Chapter 7: We really shouldn't

(Sienna)

"You forgot about him, didn’t you?" Maya said.

Not an accusation. Just a fact, delivered quietly, which was somehow worse.

"Not forgot," I said. "I just—" The sentence didn't have an ending that helped me. "There wasn't time to—"

"Sienna."

"I know."

Shit. I screwed up. Big time. And I had no words to make it right.

“Please tell me that you were at least in an off-again situation before today?” She asked then. Because she was trying to give me an out for forgetting all about the fallout being a replacement bride at my sister’s wedding would cause with my on-again, off-again boyfriend of three years.

I nodded eagerly. Tragically.

Maya looked at me with no mercy.

"He was in the cathedral. Left more or less the same time Celeste did."

Which was long before we said “I do”.

The thought of stately Oliver Atwood, who only let me call him Ollie, sitting in a pew, processing the same wreckage as two hundred other guests, settled over me like cold water.

He wouldn't be shouting. That wasn't Ollie. He would be very still, and his face would give almost nothing away, and privately he would be taking everything apart with that precise, methodical mind of his, looking for the logic in something that had none.

"Shit," I said out loud this time.

Something in my throat pulled tight.

"I can't explain it," I said, "in a way that sounds like anything other than what it is."

Maya was quiet for a moment.

"What is it?"

I looked at the crack in the courtyard paving near my left foot.

"A series of decisions I made when I wasn't thinking about him at all."

The words settled between us. Honest in a way that didn't feel good.

Maya exhaled slowly. Then, because she was Maya and the silence had gone on long enough: "Right. Okay. So your life is on fire." She looked sideways at me. "Any upsides to this arrangement, or are we just cataloguing the damage?"

I almost laughed. Almost.

"I mean." I stared at the middle distance. "One year married to a man who—" I stopped.

"Who what?"

The words came out before the filter engaged.

"Who's hung like a horse and fucks like a demon, so. There are worse prisons."

Silence. Maya had gone completely still, which on Maya looked anatomically wrong.

"Sorry." Her voice was very careful. "How do you know that?"

The courtyard felt suddenly smaller.

"Sienna?"

I said nothing.

Her eyes widened, slow and incremental, the way understanding arrived when it was too large to land all at once.

"When," she said, "did you—"

"Maya—"

"When."

I closed my eyes.

"Heathrow Airport Hotel," I said. "Six weeks ago."

The silence that followed was the loudest thing I'd heard all day.

****

The penthouse was exactly what I expected. Clean lines. Expensive restraint. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over a city that had no idea my life had just been disassembled and reassembled in the wrong order.

I set my bag down near the entrance and didn't move further in. Adrian loosened his tie without looking at me.

"Drink?" he said.

"Please."

He poured without asking what I wanted. I noted that and said nothing, but images of those hands on my thighs skimmed my thoughts the moment I took the glass and our fingers brushed against each other.

I inhaled slowly and told myself to calm down.

The silence between us had a texture. Not hostile nor comfortable. We were two people who had seen each other entirely undone and were now pretending, with considerable effort, to be strangers.

Which we were.

Which was the problem.

I moved toward the windows. London spread below, indifferent and glittering.

"I saw you," he said quietly, suddenly a lot closer that I thought he was. "I saw you and everything I'd prepared for the day stopped being relevant."

No smoothness to it. No lead-up. Direct. Just like in the airport lounge.

Ollie would have built an argument. A sequence of cause and effect that absolved everyone. Adrian simply said it.

I didn't know what to do with that.

The silence stretched. Thinner now. He hadn't moved obviously, but the distance felt smaller.

I noticed his intoxicating, expensive scent. The veins in his strong forearms where he had rolled up his sleeves. The heat rolling off him unapologetically.

I shouldn’t have noticed any of it.

"You told me at the altar I'd invite you in tonight." I met his eyes. "You don't get to decide that."

"No," he said. "I don't."

Quiet. Immediate.

He set his glass down and the movement drew my attention to his hands, and I had a sudden vivid memory of exactly what those hands were capable of when wrapped around my thighs.

I looked up.

He was watching me with unguarded lust. It did something to the pit of my stomach.

The city hummed beyond the glass. The room had gone very still. He was close enough now that I could see the faint line of tension in his jaw, the way his gaze had settled on my face with that focused, unhurried attention he'd had in a hotel room six weeks ago.

We shouldn't.

The thought arrived clearly and did absolutely nothing useful.

His head tilted slightly, almost imperceptible as he closed the last of scrap of distance, and I felt my breath change before I'd made any decision about it.

His mouth found mine.

Warm. Certain. The same way he'd kissed me in that hotel corridor.

We really shouldn’t.

I kissed him back.

His phone rang.

Neither of us moved. The sound simply existed around us.

Then he answered. "Jolene."

I watched his face.

That was what I'd remember. The change before he said a word. Jaw tightening. Something warm becoming unreadable in a single breath.

He listened. Then: "Fuck."

Whatever had existed in the room sixty seconds ago was gone.

He looked at me. "Check your phone."