CHAPTER 8: No Excuse

She had a perfectly good reason to go back to her own bed that night.

Her apartment was ready. Her keys were at reception. Her sheets were clean and her pillows were hers and her routine — the one she had spent three years perfecting — was waiting for her exactly as she had left it, patient and undisturbed, twelve steps across the hall.

She stood in the bathroom brushing her teeth and looked at herself in the mirror and had a very reasonable internal conversation about all of this.

Then she spat, rinsed, turned off the light, and walked past her own door without slowing down.

She did not knock. She just opened his door — it was unlocked, it was always unlocked, she had stopped thinking about what that meant — and he was already in bed, one lamp on, reading something on his phone that he set face down the moment she came in.

He did not say anything. Neither did she.

She crossed the room and got into his bed and he reached over and turned off the lamp and that was that.

Except it wasn’t.

She lay in the dark and she was very aware of him beside her — his warmth, his breathing, the fact that there was no flood tonight, no burst pipe, no reasonable explanation she could offer herself or anyone else for why she was here.

She was here because she wanted to be.

That was the whole truth of it and she was done arguing with it.

She turned toward him.

He was already facing her. Of course he was. In the dark she could just make out the line of his jaw, the quiet patience of him, that stillness he carried that she had spent weeks resenting and now found herself reaching for.

“I don’t have a reason,” she said quietly. “In case you were wondering.”

“I wasn’t wondering,” he said. “I just wanted to be here.”

“I know.”

“You always know,” she said, and it came out softer than she intended, without any of the edge she might have put on it a month ago.

“You’re not that complicated,” he said. And then, before she could respond to that — “I mean that as a compliment.”

“How is that a compliment?”

“Because complicated usually means someone’s hiding something.” A pause. “You’re not hiding anything. You just needed time to stop pretending you weren’t.”

She lay with that for a moment.

It was annoyingly accurate. She was a therapist and she could not have said it better herself and she found that both irritating and deeply, quietly settling.

“I hate that you’re right,” she said.

“I know that too,” he said, and she could hear the smile in it.

She closed the distance between them.

It was different this time.

She kissed him first, slow and intentional. Damien met her with the same deliberate pace, his hand sliding up her back under her shirt, warm palm against bare skin. They undressed each other without hurry — her shirt lifted over her head, his joggers pushed down, until there was nothing between them.

He rolled her onto her back and settled between her thighs, kissing her deeply as he did. His mouth moved from her lips to her jaw, then down her neck. When he took her nipple into his mouth, sucking gently, Olivia arched with a soft moan, her fingers threading through his hair. He spent long minutes there, tasting her, before continuing lower.

He kissed down her stomach, then lower still. When his mouth found her center, Olivia’s breath hitched. He licked her slowly, thoroughly, savoring her, his tongue circling her clit with patient precision until her hips were rolling against his face and her hands were gripping the sheets. He slid two fingers inside her, curling them just right, and stayed there until she came hard against his tongue, gasping his name into the dark.

Only then did he move back up her body. He hovered over her, eyes locked on hers as he positioned himself at her entrance. He pushed in slowly, inch by inch, letting her feel every thick ridge of him until he was buried to the hilt. Olivia wrapped her legs around his waist, pulling him deeper.

They moved together in a slow, steady rhythm. Damien kept his forehead pressed to hers, watching her face as he thrust deep and unhurried. Every stroke was deliberate, intimate. He kissed her through it — slow, open-mouthed kisses that matched the pace of their bodies.

He shifted slightly, angling his hips so he hit that perfect spot inside her with every thrust. Olivia’s nails dug into his back as pleasure built again. When she came a second time, clenching hard around him, he groaned her name and followed right after, burying himself deep as he spilled inside her.

They stayed connected for a long moment, breathing each other in, before he gently pulled out and rolled onto his back, pulling her with him.

Afterward she lay with her head on his chest and his heartbeat under her ear and the city outside doing its usual indifferent thing and she felt — settled. That was the word. Not happy exactly, though she was that too. Just settled. Like something that had been slightly off-kilter for a very long time had quietly, without announcement, found its level.

“You’re thinking again,” he said.

“I’m always thinking.”

“What is it this time?”

She considered her answer properly. Honestly.

“That I should have stopped pretending sooner,” she said. “I wasted a lot of mornings being annoyed at you.”

He was quiet for a moment. “You weren’t annoyed.”

“I was absolutely annoyed.”

“You were annoyed at yourself,” he said. “I was just convenient to blame.”

She opened her mouth and closed it again.

He was right. Obviously he was right. She had known it since approximately Chapter 3 and had simply chosen not to examine it.

“You’re very irritating,” she said.

“You’re in my bed,” he pointed out.

“That’s irrelevant.”

“Is it?”

She smiled against his chest. He felt it — she knew because his arm tightened slightly around her, that small quiet pull that said things he did not bother putting into words because he did not need to.

She closed her eyes.

Outside London hummed on, grey and continuous, completely unaware that somewhere on the third floor of a building in East London a woman had walked past her own front door without slowing down — and for the first time in a very long time had not second-guessed herself once.

No flood.

No excuse.

Just want.

That was enough.

End of Chapter 8