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She tried to picture him in California with a wife. Tried to picture Sean’s children picking through boxes of history that smelled of yellowing paper and inferior glue. But all she could see was the too-bright sun he’d told her about, the too-green grass, and Sean pacing a hallway in some too-big, too-empty house, barking perfectly articulated orders into his phone.
Stay here, she thought. Stay here with me and stutter.
Tell me something. Anything.
He didn’t say a word. Instead, his fingers found the bottom of her T-shirt, unbuttoned her jeans, stroked up and over her ribs and cupped her breasts. Sean pulled her down to the attic floor, his chin scraping over her lips, the wet plane of his cheek pressing against hers before his questing mouth found hers and claimed it, and, God, she loved him, she loved him, she loved him.
Condemned kisses. Gallows passion. Her ponytail made an uncomfortable lump between her head and the floor while her traitorous body roused to the feel of his dirty palms against her breasts, to the attic smell and the single-minded focus he brought to this desperate act. Such a bad idea. Such a bad memory she’d be left with, of her jeans bunched above her boots, her shirt pooled at her armpits, her unfocused eyes on the ceiling beams as beautiful, broken Sean pinned her hips with his weight and tested her readiness with his fingers.
Wet for him. She wanted him even now, even as he hurt her with this endless, deferred leave-taking. Even as he denied her the confrontation, the clean break that might have made it possible for her to hate him, she opened her legs to him, opened her mouth in an astonished inhalation when he fumbled open his jeans, centered himself, and thrust inside her. He grunted, an animal sound that matched their hot, slick mating, their uncoordinated thrusting and lifting and oh, how everything bad in her wanted to do this. How everything craven hoped that this would be the time he realized he couldn’t give her up. She would snare him with sex if she could, her body a trap.
She grimaced at the i
dea and the futility of this last sacrificial gesture, and he made a sound like a sob and kissed her hard, hard, pushing his hands beneath her head so he could hold her where he wanted her and use her how he needed her.
God damn him for doing it.
God damn her for letting him.
When she couldn’t breathe, she broke the kiss and turned her face away. His lips against her ear. The rhythmic pistoning of his hips as she met him every time, just right, that deep, dark, unbearable pleasure. They knew how to do this one thing well, to speak in this one language honestly when they’d failed to tell the truth in any of the others. She’d never say she loved him, and he would never say it back.
His palm smoothed over a few inches of bare thigh to bring her leg up. Impossible. Her ankles were caught in her jeans, her weight trapped by his legs, her heart in her throat.
She strained toward him, and he hurtled toward obliteration. Running. Always running. His breath harsher with every deep stroke, her own body betraying her by tightening, accelerating them both toward the end.
He reached it first. If she could have held off her orgasm, she would have, just to deny him something. But in the end, the sound he made took her choice away. A hitched inhale, a held breath as his cables pulled tight, a moan deep in his chest, and she came.
In the placid moment afterward, she became aware of her hands first. They rested against his skin inside his T-shirt, flat and limp now where she’d been clinging to his back only moments ago.
The rain assaulted the roof. Sean breathed against her neck.
Katie lifted her palms, floated them over the plane of his back, and dropped them to her sides against the floorboards.
There. She’d done it.
Letting go wasn’t impossible after all.
Chapter Forty-one
When Katie dropped her hands, Sean understood he was supposed to haul himself up on his elbows and move off her. He just didn’t want to do it.
He didn’t want to stand up, zip his jeans, help her to her feet, apologize. He didn’t want to find dinner in a few hours, say good night and goodbye, and watch her walk out to her car alone in the rain.
It should be possible for him to engineer some kind of genteel end to this thing. A parting moment where they acknowledged that it had been good between them—it had been great—but they had no future together.
It should be possible, but it didn’t feel possible, any more than it had been possible for him to keep his hands off her.
Don’t grab her. Don’t kiss her. Don’t touch her. He’d been telling himself that for days, and here he was, still semi-hard and buried to the hilt inside her body.
God, he was weak. Weak and stupid.
And he needed a new plan, because he couldn’t give her up.
He was supposed to be good at solving problems. This was a simple problem. It had a simple solution.
He couldn’t stay here, so she had to come with him.
“Come to California with me.”
