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Ten seconds was longer than most hugs lasted. Something in her had tensed, a signal laid down by her amygdala telling her, Let go.
She tightened her grip and felt him exhale against her hair.
“This is nice,” she said.
“Mmm.”
Her body released, just a little, floating on the deep warm sound of his mmm, on the feel of his hands spanning her lower back. He adjusted his stance, and her thigh brushed over his, making her aware of all the places they touched. His thigh, the ridge of belt at his waist, her breasts against her soft shirt pushing into his shirt and behind it the bare skin of his chest.
She opened her eyes to the sight of his top shirt button, his collar gaping, the flushed skin of his throat.
She wasn’t sure what it felt like precisely for oxytocin to flood through her system, but she suspected it might be linked to the lazy, loose rush of her pulse and the wobbling uncertainty in her legs that made her lean into him and smile at the expensive fabric of his shirt.
He slid one of his arms tighter around her body so that it felt like his forearm was pressing against her upper spine. It meant one of his buttons was biting her cheekbone, but it also meant that she could hear his heart.
He adjusted again, and she felt his lips on her hair, warm on some little place on her scalp. It made her imagine being in bed with him. Not having sex
, not even naked. Just legs wrapped comfortably around legs, reading sleepily in the pink light of bedside tables. She imagined him wearing reading glasses and slipping them off his nose when he started to snore.
Hugging was clearly extremely dangerous.
She knew that the thin golden wire of the second hand on his watch had already slipped past their time, but she didn’t let go. Neither did he.
“I find I don’t want to let go.” His voice vibrated against her face.
“Yeah.”
“I’m not sure I’ve ever really hugged anyone. Maybe Beatrice.”
“How do you feel about hand holding?”
He tipped away, a bit, and she loosened her arms around him, slid her hands down his sides. His hands were right there to meet hers. It should have been awkward to meet his eyes.
“Well, hand holding wasn’t on the list.” He squeezed her fingers.
“I don’t know if you noticed, but quite a few things aren’t on that list.”
“Anal, for one.”
She laughed, choked. She would never get over, in a million years, the way anal sounded in his terribly posh accent.
“Let the record show that we can work off-list.”
He did that eyebrow thing again, and they broke apart. “I don’t want to keep you up,” he said. “If you’d like to turn in, I’m happy to leave. But if you find you’d like to sit up awhile, I thought perhaps…do you like movies?”
“Winston, everyone likes movies.”
“Right, well. I have a sort of project, with my Netflix queue. Movies I’ve missed. If you’d like to watch a movie with me, and investigate this hand-holding business a bit further.”
“I’d like that.” She couldn’t remember, actually, the last time she’d watched a movie all the way through. She wasn’t sure she had ever watched a movie with a man, or a boy even, and held hands.
She was so off-list, it was a teeny bit scary.
She thought his daughter was a very fortunate girl.
—
In the morning, after a night’s sleep that was much better than it should have been given she didn’t know where her mother was, didn’t know how her dad was doing, wasn’t sure how to call her sister and tell her she was in town, Allie found a little white card made of thick paper on the breakfast bar with an embossed phone number on the front. On the back was a note from Winston. He must have left it there just before he hugged her good night and left.
