Page 74 of Cruel Kiss

But somewhere in the middle of it, something cracks.

I don't know what does it. Maybe it's my mother's voice still in my head.The only one pretending was you.

Maybe it's the way he says my name, notkotyonok,notMs. Meadows,justCalista,growled into my hair like it's the only word he knows.

Maybe it's that I stop keeping my eyes shut and open them and he's already looking at me. The look he's giving me isn't a hookup look, it isn't night-stuff—it's the aquarium look, the one from before all of it went wrong, and I feel it sear through me.

It slows down. I don't mean for it to. He doesn't, either, I don't think. But it slows, and it stops being the thing we agreed it would be, and it turns into something else, something I said I wasn't going to do again, face to face and unhurried and terrible.

"Calista," he says.

"Don't."

"I'm not saying anything."

"You're about to."

"I'm not." His forehead comes down against mine. "You are."

And I am. I feel the words climbing up the back of my throat, the ones I said at the lake and swore I killed in an elevator, the ones that ruined me the last time I let them out.

I love you.

They're right there. They're so close I can taste them.

I bite them back. I press my mouth against his shoulder and clamp them down. He feels me do it, I know he does, because he goes still for half a second like a man who almost caught a falling glass.

Then he just gathers me up closer and keeps going. I don't say it, and neither does he, though we both know it's there in the room with us anyway, sitting quiet in the dark like a third person nobody invited.

After the sex is over, I wait for him to get up.

That, after all, is the rule.

Tonight, he doesn't.

He pulls the blanket over both of us and settles onto his back. His arm is under my head. I lie there rigid for a second waiting for him to remember the terms.

He doesn't remember them. Or he remembers them and decides against them. I can't tell which, and I don't ask, because if I ask, then one of us has to say something out loud, and if we say something out loud, then it's real, and neither one of us wants to be the one who does that.

So I don't ask.

I let my head stay where it is, over his heart, listening to it slow down. His hand combs once in my hair and then goes still. His breathing evens out.

I fall asleep there, in the wrong bed, in the wrong man's arms.

Nothing has ever felt more right.

I wake at dawn, alone, in thin gray light. His side of the bed is empty but warm, the sheets tangled and thrown back on both sides. Sheets that held two people all night and aren't pretending otherwise.

I lie in it for a minute. The gone-by-morning rule died sometime in the dark, and neither of us said a word about it. It just stopped being true, quietly, the way things do when you're not looking.

Downstairs, the coffee maker gurgles.

I put his shirt back on—the stolen one, the spoil of war—and go down. He's at the stove. Too early for pancakes; the kids aren't up. Just standing in the gray kitchen with his back to me, and on the counter there's a mug already poured. Mine.

He hears me on the stairs.

"Morning," he says. "Sleep well?"