Page 142 of The Lies We Play

Creed

Then . , .

I hear the door.

I assume it is Liv, who’s had a copy of my key since mid-December.

I’m in the bedroom putting socks into a duffel bag because socks are the part of packing where my brain stops working. Five identical pairs of black socks. Two pairs of white. All of them suddenly requiring more thought than a defensive read on a three-man rush.

“Creed, are you home?” I hear her call.

“In the bedroom.”

Her footsteps cross the apartment, then stop at the doorway.

“You’re just packing,” she says.

I look up.

She’s in jeans and a sweater of mine—the navy crewneck I lent her in late November and haven’t asked for back. Her hair is up in the slip knot I have learned, over four months, to recognize as either academic distress, emotional avoidance, or both. She has the keys to my apartment in her hand and a tote bag on her shoulder that is empty because she is here to fill it.

The keys catch my attention first.

Not the sweater.

Not her mouth.

The keys.

Small, ordinary metal in her hand, proof that she can come in without asking, proof that I wanted her to be able to. There is something dangerous about that kind of ordinariness. It gets under the skin faster than sex. It says, ‘I trust you with my door.’ It says, ‘you belong here enough to interrupt me while I’m losing a war with socks.’

I have, in the four months I’ve known Livia Sabine Crane, kissed her at her own door on a night a man named Halston Saint Claire walked into our lives. I kissed her on the roof. I kissed her in the kitchen while the kettle screamed behind us, and neither of us moved to stop it. I kissed her in a cab two weeks ago when we shared one from the Brewers Table because the snow was too deep to walk in.

Every kiss has taught me something worse.

That restraint is not the absence of wanting.

It is wanting with both hands behind your back.

She puts the tote bag on the bed.

Then she walks to me and rises on her tiptoes, kissing my jaw.

It is not enough.

My body decides that before my head can pretend we’re being reasonable.

I bend slightly and take her into my arms. She comes easily. Too easily. Like she has been waiting for me to make the space and is irritated I took this long. My hand slides to the back of her sweater—my sweater—and I feel the warmth of her through it, the small give of her body as she leans in.

I kiss her.

She inhales against me, and the sound goes straight through whatever discipline I walked in here wearing. Her hands grab the front of my shirt. Not carefully. Not politely. She kisses me back like she has a list of reasons not to and has decided, for once, that lists are for cowards.

There is something eternal in it.

A continuity.

Like the roof led to the bar, and the bar led to Halston, and Halston led us here, and every small almost became this mouth, this room, this hand on my shirt, this girl in my sweater trying to kiss me with the full force of everything she has not said yet.