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She wiped a hand over her eyes. “I’m being dramatic. I’m fine. You’re going to stand here and watch me walk down the corridor and get in that elevator, and I’m not going to turn around and look at you.”
“Okay.”
She took a step back and then another. “God. You are so fine.”
“Right back at you.”
She put the red bag down. “Something’s not right.”
He kicked a cast-iron squirrel doorstop into place and was ready for her when she tumbled into his arms. “It wasn’t a proper kiss goodbye,” she said.
What they did wasn’t what you’d call proper. It was a glorious, clutching mess of grabs and squeezes and biting fingertips. It was an outlaw kiss to damage and repair and win and lose and start and finish and when Lenny pulled away, he reeled back against the door, the blood rush to the head making him dizzy.
“Why do you have to be a crook?”
“Why do you have to be a good girl?
“I’m going.”
“I’m watching.”
He didn’t want to take his eyes off her. He watched her walk the corridor to the elevator. She kept her face lowered as she called it, and without looking back, she stepped inside, the doors closed, and she was gone. If it weren’t for the doorstop, he’d be left standing in the middle of the corridor locked out of his apartment, barefoot and emotionally devastated.
That’s how he spent the next few days, fully dressed and feeling oddly naked, shut out of the comfort of his treasured routines and struck with a kind of fever, a worm in his heart that kept burrowing, turning, and wouldn’t let him sleep. He’d known something like this was waiting for him, but not that it would feel so disorienting.
Zeke groused at him when he drifted off during a meeting. Sherin asked if he was coming down with something. He lost interest in food and the gym. His concentration was shot.
At 6:00 p.m. on Friday night, he set off from the office, walking in the rain like a sinner looking for redemption, no clear idea where he was going until he was in front of Lenny’s building.
His world was on fire; he rang her buzzer.
He didn’t want her to answer. If she did, he wanted her to send him away. He wanted to lean into the impossible misery of her absence and feel like an utter fool, hit the bottom of whatever was wrong with him, then go home and sort himself out.
“Yes.” Lenny’s voice. It made his chest get tight.
“It’s Halsey. I shouldn’t be here.”
The door clicked. He could have her in his arms in less than five minutes. He should bu
zz her back and apologize for disturbing her. He was still thinking that when she opened the door to her apartment.
Her hair was pulled back haphazardly from her face in a clip. She wore a splotched, oversize sweatshirt and torn yoga pants. She smelled of bleach, and she looked at him as if he’d been keeping her waiting.
“Are you alone?” he asked.
She barely nodded before he stepped inside, kicked the door closed, took a fistful of her shirt, and hauled her close. “I’m going insane. I need to kiss you. I need to kiss you till I stop going out of my mind thinking about you.”
She half climbed his body to get to his mouth, and then all the righteous insanity boiled over and spilled out into everything that was good and glorious and right.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Halsey was desperate and dangerous, and Lenny’s body pulsed with the knowledge she’d made him that way. He was drenched, but his eyes were on fire, and he grabbed at her like he was one step away from crumbling.
It was the madness she needed, puncturing the zombie calm she’d walked around in all week—the determined blue note that was all she could hear.
He needed her, and she clung to him, her desire roaring to the surface, a whole symphony of soaring emotions and song lines that made her insensible to caution.
The first kiss was like the sky cracking, a storm of their own making, and she wanted to be saturated by it and swept away.
