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“Margaux?” Roman’s voice startles me. I turn around to find his head sticking out of my bedroom door. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah.” I wave it off. “Cake is cooling. I was just checking on my sister.”
His eyes scan past my shoulder.
“Turns out she’s not even home,” I say.
Guess we could’ve been as loud as we wanted . . .
Roman steps into the hallway, his pants already zipped up and his belt secured just beneath his rippled abs, which taper to a chiseled V. We’d been going at it so intensely, I hadn’t taken the time to stop and appreciate Roman’s Adonis-like physique. Shrugging into his white dress shirt, he works the buttons one by one without peeling his gaze off me.
“If you need to get going, I can always drop the cake off in the morning,” I say.
Roman frowns, stepping toward me and meeting me in the hallway.
“What? No.” He cups my cheek before leaning in to steal a kiss.
“It just seems like you want to go.” I fold my arms, not because I’m mad, but I feel like I could use an extra barrier between us for some strange reason. Never mind that Roman was inside me just minutes ago.
“I don’t.”
“You don’t what?” With everything suddenly being clear as mud, I’m going to need him to be more specific.
“I don’t want to go.” He runs his hand through his messy hair, the very hair I was tugging and pulling and running my fingers through mere minutes ago. “Not yet. Not unless you want me to.”
“I feel like something happened in there . . . afterward, I mean . . . it was like you flipped a switch . . . you shut down.”
There’s a dark flash of pain in his eyes, though I’m not sure that pain is directed at me, at his late wife, or at his girls. Maybe perhaps all four of us.
“We were having a good time, right?” I ask. “The whole night? From beginning to end? I wasn’t just imagining it, was I?”
“You weren’t imagining any of it.” His tone is confident and reassuring as he pulls me against him, but I keep my arms crossed tight. “I wasn’t planning on coming home with you tonight. I wasn’t planning on sleeping with you. I wasn’t planning on any of this.”
“I’m sorry—”
“—please let me finish,” he says. “Everything that happened tonight—I wanted it. All of it. But as soon as it was over, I don’t know . . . like you said, I shut down. I started thinking about things outside of this apartment. The people who work for me, the people who were still on the clock, waiting for me, for starters.”
“You couldn’t, I don’t know, wait a few minutes before compartmentalizing?” I ask with a slight chuckle to hopefully hide my bruised ego. I feel silly for assuming the worst, but the whole thing still stings.
Roman untangles my arms, drapes them over his shoulder, and pulls me close.
“I could have,” he says. “And I should have.”
He kisses my forehead before breathing me in. The scent of his faded cologne on his dress shirt fills my nostrils, a fleeting souvenir of the night we shared that was almost perfect.
I don’t know what it’s like to lose a spouse or the parent of my children in such a devastating and tragic way. I don’t know what it’s like to try to make sense of that or to give yourself permission to live again, to feel pleasure again.
“Next time, don’t leave so soon, okay?” I ask. “Stay a while.”
“I haven’t left yet, have I?”
“Emotionally,” I say. “Stay with me emotionally.”
“Right.” His lips press flat, and while he looks like he has the weight of the world on his mind, he keeps his thoughts to himself.
“I’m going to stick the cake in the fridge to cool . . .” I untangle myself from his embrace and trek to the kitchen, placing a dish towel under the pan and sliding it onto an empty shelf in our little white Frigidaire—halfway between Margaux’s organic french vanilla greek yogurt and a cup of pomegranate arils.
When I turn around, I’m suddenly face to face with Roman. I release a startled gasp. I hadn’t heard him follow me.
“Sorry.” He runs his hand down the side of my arm before interlinking his fingers with mine. “Just came to see if you needed any help.”
“Should be ready for frosting and sprinkles in a half hour or so.” I gesture to the living room. “We can watch something while we wait?”
Though I’m half tempted to hide him in my room in case Margaux comes home.
“I just need to check on my sister.” I grab my phone and check my texts. My last one to her now shows as read, but she’s yet to respond. I fire off a series of question marks.
