Page 114 of Bad Words

The silence in my apartment grew louder, then differentiated. I could hear the distant tick of my bedroom radiator, the gentle hum of the kitchen light. The faintest strain of a violin was seeping up from a different floor.

“You—you two don’t talk much about work, then,” I said.

“No, I meant we haven’t spoken. We went on a couple of dates, but it didn’t work out.”

The words reverberated through my body. I didn’t lift my gaze. I entered Navarro interview as the title of the voice memo and pressed Save. “Oh,” I said, trying to sound like myself, but something seemed to be accelerating in me, vibrating, as though I were pressed back against a seat on a high-speed train.

I looked up and found Parker watching me. My breath lodged in my throat.

Don’t, I thought. Nothing had changed. Yet everything felt different.

With a titanic effort I stood and took a few steps away from him, vaguely in the direction of the dining table. I said, “I suppose you’ve had a lot of time to write, then.”

I heard the sound of his chair as he stood, too. “Yeah, enough to scratch the itch.”

“This new project.” I picked up my near-empty wineglass from the table. “Is it another story about a critic who gets what she deserves?”

Parker stopped at the opposite corner of the table, one hand curved gently over its edge. “It’s not.” He paused. “Why? Is that what I should be writing?”

I could only think, He isn’t leaving.

We’d finished the interview, and he wasn’t going to see anybody else, and he wasn’t saying it was late and he should get home. Instead, he was continuing to watch me, very still.

I began to feel as though a hand had closed around my heart, squeezing every time it beat.

“I don’t know,” I said. “The descriptions were interesting, last time.”

“Which ones?” he said quietly.

I held my glass to my lips but didn’t drink. “You tell me.” My throat was so tight, I didn’t know how I was still speaking.

Parker took a step toward me and my heart began to speed.

It doesn’t mean anything, I told myself, clinging to anything that would guard me. He would take the glass from my hands and pass into the kitchen. That was what was happening, not what I wanted.

“I did my best,” he said. “But I had to imagine a lot of the details.”

With another step he closed the distance between us.

“Like what,” I said.

He took the wineglass from my hand, set it on the table beside me, and didn’t step back.

I finally let my gaze rise then, from the neck of his shirt to his eyes, fixed intently on mine.

“This place,” he said softly. He paused, his eyes straying down to my mouth, his head dipping by a fraction of an inch. “Your perfume.”

If I had ever felt this way in my life, I couldn’t remember it, like my torso had filled with surging waves, like every sensation was a static shock.

I let my head tilt back until it gently met the wall. I turned my chin half an inch to one side.

I watched something change in Parker’s eyes, a dark glaze that made heat sear across my abdomen. He lifted his hand and slowly, deliberately brushed back my hair, his fingertips skimming my neck. Then he leaned down and set his mouth to the corner of my jaw and drew a quiet, shaky inhalation.

Tingling spiraled down across my collarbones. I imagined how his lips would feel, the graze of his touch. “Selina,” he said, just beneath my ear, and then his other hand found my waist, and I turned my face toward him, and his mouth pressed deeply to mine.

My eyes fell shut. My mind hummed.

Parker moved closer, his hand tightening in my hair.