She cranes her neck, looking around. There isn’t anything to see in the enclosed entryway. “Is that coffee I smell?” she asks.
“I just put on a pot.”
She won’t come in for me, but apparently she will for coffee. Fine. “Can I take your coat?”
She shrugs out of it. Like an old habit, I check her outfit, trying to find a piece of the puzzle I’m creating in my mind. A picture of who she really is. Her top is white but the material is thick enough to hide her bra. With her hair down, her tattoo is hidden. She’s wearing black pants and those leather boots again that come up to her knees.
“I told a friend, a man, I’d be here.”
I blink from her legs to her face. I’m not sure how to feel about the fact that she needed to tell someone where she is. And to let me know about it. “Do I scare you?”
“No,” she says quickly. “This just isn’t something I’d normally do. Go to a stranger’s apartment by myself.”
I turn and lead her into the living room. “What do you think I’m going to do to you?”
She hesitates so long that I glance back at her. “Any number of things,” she says softly.
I’ve seen through her eyes. Maybe if I hadn’t peeked inside her mind, I might not understand. I do, though. She lives in vivid fantasies of love, sex, pain, need. Of course, a stranger would slip right into any role she wants—a hero to save her, a villain to be terrorized by. They both make for good fiction. “Don’t worry. You’re safe with me.”
She looks at the only things in the room—the big screen TV, a neutral-colored couch and love seat, an antique wooden coffee table. Books stacked on the window ledge above a vintage record player. My sneakers by the kitchen doorframe. My camera bag on the coffee table. That’s all of it.
She touches her neck. It’s possible I’ve made it too warm in here. “How long have you lived here?” she asks.
“Why not your boyfriend?”
She whips her gaze back to me. “What?”
“You said you told a male friend you were here. Why not your boyfriend?”
She swallows. I’d like to feel her skin on mine, the delicate ripple of her throat against my palm. She crosses her arms lightly, as if she needs something to do with her hands.
She looks so uncomfortable, I let her off the hook. “I’ll get the coffee,” I say, going into the kitchen. “I moved in last November.”
“You don’t have much furniture.”
I pour coffee from the pot into a mug, comforted by the black hole it creates. “I’m in the process of replacing it.”
“Bed bugs?”
“What?”
“Is that why you had to get rid of your furniture?”
“Oh.” Gross, but I’m not sure if the truth is worse. When I’d rented this apartment, I’d already begun moving things in from our house in Connecticut when Kendra found out about the affair. She’d made me move it all back. Not that I’d been upset to say goodbye to the butt-ugly, green-velvet couch she’d bought without my input, or the kittens-with-babies photographs she’d insisted on hanging in my mature daughter’s room.
I guess I should be grateful I got to pick out my own shit for once, but I’ve never had an eye for interior decorating. I only buy what I need.
I can’t begin to think of how to explain all that to Halston without freaking her out. “Sure . . .” I say. “Bed bugs.”
I return to the living room with two steaming mugs. She takes one before I even offer it, lifting it to her lips.
“It’s hot,” I say. “You’ll burn—”
She sips and winces, but hums with appreciation. Her eyes are closed, yet I can’t take mine off her. I watch her like she’s the goddamn Mona Lisa come to life. I want her to hum into my mouth, to melt like that with my tongue between her legs. The way she writes, the way she moves—she’s got to be sensuality personified in bed.
My craving for her makes it hard to talk, and even more difficult to control myself. “You shouldn’t do that, by the way.”
She opens her eyes. “Do what?”
“Go to a stranger’s place alone. Drink from a cup without knowing what’s in it.”
Her lips part for an audible breath. “But you said—”
“You’re safe with me. Just don’t make it a habit.”
She holds the coffee to her chest, right above her breasts, as if I might try to take it back. “It’s good. Where’s it from?”
This time, it’s hard to speak for a different reason. I’ve had a bag of Quench coffee in the freezer for a year. I couldn’t drink it after Sadie left, that shop the coffee came from was something special between us, but I couldn’t get myself to throw it out either. Now I realize I’ve filled the entire apartment with the smell of Sadie but am only now noticing it. I don’t want to be thinking about Sadie when I’m here with Halston, so I say, “Quench Coffee, a few blocks over.”
“I’ve been there,” she says. “They have a location in Chelsea Market, right?”
I nod. “Best coffee in the city, if you ask me, but like you said, Lait Noir is more convenient.”
“Not if you take Lexington. It’s probably about the same, distance-wise.”
I rub my chest. “I’ll go grab your journal.”
“Where is it?”
“My bedroom,” I say before I realize how it sounds.
“Your bedroom?” she asks.
Shit. It sounds bad, because it is. “I was just, you know, keeping it where I could see it.”
“Sure,” she says as I turn. “Leave the lotion and tissues, though.”
I look back, my eyes wide.
She’s busting my balls, and I have no comeback. Just a flushed face. I can slink off, shamed, or I can give it right back to her. “I’ve made no secret of the fact that your words do something to me. So, yeah, I did something to them. I’m sorry if that’s overshare, but why else would I practically hunt you down?”
She bites her bottom lip with all her teeth, hard enough to turn the skin around it red. “Finn . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Boyfriend. Fuck off, Finn. This is dangerous territory. I go into my room and grab the leather book from my nightstand. I should return it to her and ask her to leave. It seems unfair, but as long as there’s a third-party, I can’t risk getting too close.
She has to go.
When I return from my room, she’s sitting on the couch, and I know right away that I don’t have what it takes to make her leave. If she does it on her own, it’d be hard not to stop her, but asking her to go? I can’t. I’ve never been able to flip fate the bird, as many times as I probably should have.
To put some distance between us, I take the loveseat. It came with the couch, or I wouldn’t know fuck all about loveseats, but now I’m glad for it. As tempted as I am to get physically closer to Halston, distance is my friend right now. Too close, and I might forget how it feels to lose what was never mine to begin with.
To her credit, she holds my gaze, even though I just admitted to jerking it to her words. She’s getting braver with me. I can practically feel her not looking at the journal until she caves and drops her eyes to my lap. “You read it,” she says quietly.
“Not all of it. But yeah. A lot.”
“And you can still look me in the eye?”
“I was caught off guard at first.” My hand sweats around the leather. “But you’re talented. You drew me in and I’ve been unable to get out since.”
I think I see tears in her eyes, but then they’re gone. “It’s just a bunch of random stuff. I wouldn’t have thought anyone would even get it.”
I wish I could explain how it felt to read through her pages. Like she’d been inside my head. “I get it.”
“Because of the sex?” she asks.
I sit back a little. “It’s more than that, you know it is. It’s really moving, the way you write.” She stares down so hard, I wonder if she’s even listening. “I don’t understand why you tried to deny it was yours.”
“I looked at your website,” she says quickly, glancing up again.
“Oh.” The subject change leaves me scrambling to shift gears. “My website?”
“It took almost ten seconds to load.”
“Yeah, that could be right.” I rub the back of my neck. I designed my own website, but I haven’t put much effort into making it any good. My technical skills have gotten me as far as I can go on my own, but it’s kind of like my apartment. Just the necessities. “It’s a work in progress.”