Page 21 of Brother in Law with Benefits

Sophie closes her eyes.

I close mine.

We stand there for one second with our foreheads almost touching and our hands still linked and the moment exactly one inch from being something else.

"I'll go," Sophie says, very quietly, and laughs. She squeezes my hand and lets go.

She's already moving toward the stairs.

I stand in the kitchen alone, hands at my sides, and listen to Sophie's voice from upstairs talking my mother through the next wave.

I pour out the rest of my cold coffee and stand at the sink for a minute, looking at nothing in particular, turning over the shape of what almost happened and what it means that some part of me is almost grateful my mother interrupted it.

An inch further and there would have been no pretending this is manageable.

An inch further and I'd have known, definitively, instead of just suspecting, that three months was never going to be enough.

7

Sophie

I'm sitting on Grant's bed when I hear the truck pull into the driveway.

Footsteps on the stairs. Coming closer. Stopping outside the door.

The handle turns. Grant walks in.

He sees me and stops.

Just stops — like he's making sure I'm real, like he was expecting to open a door onto a normal afternoon and I've disrupted the premise.

"Hi," I say.

"Hi."

He closes the door. Locks it. Crosses the room in three strides and kisses me.

It's different than the first time. Less frantic. More certain, like he's been thinking about this, like he's been thinking about exactly this and now he's arrived.

His hands cup my face, tilting my head back so he can deepen the kiss. I make a sound against his mouth that I'd describe as undignified but he seems to have a different opinion about, because he smiles.

"Missed you," he murmurs.

"It's been two days."

"Long two days."

His mouth moves to my neck and I tilt my head and think here we go, I'm completely done for — not as a complaint, more as an observation, the way you note weather.

"We have time," he says against my skin. "Hours. No interruptions."

"Patty's downstairs."

"She always naps after appointments. And these walls are thick." He pulls back to look at me. His eyes are dark. "Thick enough that you can be as loud as you want."

Oh.

"Grant—"