“My parents got into a car accident coming home one snowy night from a dinner out.” Her breath shuddered as it left her now. “I was fifteen and allowed to stay alone, stay up late. I was excited they were gone because I got to make my own meal and feel all grown up.” There was a long pause. “The police knocked on the door just before midnight. I was sleepy on the sofa in front of the TV, but not worried. My father could keep them out late, you know. It had happened before.”
When she didn’t go on, Darius closed his eyes. “What did the police tell you.”
“My—ah, my father… was okay, but in the hospital. My mother was killed instantly. No seat belt.” The sound she made could have meant a lot of things, all of them sad. “That night is why I don’t have a car, actually. To this day, I don’t drive. I don’t want to be responsible for…”
Jesus, he thought. And he’d hit her with his own.
“Anne, listen, if this is too hard, you don’t have to—”
“In the aftermath, my father was inconsolable.” As she spoke over him, he knew that she was deep within herself. “Me? I was crushed, but I also felt lucky I had a parent left. Except then… about two weeks later, he was charged with vehicular homicide because he’d been drunk at the time.” Another pause. “He never told me he’d failed a sobriety test at the scene. He never… said anything about that. And you know, the night the accident happened, I’d told myself he wasn’t, that he hadn’t been drinking. I’d told myself it was December and the roads were icy and it wasn’t his fault…”
Darius shook his head, and kept the cursing to himself.
“My father was sentenced to ten years in prison. Pretrial, he was offered a plea deal, but he refused to admit guilt—in part because of me, I think. He would have gotten five years if he’d just taken what was presented to him, but he didn’t want me to hear him admit to it.” She shrugged. “I guess that’s how I learned that you didn’t have to be a mean drunk to be destructive. He killed his wife and my mother, and then ruined my life along with his own—and for what? A couple of jokes? A few pats on the back, some belly laughs? I would have taken a boring wallflower and kept my family any day of the week, thank you very much.”
He imagined her so young, left to fend for herself in the world. “Where did you go?”
She took a deep breath, and exhaled slowly. “My grandparents on my mom’s side raised me, and even though they didn’t want me to, I tried to go see him several times. He refused the visits. He died about three years in of an overdose. He just couldn’t live with himself.”
Abruptly, she refocused on Darius. “So this is why I say… you can love someone and hate them at the same time.”
Reaching out, he tucked her hair behind her ear. “I don’t know what else to say other than I’m sorry. And… yes, you do know exactly how I feel.”
Anne put the plate on the bedside table. Then she took his hand in both of hers.
“You know something?” she said.
“What.”
“I didn’t realize how lonely I’ve been…” Her eyes returned to his. “Until now.”
Darius sat up slowly, struck by the realization that it was as if she were reading his mind—while thinking the same thing he was.
“Me, too. Anne… that’s how I feel, too.”
* * *
It wasn’t the amount of time spent with someone. It was the resonance of the moments you shared.
As Anne stared into the face of a stranger she’d known for such a short time, she felt like they’d been in each other’s lives forever. She was also keenly aware of how much she kept from other people. In sharing her story with Darius—and not just the facts, but the feelings—she had lowered defenses that were so integral to her, she’d forgotten they existed.
“Anne…”
There was a lot in the way he said her name, and even though the logical part of her brain was telling her to go slowly, everything else inside her was clear that she had found in this man what she hadn’t even been aware of searching for. The relationship with Bruce, if she could even call it that, had been performance art masquerading as an office romance. Spurred on by the likes of Penny and the other women on the support staff floor, she’d followed a path set by others: by the misplaced envy of those around her, by Bruce, with all his upward mobility… by the expectations that women needed to be married by the time they were twenty-five or their expiration date was triggered.
But there was no one else in her ear now.
It was just her and this man who was looking at her like he’d found something that surprised him as well.
“I want to kiss you,” she whispered.
“Yes,” he purred.
Darius’s broad hand brushed her cheek and then lingered at her chin. And then he didn’t have to draw her forward. She moved to him on her own, leaning into him, tilting her head.
The first contact was gentle, and his lips felt foreign in a shocking and tantalizing way, everything so soft and velvety. And in spite of his size, which seemed to quadruple before her very eyes, she wasn’t threatened at all. On the contrary, she wanted to keep going from this electric starting place. She wanted him on top of her, his weight pressing her down into the mattress, her legs split around his hips, their bodies no longer clothed…
Darius inched back. “Is this okay? I don’t want to push you.”
Exploring his lower lip with her fingertips, she smiled. “If I’m honest, I’ve wanted to kiss you from the second I met you.”
“Even in the back of that car, on the way to the hospital?”
“Okay, maybe the next night in my kitchen, how about that.”
His hooded eyes flashed under those thick lashes. “Works for me.”
When he eased forward once more, she met him halfway again, and their mouths re-fused. The plying sensation, the heat, the live-wire charge of the kissing disappeared the whole world, and she wanted the amnesia. She was starved for this removal from everything, from Bruce, from Thurston and his check, from Charlie in the back hallway, from Miss Martle and the beautiful receptionist with the coffee offer. She wanted no more of the bruises and aches that were dogging her, no more of the sense that she was working five days a week and paying her mortgage and not really getting ahead.
Her life had been a lonely dead end, and then everything had gotten scrambled in a bad way.
But kissing Darius felt like something truly good was happening in her life—and the hope and excitement were what had been absent from everything, including from the beginning with Bruce.
As they continued to learn each other’s mouths, Darius’s hand snuck around the nape of her neck, and things deepened, his tongue licking into her. God, what was that cologne he was wearing? It was the best thing she had ever smelled—
With a sharp jerk, he moved back and looked to the door. Which seemed to have magically shut itself.
“Fritz will be bringing down dinner soon,” he said in a raspy voice.
“Oh, sorry—”
Without missing a beat, he took her lips like they were running out of time, and then he pulled her onto his chest, demanding something she was impatient to give him. The exploration over. Now it was bonfire time, the sexual burn engulfing them.