Chapter 4: He kissed me.

DAISY ❀

Ivy knocked twice before she walked in, which was her version of privacy.

I was on the bed with the television going and a bowl of popcorn I had barely touched, half watching a reality show I couldn’t follow because my mind kept drifting to places I didn’t want it to go. She leaned against the doorframe in a yellow dress that meant she had somewhere to be.

“I have a date at five,” she said, and her voice carried that particular apologetic warmth. 

“Will you be okay here alone?”

I muted the television. 

“Ivy. Go.”

“I just want to make sure…”

“I am a grown woman,” I said. “I will watch television or take a walk around the compound or do absolutely nothing productive and I will be completely fine. Go on your date.”

She chewed her lip. “You can call me. Any time. I don’t care what we’re doing.”

“I know.” I got up and crossed the room and hugged her properly, 

“Thank you for caring about me this much. Now go. Wear the gold earrings, not the silver.”

She pulled back and pointed at me. “See, this is why you’re my best friend.” She disappeared to change her earrings and twenty minutes later the front door closed behind her and the apartment went quiet.

Later that day I took a walk. I promised her down the corridor, around the compound, back upstairs. I made myself a cup of tea I didn’t finish. I went back to the reality show and watched three episodes without absorbing any of them. By eight o’clock I had migrated to the living room with a bottle of Ivy’s red wine because one glass felt like the reasonable solution to an evening that was starting to feel too much like the evenings at my parents’ house.

 Empty. 

Echoing.

One glass became two.

I was halfway through the second when the front door opened and Dexter walked in.

He stopped when he saw me. Jacket in hand, tie loosened, the particular look of a man whose evening had not gone the way he planned. He glanced at the wine bottle on the coffee table, then at me, then at the television.

“Ivy’s not here,” I said, because someone had to say something.

“I can see that.” He set his jacket over the arm of the chair. “Date cancelled.”

“Mine too,” I said, and then realized what that sounded like. “I mean  I wasn’t on a date”. And I didn’t plan any date either, I said. 

“I meant my evening… My evening was cancelled.”

The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. 

“Right.”

He disappeared into the kitchen and came back with a beer and stood there for a moment looking at the couch like he was doing mathematics. The apartment had exactly one television. The couch had exactly enough space for two people who were not trying to sit close.

He sat at the far end.

I moved my feet to make room. He didn’t acknowledge it. I didn’t acknowledge that I’d done it. We both looked at the television like it was very interesting.

Ten minutes passed.

“This show is terrible,” he said.

“Completely,” I agreed. I hadn’t changed the channel.

He reached forward and refilled my glass without asking. Just picked up the bottle and topped it off and set it back down and returned to his beer like that was a normal thing to do. I looked at the glass. Looked at him. He was watching the screen.

I drank

By the third glass the edges of everything had gone softer.

We had talked, actually talked, about nothing important at first. The terrible show. A case he wouldn’t name specifics of but described in broad terms that made me laugh twice. I told him about a shoot I did last year where the client hated every single photograph and then called six months later to say they were her favorites.

He laughed at that. A real one, low and unhurried.

I hadn’t heard him laugh like that before. At some point the show ended and neither of us changed the channel and the next thing was something quieter, a film neither of us chose deliberately, just what came on. He smelled like cedar and something underneath it that was just him.

I noticed that. I wished I hadn’t.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

“You’re going to regardless,” he said.

“Why do you do it?” I turned to look at him. He was already looking at me, had been for a moment, I realized. “The women. The flings. All of it. You’re not stupid, Dexter. You know exactly what you’re doing to them.”

Something shifted in his face. He was quiet for long enough that I thought he wasn’t going to answer.

“It’s easier,” he said finally.

“Easier than what?”

He looked at me steadily. “Than Staying.”

The word landed between us and sat there. I held his gaze and felt the wine, the quiet and the particular vulnerability of a night that had no one else in it pressing against something I had been holding very carefully in place.

“That’s a terrible reason,” I said softly.

“I know,” he said. Just as softly.

I don’t know which one of us moved first. I don’t think it matters. What I know is that his forehead touched mine and we stayed like that for a moment , breathing the same air, neither of us speaking, the television going quietly in the background,  and then he kissed me.

Not tentatively. Not like a question. Like something that had been building pressure for days and finally found the release point.

I kissed him back before I thought about it. Before I thought about anything.

He took my hand and led me down the hallway and I followed because every sensible thought I owned had stepped aside for something older and more honest. His bedroom door closed behind us and he turned to look at me in the low light, he really looked the way he hadn’t let himself before  and his hand came up and pushed my hair back from my face with a slowness that made my breath catch.

“Tell me to stop,” he said quietly. “And I stop.”

I reached up and pulled him back down by the collar.

He was unhurried in a way I hadn’t expected. Deliberate. Like he had decided to pay attention to every detail and wasn’t going to be rushed out of it. 

His hands were warm and certain and he kissed the side of my jaw, the curve of my neck, the place just below my collarbone, and I pressed my fingers into his shoulders and stopped thinking about wine or grief or the particular wrongness of wanting my best friend’s brother this badly.

When I gasped he pulled back just enough to look at my face  checking, reading  and what he found there made him exhale slowly like something had confirmed itself.

“You’re okay,” he said. Not like a question 

“Don’t stop,” I said, he carefully carried me to the bed, undressing me. He opened my leg and looked at me. “ Should I go in?” he said, dipping his fingers in my virgina. I gasped as  he turned me on the way I  couldn't resist even though I didn’t want to. 

 “Yes, I want you, go in Dex” I said as he pulled his shirt off and he put his dick in my virgina, I moaned so hard that if Ivy was around she would have badged in to save me. “Oh Dexter” I said slowly, “don’t stop until I cum”. Dexter kept going until I cum and he released orgasms too. 

 It was the kind of night that rewrites something in you without asking permission. 

I held onto him and let myself be found by something else entirely.

When it was over I lay in the dark with my heart still loud in my chest and his arm heavy and warm across my waist and the city was quiet outside and I thought  clear as anything, in spite of everything.

That was the most alive I have felt in weeks.

I woke up to grey morning light and a cold pillow beside me.

He was gone.

I lay there for a moment staring at the ceiling, at the unfamiliar room coming into focus around me, at the dent in the pillow next to mine. The warmth where he had been was already fading.

I sat up slowly. Found my clothes. Got dressed with the careful movements of someone assembling herself piece by piece. I stood in the middle of his bedroom in the thin morning light and had a very honest conversation with myself.

It was a mistake, I told myself.

The words felt necessary. I repeated them once more to make sure they stuck.

Then I walked out of his room and down the hallway toward the kitchen and I was so focused on the architecture of my composure that I didn’t prepare myself for what I walked into.

Dexter was standing at the kitchen counter with his back to me, both hands flat on the surface, staring at something I couldn’t see. He heard me come in. His shoulders tensed slightly. He turned around  and the expression on his face was not the one I expected. Not guilt. Not distance. Not the careful blankness of a man putting a night behind him.

He looked at me like I was something he had already decided about.

“Morning,” he said. Quiet. Certain.

My carefully assembled composure developed an immediate crack.