Page 39 of Night of Shadows
"I know what you are. I knew at the gala."
"You didn’t know about Theo."
"I knew about a Theo. The specific name is new. The fact of him is not."
He absorbs that. His face moves the way it does, which I have learned is how Lex feels things. Other people feel things in their chests, throats, or hands. Lex Konstantinos feels things in the exact architecture of the muscles around his eyes.
"Three years, Lex."
He swallows.
"I have been waiting for three years."
I kiss him.
? ? ?
I have planned this kiss to be slow. It is not slow.
My hands are in his hair before I have finished the thought of putting them there. His arms come around me and lift me half off the floor, and I make a sound into his mouth that is foreign even to me, and he answers me with a sound that is not a word.
"Christ. Maeve."
"I know."
"I have been?—"
"I know."
His mouth is at my jaw, my throat, the place under my ear where his breath has been before. His teeth find the cord at the side of my neck, and I feel my knees go weak. He catches me with one hand at the small of my back and one hand at the back of my head, and he’s holding all of me up, all five-four of me, with the kind of strength I had felt at the dining-room table and have not felt against me since.
"You taste…"
"What?"
"The same."
My breath goes out of me all at once, totally caught off guard, undone low in my body, and gutted somewhere I'd thought was sealed shut. I have not, in three years, allowed myself to think about how I tasted to him at four in the morning in a hotel room. He’s not, apparently, stopped thinking about it.
"Lex. Stop. I have to ---"
He stops.
Two inches between us. Both of us are breathing the same air. His hands are still on me. The hand at my back has come around to my ribs. His thumb is on the underside of my breast through the sweater, and I don’t think he’s noticed yet. I can’t move, I don’t want to move.
"Maeve. Whatever you need?—"
"I know. Listen."
I step back. I cross to the kitchen counter. I take the book out of my bag, where I have placed it. The hardcover Pride and Prejudice. My mother gave it to me when I was twelve and told me, in the small, careful voice she used about men, that I was going to read this book at twelve and again at twenty and again at thirty and that I would not understand it the same way twice.
She was right about that, as she was right about most things.
I open it to page seventy-three.
The note is where I have put it back, every time, after every reading. Three years. Hotel pen. Black ink. Folded once. The paper has gone soft along the fold from the number of times I have opened and refolded it.
I take it out.
