She came to me.
I hold onto that. I hold on to her and the specific way she breathes my name without actually saying it, and I take my time, and I watch her face, and when she finally lets go, it goes all the way through her. No performance in it. No management. Just Toni, unguarded, for thirty seconds, which might be the most valuable thing anyone has ever handed me.
I position myself at her entrance and slowly push inside. Her walls around me tighten, and I take in the sight of our bodies perfectly aligned. Toni closes her eyes, her mouth parting into a moan of pleasure. I move, my hips slapping against hers in a rhythm that is uniquely ours. Our sweat-slicked bodies move together toward the high we both crave. With a final thrust, my eyes fly open as I release myself inside her. I lean down to capture her lips once more, my heart pounding.
The city hums. Her breathing slows. I wait for her to leave. I’ve already decided I won’t say anything if she does. Won’t make it mean more than she wants it to mean tonight. That’s the deal she didn’t have to say out loud. After all she came to me and she’s letting me have tonight, and if she leaves at two in the morning that’s still more thanI had at ten.
She doesn’t leave.
She is still here in the morning.
I notice the exact moment she wakes up — the change in her breathing, the way her hand tightens fractionally on the pillow before she remembers where she is. I’m already awake. I’ve been awake for an hour, lying here with my arm going numb under her shoulder because the alternative is moving and I am not moving.
She turns her head. Looks at me. The morning puts her face in real light and she is still the most specific problem I’ve ever had, and I don’t know what to do with that.
“Max.”
“Morning.”
She closes her eyes. “This didn’t fix it.”
“I know.”
I’d prefer not to make things more complicated. I wait. Waiting with her has become a skill I’ve developed. “We go back to before,” she says. “This was the dock. I was in a moment. We go back to professional, we finish the season, and this...” She gestures at the space between us, which is not much space at all. “This was one time.”
Every version of that sentence causes a distinct ache in my sternum. I stare at the ceiling and weigh what I want against what she’ll actually agree to, and those are two very different calculations. “Okay.”
She exhales.
“One condition,” I say.
“Max.”
“One.” I turn my head. She’s watching me with the guarded face, the professional face, the one that doesn’t give anything away. “You eat breakfast with me. Right now. This morning. Actual food at an actual table, and then you can have your professional relationship back and I will be very well-behaved.”
The careful face almost cracks. “That’s a condition?”
“I’m a simple man.”
She stares at me for a long moment, and I hold perfectly still and let her decide. “Fine,” she says. “Breakfast.”
Saying “okay” has a cost. I hand her what she’s asking for and I feel it go, and I know I’ll spend the next three weeks watching her stand on the other side of the glass at practice being very professional and pretending this room doesn’t exist, and it will make me absolutely insane. Worth it. To have her here for one more hour. Worth it.
I get up to find my phone to order breakfast, and she sits up in my sheets. Hair wrecked. My pillow crease across her cheek. The delivery arrives. We eat at the small table by the window. The Lake visible from here on a cloudless morning, a strip of gray-blue between buildings.
There's honey on the room service tray. A small jar of it, the kind hotels include next to the tea. She drinks the coffee I ordered wrong and says nothing about it, she doctors it with the honey. I watch her do it and I open my mouth. I don't say anything. Close it again.
She's used half of it. In the coffee, I realize, watching her stir. Not a packet. Not sugar. Honey.
"You always do that," I say.
She looks up. "Do what."
"The honey."
A pause. She sets the spoon down with the specific deliberateness of a woman deciding whether to answer. "It has antibacterial properties," she says. “When honey is available I put it in coffee. Tea. Yogurt. Most things." A beat. "Everything, technically."
I absorb this. I think about last night. I say nothing.
