The kiss started soft. Her mouth against his, lightly, a question rather than an answer. And then she deepened the kiss, opening her mouth against his and letting her hand slide from his jaw into his hair and pulling him closer. His hands come up to her waist — tentative at first, as though the waist might be a boundary he hadn't been invited past, and then, when she pressed closer, with the full warm certainty of a man who'd been given permission and was not going to waste it.
His hands were warm through the fabric of her blouse. His mouth tasted like the wine they'd been drinking and like something underneath the wine that was justhim.The taste of him was the thing she hadn't let herself think about in the months of the divorce, because thinking about the taste of your ex-husband’s mouth while you were rebuilding your life was thinking that pulled the nails out of the rebuilding.
Noelle was thinking about it now. She was drowning in it now. His mouth on hers, his hands on her waist and the warm weight of him as she leaned into him and felt the bookshelf behind his back give slightly, a creak of wood, and neither of them noticed, and neither of them cared.
The kissed until the kissing had become its own language, until the softness had burned off and what was left was hunger, real hunger, the hunger a woman carried in her body for months without naming it because naming it would've been a concession she wasn't ready to make. She was making it now. She was making it with her hands in his hair, her body pressed against his and her breathing ragged against his mouth.
She pulled back. Her forehead against his. Her eyes still closed. His breath on her mouth. Her hands still in his hair, his hands still at her waist, and between them the charged dark warmth of two people who'd just discovered that the thing between them hadn't gone away during the months they'd been apart. It had been waiting. It had been sitting in a back room on a shelf beside the books he'd sent her, and it had been growing in the dark the way things grew in the dark: quietly, without anyone's permission, until the growing was the loudest thing in the room.
She opened her eyes. His were already open. The hazel was close enough to fill her whole field of vision. What she saw was the man from the blanket, the man from the candles, the man who'd saidI love youwithout asking for anything in return and was now looking at her with his hair wrecked by her hands and his mouth swollen from her mouth and his breathing still uneven. The shop around them was dark and warm and theirs.
Noelle was, at last, ready to find out what happened next.
"Elias."
"Yes?”
"Take me home."
CHAPTER 25
NOELLE
They went to Astor Street.
They didn't go to the penthouse — she hadn't saidnot the penthouseand he hadn't suggested it. The penthouse was behind a wall. Astor Street was hers.
She let them in with her key. The entryway of the Mathieus' apartment was narrow, and in the light of the single lamp his face was the face from the bookshop floor: open, without the composure he'd worn like a second skin for the whole of their marriage. It was the face of a man who'd arrived at a door and was waiting to be told whether to walk through it.
Noelle took his hand. She led him down the hall to the bedroom she'd been sleeping in since the winter. She put her hands on the front of his shirt, flat, over his chest. She could hear his heart under her palms: fast, faster than she'd expected, the heart of a man whose composure had, as she'd noted in the bookshop, simply ceased to exist.
Elias let out a low growl and kissed her. She kissed him with her hands on his chest, then on his shoulders, then at the back of his neck. His hands came up to her waist. His fingers found the hem of her blouse and moved underneath it, the touch of his hands on the bare skin of her back was the first time his handshad been on her body since the marriage, and the contact went through her like current. The slow spreading warmth of a circuit being completed after a long time open.
She pulled back enough to look at him. His eyes were burning, shot through with desire. Noelle unbuttoned his shirt and pushed it off his shoulders, and she looked at the body she'd been married to and never seen: the lean lines of him, the shoulders she'd watched from across a hundred rooms without ever having touched them.
He reached for her blouse and undid the buttons. The blouse opened, he drew it off her shoulders and it fell somewhere behind her. His eyes moved over her, raw with hunger.
"Noelle." His voice was low. Lower than she'd heard it. "You're beautiful. "
They fell onto the bed together. His mouth found the curve of her neck, her back arched off the mattress, her hands pulled at his belt. His hands pulled at her waistband and the gravity dissolved into something messier and more honest, which was two people who'd been starving for each other for a very long time and had, finally, stopped pretending they weren't hungry.
His mouth moved down her throat to her collarbone, across the line of her shoulder. He moved down her body with the attention of a man who was learning her, discovering a woman's body with his mouth, finding out what made her breath catch and what made her hips shift and what made her fingers tighten in his hair.
He kissed the inside of her wrist. He kissed the line of her hip. He kissed the soft skin of her inner thigh, and when his mouth found her center she closed her eyes, her head went back and the sound she made was a sound she'd never made in her life, a half-moan and groan.
Elias stayed there until her climax tore through her body. When he came back up to her and settled his weight against hershe opened her eyes and looked at him. His face above hers was filled with emotion.
He entered her slowly. She could hear him breathing against her neck, could hear the control he was exerting to keep the slowness slow, and the exertion was its own intimacy, because a man who was exerting control in bed for the purpose of her pleasure rather than his own composure was a man who'd crossed a line she hadn't known he was capable of crossing.
She wrapped her legs around him and pulled him deeper. She heard him make a sound against her throat — low, involuntary— and she held onto him and let him lose it. She let him move, let him find the rhythm she wanted and adjust to it without being told. The adjusting-without-being-told was the thing about him that had, across the whole length of the evening, been breaking her open: the evidence that he was, at last, paying the kind of attention that didn't require a dossier or a strategic analysis. Just his body against hers, reading hers, responding.
Noelle came again, with her face against his neck, her fingers in his hair and his name in her mouth. It moved through her from a depth she hadn't known she had, and she let it, let the whole of it happen. When it was done she was shaking, his arms were around her, he was still inside her and still moving, slower now, until his own climax roiled through him.
They lay in the dark afterward. The duvet had been pushed to the floor. The sheets were tangled. His arm was across her waist, his face was in her hair and she could hear his breathing slowing in the way a body's breathing slowed after the body had been taken apart and was putting itself back together.
She lay very still.
She was thinking.
