Page 90 of The Husband I Left

“I’m going to go now,” she says, saving him, or maybe saving herself. “I’ve said what I came to say, and I promised only a few minutes.” She crosses the small distance to her son, and she reaches up and pats his cheek. “I’m glad the two of you are finding your way back to each other,” she says. “If that’s what this is.”

Neither of us confirms or denies.

She moves to the door, and Oliver reaches past her to open it. Then she turns back. “Your father is a proud man,” she says. “You know that better than anyone. He is never going to pick up the telephone. He’ll look at it every day and hope it rings, and he will go to his grave with it sitting there, untouched on his desk, and he’ll call it principle.” Her eyes hold Oliver’s. “But if you were to call him, I think you’d find that he has missed you. Rather more than he’d ever admit.”

And then she turns around and walks away. Neither of us moves. Oliver stands facing the closed door, and I sit on the couch, and we stay like that for what feels like a very long time, because neither of us has the faintest idea what to say. There isn’t a word for what just happened.

Finally, Oliver clears his throat.

“Huh,” he says.

I stand and cross the room to him, and he turns as I come, and his arm goes around me and draws me in against his chest like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Maybe by now it is. I can feel his heart going faster than his face lets on, a quick, unsteady drum under my ear.

“Are you going to call him?” I ask. “Your dad?”

He’s quiet. His chin rests on the top of my head, and I feel him breathe in and out before he answers.

“Maybe,” he says. “Someday.”

I tip my head back and look up at him. His hair is still a disaster from my fingers, and there’s a crease between his eyebrows.

“Do you want me to go?” I ask quietly. “It’s been kind of a night. If you need some time to—”

“No.” The word comes out fast, the same way it did when I asked if my outfit was wrong on our first date. His arms tighten around me. “Stay.”

Then the color starts climbing up from his collar, spreading across his cheeks in a way I have become entirely too fond of over these last months. “I mean—” he says, and now the tips of his ears are going pink, “—only if you want to. I’m not assuming anything. You can absolutely stay, and we can just drink cocoa, or I could make—”

I reach up and wrap my arms around his neck, and he goes still and his voice trails off into nothing.

“Oliver,” I say. “Take me to bed.”

And the smile that spreads across his face is the real one. The one that has, it turns out, belonged to me all along.

Chapter 33

Genny

He doesn’t give me a chance to say anything else. He just grabs my hand and tugs me after him, all the way to his bedroom. The door shuts behind us and then his mouth is on mine. He kisses me desperately. He kisses me like he’s making up for every hour, every day, every lost month we spent apart.

My back hits the wall, and I’m laughing even as I try to keep up. His hands are everywhere, greedy, insistent, running up my ribcage, tangling in my hair, settling on my hips and then moving again, like he can’t decide which part of me he wants first.

“Are you sure?” he asks into the spot just beneath my ear, his breath warm against my skin.

“Yes,” I reply, tugging his shirt over his head.

“Thank God,” he exhales, and then he’s helping me pull off his shirt and tossing it to the side. I can’t stop staring at him: at the long line of his neck and the sculpted plains of his chest.

Oliver’s hands slip under my shirt and pause at the hem, waiting for a signal. I let him lift it up and over my head, and he makes a soft noise when my hair spills down over my shoulders.

“God, Genny.” He says my name like a benediction.

“Keep going,” I manage, voice unsteady. “I want—I need—”

But his hands are already there, skimming up my sides, unhooking my bra. It falls away, and Oliver just stares for half a second, and then he’s kissing the tops of my breasts, warm and reverent and just a little wild.

He drops to his knees. He kisses my belly, my ribs, the soft spot just above my hip. I can feel every place his mouth touches like it’s been branded into me. My hands find their way to his hair. I can’t stop trembling. Wordlessly, I urge him to keep going.

He slides my jeans down my legs and helps me out of them. My panties follow, and he just stares for a moment, his expression hot and hungry.