melts by degrees. Her shoulders loosen. Her hands slide up around my neck. When my arms go around her, I hold her carefully at first, but Emmy makes a frustrated sound and pulls me closer.

“I’m not made of glass,” she whispers against my mouth.

“No,” I say, my hands spreading over her back. “You never were.”

That undoes something in her. I feel it in the way she exhales, the way her forehead drops briefly to my chest, and the way she lets herself lean her weight into me.

I hold her there in the unfinished entry of the house I built from a promise I broke. Her belly rests between us, the truth of her warm through both our clothes.

I lower my hand to it again. “I missed this.”

Her breath stutters.

“I know I didn’t know,” I say, my voice rough. “I know. But I missed it anyway. Every morning. Every doctor visit. Every time you got scared. Every time you felt sick. Every time your body changed, and you had to look at it alone.”

Her fingers curl into my shirt.

“I’m going to hate that for the rest of my life,” I say. “But I’m here now. I won’t miss another moment you let me have.”

She looks up at me, lips swollen from my kiss. “You can’t promise perfect.”

“No.” I touch her cheek. “I can promise present.”

Her eyes close again. I kiss the corner of one, then the other, then her mouth, softly enough that she’s the one who deepens it. She’s the one who steps into me and takes what she wants.

I let her. I let her lead until her breathing turns uneven and her hands start searching, until she tugs at my shirt and laughs once against my mouth, wet and overwhelmed.

“There’s nowhere to sit,” she says.

I look around like I haven’t built every inch of this place and still failed to put a bed in it. Plastic sheeting covers the living room floor. Sawhorses stand where a couch will go someday. The kitchen has cabinets without doors, and the hallway is stacked with trim.

Then I look up toward the raised nook over the kitchen. The reading nook.