Page 50 of Anything For You
One tipsy kiss on a patio, one slow dance where Elizabeth forgot to hold herself apart, should not have given her this much hope. Should not have rearranged her entire internal landscape so thoroughly that losing it felt like grief.
But it had. And it did.
23
The door clicked shut and Elizabeth stood facing the window, her back to Kelsey, and her mind was already building the case.
She had kissed her. On the patio, with the reception lights behind them and no one watching, she had put her hands on Kelsey’s face and kissed her, and the kiss had not been for Grace or for Scott or for the Pattersons or for anyone who might be keeping score.
She had kissed Kelsey because she wanted to, and she had done it knowing about the contract and the five thousand dollars and the seventeen years between them and the fact that Elizabeth had, in a very real and legally documented sense, hired her to be here.
If anything happened next, if anything happened in this room tonight, the weight of it sat on Elizabeth’s shoulders entirely. She had the money. She had the power. She had made the first move. Every piece of this was hers to answer for.
So she told herself to stay where she was. Let the silence fill the room like water rising in a basin, slow and cold and clarifying. Let the night end the way it was supposed to end, the way the contract described: two women in a shared room, alogistical arrangement, sleeping on opposite sides of a mattress that neither of them had chosen for romantic purposes.
The kiss was a lapse.
The dancing was proximity and champagne and the disorienting tenderness of watching someone else’s wedding while pretending to be in love.
Tomorrow morning, in the car, with daylight doing its work and the venue shrinking in the rearview mirror, she would see tonight clearly.
She would see herself clearly. She would recognize the kiss for what it was, a moment of weakness born from loneliness and flattering attention, and she would file it away and move forward and find a new coffee shop.
She did not believe a single word of it.
Her heels came off one by one, the familiar heat of the leather lingering against her arches before the plush carpet swallowed the tired ache of her soles.
Behind her, she heard a small sound. Metallic, barely there, the whisper of metal sliding against hair. Then another. She knew what it was before she turned. Kelsey was taking the pins out. Standing just inside the door, fingers reaching behind her head, finding the pins that held the styled wave in place and pulling them free one by one and holding them in her palm.
The most ordinary gesture in the world, a woman undoing her hair after a long night, something Elizabeth herself would do in a few minutes, something every woman at this wedding was probably doing right now in rooms up and down this hallway.
Elizabeth turned.
She didn’t mean to. Her body made the decision before her brain approved the motion, and then she was looking at Kelsey in the moonlight that came through the window in a wide, pale band, watching her pull a pin free with a small tug, the curl releasing and falling against her bare shoulder, longerand looser than the sculpted wave, softer, and Kelsey reached for the next one and the blonde hair spilled further down and Elizabeth’s breath left her in a way she could not disguise as anything else.
It was nothing. A woman taking her hair down.
But Elizabeth’s eyes tracked the movement of Kelsey’s fingers with something she could no longer pretend was casual observation, followed the line of her raised arm to the curve of her shoulder to the gold silk draped against her collarbones, the deep plunge of the neckline catching light and shadow in equal measure, and she could not look away.
She had been trying not to look at Kelsey like this all day. Since the bathroom door opened and Kelsey walked out in that dress and Elizabeth’s vocabulary collapsed to a single inadequate word.
Since the ceremony, when Kelsey’s thumb had moved across her knuckles in slow, anchoring strokes. Since the dance floor, when Kelsey’s palm had pressed flat against the bare skin of her back and Elizabeth had felt it in her spine and her stomach and the backs of her knees. Since the patio.
She had been rationing her glances all evening, controlling her gaze the way she controlled a courtroom, parceling out her attention in careful, defensible increments, always turning away before it became visible, always pulling back before the looking became something she would have to account for.
She was so tired.
She was so profoundly, thoroughly tired of monitoring herself around this woman.
Kelsey’s fingers paused on the last pin. She had noticed. Their eyes met across the dark room and Kelsey’s face was uncertain, guarded, her brown eyes carrying the bruised wariness Elizabeth had put there in the elevator when she’d lether voice go flat and professional and watched the warmth bleed out of Kelsey’s expression like she’d thrown a switch.
Kelsey was waiting. Not hopefully. Braced, the way someone braces when they already know the answer but haven’t been told yet.
Elizabeth opened her mouth. What came out was low and rough and stripped of every defense she’d spent the evening constructing, directed not at Kelsey but at herself, at her own useless, exhausting discipline.
“I have been trying so hard not to look at you like this all night and I can’t stop.”
The pin slipped from Kelsey’s fingers. It hit the carpet without a sound, lost somewhere in the dark between them. Kelsey’s lips parted. Her eyes went wide, and Elizabeth watched the shift happen in real time, watched it move across Kelsey’s face the way weather moves across open water.
