I woke up first.
The light coming through the blinds was the gray-pink that meant it was earlier than I wanted it to be. His arm was across my waist, heavy with sleep, and his face was turned toward me on the pillow with his mouth a little open.
I lay still and looked at him.
His hair was a mess. There was a small line at the corner of his mouth from where the pillow had pressed against him in his sleep. His stubble was darker than it had been last night. His lashes were longer than I'd registered. The dimple was gone because he wasn't smiling, and he looked younger than thirty-two by some margin I'd not been prepared for.
I felt it land. The whole night, in one piece. The dress on the floor. His shirt over the chair. My keys in the entryway where I'd dropped them. My body sore in places I hadn't been sore in a long time. The smell of him on the pillow next to mine, clean, warm, and unmistakable.
I let myself look at him for one more minute. I gave myself that.
Then I started building the wall back.
I did it in real time, in my own head, with the light coming up gray through the blinds and his arm warm across my waist. I worked through it like a chart at the hospital—methodical, fast, no wasted motion. The night had been a release valve we both apparently needed. Three months of fighting about a seating chart, a cake, and the toasts. A one-off. A one-off. Two adults who knew better than to make it into something it wasn't.
I slid out from under his arm. He shifted but didn't wake. I sat on the edge of the bed for a second with my feet on the cold floor, then went to the bathroom.
I closed the door behind me.
The mirror was unkind first thing, always. My hair was a wreck. The lipstick from the wedding was gone except for a faint stain at the corner of my mouth. There was a red mark at the side of my neck under my ear that was going to be a problem for the next several days. I was naked. The smell of him was on my skin, clean and warm, and I refused to think about that directly.
I put my hands on the edge of the sink.
I want to do that again.
The thought arrived without permission. It arrived in my own voice, and I looked at myself in the mirror and let it sit there.
I wanted to do that again. I wanted to wake up in a bed that had another person in it and not feel like the world was ending.
It scared me more than I knew how to handle.
Wanting was the road. It went to the kitchen at eleven o'clock, and the phone on the counter and the chair my mother had set for three years. Wanting led to needing, and needing led to the empty chair, and I'd spent twenty-eight years building a life that didn't require a single chair I hadn't bought and put together myself.
The man in my bed was Duke Rhodes, the most arrogant man I'd ever met, and he had put his face against the side of my neck and said my name like he meant it, and I wanted him to do it again.
I turned on the cold water and splashed it on my face. I dried my face on the hand towel and looked at myself in the mirror until the shape of it stopped trembling around the edges.
This was a thing that had happened. This was a thing I was now going to handle.
I tied my hair back at the nape with a band from the counter. I pulled the robe off the back of the door and tied it at my waist. The mark on my neck was still a problem. The rest of it I could put away.
I went back into the bedroom.
He was awake.
He was sitting up against the headboard with the sheet at his waist, scrubbing his hand through his hair, and he looked over when I came in and stopped scrubbing.
"Hi," he said.
He looked at me in the robe. He didn't say anything. The look went somewhere I wasn’t going to follow, and then it came back.His face did the thing it had done last night before he kissed me—the small recalibration, the reading of the room.
He was already doing what I was doing. I could see it. He was sitting up against my headboard at six in the morning, trying to figure out what we did next, and he hadn’t yet decided which version of himself he was going to be when he opened his mouth.
I sat down on the edge of the bed.
"So," I said. "Last night."
"Yeah?"
