Page 161 of Smoke and Glitter

"I don't want to."

We talk until he starts sounding more tired than awake. Before we hang up, he asks about my day, and I tell him what I'm walking into without pretending everything is handled before it happens. I am still figuring out my half of this.

The distance teaches us other things too. The first time it turns useful, it is just after nine in London and so late in Chicago that Sam has only been upstairs from closing for twenty minutes. I am still in bed with coffee because my first meeting is mercifully late. Rain ticks against the flat windows, the radiator knocks like somebody trapped inside it, and Sam's face appears on my screen with damp hair and exhaustion sitting low around his eyes.

He looks at me for all of three seconds before his attention drops. "Is that my shirt?"

I look down at the black button-down hanging open over my tank top. It made the trip in my suitcase for reasons I had declined to examine. "Possession gets complicated once you cross international borders."

Sam leans back against his headboard. "You stole it."

"I relocated an underused asset." His mouth pulls at one corner, and I take a drink of coffee before admitting, "I had a terrible day yesterday."

The teasing leaves his face. He starts to ask what happened, then stops himself. "Do you want to tell me about it, or do you want me to get you out of your head for a while?"

The question catches me anyway. Months ago he would have guessed, and I would have let him. I set the mug on the nightstand. "Get me out of my head."

His thumb shifts along the edge of the phone. "Okay." He doesn't reach for a solution or ask me to explain the whole day. He waits.

For a moment neither of us moves. Then Sam looks at the shirt again and says, "Open it."

Heat moves through me fast enough that the bad day disappears from the front of my mind. "That sounded suspiciously like an order."

"You asked for a distraction." His voice has gone lower. "If you want something else, tell me."

I slide the first button free without looking away from him. "No. Keep going."

Sam's jaw shifts. I open another button, then another, slow because I can. The shirt falls wider over my shoulders. His gaze follows the movement before returning to my face, and the fact that an ocean is forcing him to use words instead of his hands feels almost unfairly suited to us.

"Take yours off," I tell him.

He does. No joke, no argument. His black T-shirt disappears over his head and lands somewhere beyond the edge of the screen. The tattoos I know so well come into view one section at a time, and my body reacts with enough enthusiasm to make me annoyed at geography all over again.

Sam catches whatever happens on my face. "What do you want, Autumn?"

The borrowed shirt slips off one shoulder as I hold his gaze. "I want you to touch yourself while you watch me."

His breath changes. He does not make me repeat it. One hand disappears below the frame while the other stays wrapped around the phone, and I shift farther down against the pillows so he can see more of me. When my own hand slides beneath the waistband of my sleep shorts, Sam's eyes darken.

"Tell me," he says.

"Tell you what?"

His mouth moves, almost a smile. "You know exactly what."

I do. Heat climbs higher up my face, but I make myself say it. I tell him where I want my hand, how I want him to look at me, what I wish his mouth was doing instead of sitting six time zones away. Every sentence makes my face hotter. Every one makes Sam's breathing rougher.

He gives it back. Not a performance, not a string of lines that could belong to anybody. Sam tells me what he remembers about my body, what he misses, exactly where his hands would be if he were here. When he says he misses the sound I make when I stop trying to stay quiet, my fingers falter.

"That was dirty," I tell him.

"You seem upset."

"Deeply."

His laugh is low and brief, gone almost as soon as I move my hand again. After that neither of us has much use for jokes. The screen gives me pieces of him instead of the whole thing, his forearm tightening, his head falling back, the muscles across his stomach going hard when I say his name. He watches me just as closely. An ocean keeps his hands off me, so I give him every direction, and each time, he waits for it.

By the time the pressure breaks, my free hand is twisted in his shirt beside me and Sam is breathing my name into a dark Chicago bedroom. I close my eyes through the last pulse of it, then lie there listening to both of us recover through a phone speaker that suddenly sounds much too small for what just happened.