Page 90 of Never Alone
I set the swatch down on the counter.
I went back out to him.
CHAPTER 18
Cole
I woke at three in the morning for no reason and didn't get back to sleep.
The apartment was the way it was at that hour—the radiator ticking over, the streetlight outside leaking through a gap in the blind, the dishwasher long done with its run. The pullout sat at the corner of the master bedroom where I'd been sleeping for a few weeks. Tessa was across the room in the bed. I could hear her breathing.
I turned my head on the pillow toward her.
She had one arm thrown above her head. Her face was turned toward the window. The moonlight was on her cheek.
The first time I'd watched her sleep had been the morning after the bedroom switch.
She had drifted toward me in the night. Her hand had been on the comforter, palm up, four inches from my shoulder, fingers curled the way fingers curled when a person had reached for something in their sleep and stopped. Her face had been a foot from mine.
I'd given myself one minute to look at her.
In that minute, I'd wanted to put my hand on her face. I'd wanted to lift the comforter and put my mouth on her shoulder.I'd wanted things I had no right to want from a woman who had asked me into a bed because she couldn't sleep with me on the floor.
I hadn't done any of it. I'd got up. I'd taken my shoes by the laces and put them on at the kitchen table. I'd bought the pullout the morning after that shift.
I'd told myself it was for the GAL. The pullout hadn't been for the GAL. The pullout had been because I hadn't trusted myself another night, a foot from her face, without doing something she hadn't asked me to do.
I'd been on the pullout ever since.
She'd kissed me yesterday in Sean's. Her hands at the back of my neck. Her mouth on mine. I'd had her in my arms for what couldn't have been more than fifteen seconds, and I'd given the next five hours to the work of putting her down. The shape of her mouth. The taste of the coffee she'd been drinking on the way over. Her hand at my jaw. The way she'd smelled—bread, butter, something on her skin I didn't have a name for.
I'd wanted, while it was happening, to push her up against the swatch wall. The woman Nicholas had probably hired to seduce me had been ten feet away. Sean had been twenty. I'd still wanted it. I'd held the want at the back of my teeth all the way home.
I was looking at her now from across the room. The moonlight had moved a hand-width across her cheek.
If I get into a relationship,I had told her in the truck that afternoon,I want to get into something real. Something like Sam and Jamie.
I'd said it without looking at her. It had been the most direct I'd been with her since the lawn.
So you've really never been with a woman?
I don't have the patience for dating. Haven't met anyone worth the trouble.
She was worth the trouble. I'd known it for weeks. I hadn't said it to her in the truck. I still didn't know how.
I got up.
I made the pullout up the way I made it up every morning. Fitted sheet pulled tight. Blanket folded into thirds at the foot. I dressed in the bathroom so I wouldn't have to turn on the bedroom light. I put on coffee in the kitchen and didn't drink it. I left the apartment at five-fifteen and drove to the firehouse in the dark.
She was still asleep when I walked out.
The shift was the worst kind of shift.
Sam met me in the bay before report and pulled out his phone.
"You'll want to see this before someone shows you."
It was a photo of Tessa kissing me at Sean's. Taken from across the shop by someone with a phone they'd had ready. The angle was tight—Tessa's hand at my neck, my hand at the small of her back, both of us with our eyes closed. It had three hundred thousand likes.
