Page 26 of Anything For You
Held there. One beat. Two.
Elizabeth felt her own lips part. Felt her chin tilt up, a fraction of a degree, a movement so small it barely qualified as motion and yet her body knew exactly what it was doing, exactly what it was asking for.
Kelsey’s thumb stilled against her cheekbone. Her eyes lifted back to Elizabeth’s.
She didn’t kiss her.
She smiled instead. Small, private, devastating. Then her hand slid from Elizabeth’s cheek, fingertips trailing along her jaw, and dropped.
The night air hit Elizabeth’s face where Kelsey’s palm had been, cool and sudden, and the absence was so sharp it almost hurt.
Oh.
The realization landed like a verdict.
She had wanted it. Not for Grace. Not for the performance. Not for the careful calculus of who was watching through which pane of glass.
She had wanted Kelsey to close that distance, to press her mouth against Elizabeth’s mouth, to kiss her in this garden while her ex-wife stood fifteen feet away pretending not to stare.
She had wanted it for herself.
Oh, hell.
12
The Uber smelled like vanilla air freshener and someone else’s cologne. Sweet and sharp, layered over the faint musk of warm leather seats. Kelsey sat with her hands in her lap, fingers loosely interlaced, and watched the city scroll past through the window on her side. Streetlights dragged bright smears across the glass, amber and white, catching briefly on the emerald silk of her jumpsuit before sliding away.
She was still in the garden.
Not physically. Physically she was in the backseat of an Uber, separated from Elizabeth by twelve inches of middle seat that neither of them had moved to close. But her body hadn’t caught up to geography yet. Her palm still held the ghost of Elizabeth’s cheek. The exact temperature of it. The specific softness of skin along the jaw, the harder ridge of cheekbone beneath her thumb, the way Elizabeth’s face had gone completely still under her hand like a held breath. Her fingertips remembered the fine texture of Elizabeth’s foundation, and underneath it the warmth of her skin.
She could still feel Elizabeth’s pulse. That was the part that kept circling back, the detail her brain wouldn’t release. Not theway Elizabeth’s eyes had gone wide and dark in the string light. Not the way her lips had parted, though that was in there too, replaying on a loop that was going to make falling asleep tonight absolutely impossible. It was the pulse. Against the heel of Kelsey’s palm where it had rested along Elizabeth’s jaw. Rapid. Arrhythmic.
That pulse had not been performing for Grace.
Kelsey’s fingers curled tighter in her lap. She pressed her thumbnail into the pad of her index finger, a small sharp point of sensation to keep herself from smiling too wide in a car where Elizabeth could see. Kelsey tried not to imagine something that wasn’t there. Elizabeth was probably stressed not turned on.
But at least the party had been a hit. Every part of it. James with his warm handshake. Sonia, who’d squeezed Kelsey’s elbow when they said goodbye and whispereddon’t let this one scare you off. Even Derek, the junior associate who’d spent ten minutes explaining what a deposition was before realizing Kelsey already knew. She’d let him finish anyway. He seemed like the type who needed to be helpful.
The strangest part had been walking back inside.
Kelsey shifted in her seat, the silk whispering against the leather. She remembered it vividly. Elizabeth’s hand finding hers again as they turned toward the French doors, the two of them moving back into the brownstone’s warmth. The house was quieter than she’d expected. Not because people had stopped talking, but because half the room had emptied. Coats gone from the rack by the door. Champagne glasses collected on trays.
Kelsey had glanced at Elizabeth, confused.When did everyone leave?
Elizabeth’s expression had been unreadable, but she’d checked her watch, and something had crossed her face. A micro-flinch, there and gone. They’d been in that garden foralmost an hour. Not a few minutes. Not a quick reset and a strategic reentry. An hour. Standing in string light, holding hands, standing close enough that Kelsey could count the faint lines at the corners of Elizabeth’s eyes and think they were the most beautiful evidence of a life actually lived that she’d ever seen.
An hour, and it had felt like five minutes.
That was the part Kelsey couldn’t square. The timeline. The collapse of it. Because she knew what a few minutes felt like when you were performing. She’d been performing all night, and she’d been aware of every second, had felt the clock ticking behind each introduction and anecdote and carefully placed touch on Elizabeth’s arm. Performance was work. Performance made time stretch.
The garden hadn’t been work.
The garden had been standing in the dark with her hand on Elizabeth’s face and the entire island of Manhattan dissolving around them like sugar in hot water, and she hadn’t thought about the contract. She hadn’t thought about anything except the specific shade of gray-blue Elizabeth’s eyes turned when she forgot to guard them.
The Uber crossed the bridge. The tires hummed against the grating, a low vibration that Kelsey felt in the soles of her heels. Outside, the East River glittered, flat and black, reflecting the skyline in broken columns of light.
She glanced to her left.
