Page 31 of Love Walked In

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Mari

I wasn’t sure where I ended and Leo began, and even that wasn’t enough right now.

My greedy fingers tangled in his damp hair, my legs wrapped around his hips.

After a moment he raised his head from where it had been resting on my shoulder, and his swollen mouth found mine for a slow exchange of breath and tongue. I was… clinging to him.

What was I doing? I tried not to cling to anyone. The tenderness was too much. “So much for being professional,” I said to break the spell.

He froze, and I worried he was going to panic again, leave me alone out of some misplaced sense of responsibility.

But then he rolled over and genuinely whooped with laughter, and I couldn’t help but join in.

It was like I’d never laughed in bed with someone before.

If I’d hoped to get some distance, play it cool, Leo’s laugh was like the world’s catchiest pop song, impossible not to join in.

“Yes,” he said with a smile once we’d relaxed into chuckling. “Definitely not part of the normal course of business.” He reached out and trailed his fingers over my chest and stomach, with enough pressure this time so it didn’t tickle. “It’s been so long since I’ve done that.”

I couldn’t help but smile back at the wonder in his voice. “For me, too.”

I closed my mouth hard at that drastic overshare, and he stared at me like I’d just said two plus two was negative thirteen. “I thought—” he started, then said with a laugh, “You just seemed so confident, the way you talked about sex. I wish I could do that.”

I shook my head. “I have sex, yes, but I don’t have p-in-v sex all that often.” Sleeping with people with vaginas made the point moot, and with my other partners, there was always a tiny part of my brain that raised red flags at the prospect of repeating my mom’s mistake.

Leo wrinkled his nose. “P-in-v?”

I wrinkled my nose back. “You think ‘intercourse’ is any sexier?”

He snorted. “I do, and there’s a Monty Python sketch I need to show you.” His face became earnest again. “So this isn’t something you would do normally?”

I hesitated, not willing to bring my history of loving and leaving into this bed. “No, it’s not.”

He paused too, studying me, and a small, scared part of me waited for him to judge me, to turn away. “Thank you,” he said quietly. “Thank you for trusting me.”

I repressed a sigh of relief. Even though I shouldn’t care what he thought, because he was just another partner. Right?

But I couldn’t help but notice that his night-sky hair was a feathery mess, his normally tight mouth was relaxed and full, and his eyes… he looked blissed out. I’d made him that way.

And I was going to sink back into reverie if I didn’t get practical soon. “Of course I trust you. But now I need to get cleaned up.”

When I came back from the bathroom, Leo had gotten rid of the condom and was sitting up in bed looking at me. “Wait,” he said, his voice a little dark.

An answering shiver went through me. “Your wish is my command,” I half joked.

He crawled down to the end of the bed and sat, then reached for my hand and tugged me closer.

“I feel like I should be posing,” I said. The attention, the close, close attention, felt like intense sunshine after too long in the dark.

He didn’t respond, just trailed his fingers over the branch of pale pink apricot blossoms on the front of my left thigh, then turned me around and studied the vermilion tulip tattoo on my right shoulder.

“The person who did these is a tremendous artist,” he said.

“She went to art school,” I said. “She has these amazing paintings all over her studio.”

He froze for a second, then let out a long breath and turned me around again so I faced him.

“They’re all so lovely, like you.” He lightly tapped the apricot flowers. “What’s the story of this one?”

It had been so easy with other people to say superficial answers: They were pretty.

I liked the colors . But Leo wanted to know me…

and I wanted to let him in. I breathed out hard.

“This was the apricot tree that grew in our backyard. Mom would spend a whole weekend making jam every summer and the house would smell like fruit and vanilla.”

“And this one?” he asked, putting his palm over the tulip.

I smiled. “Mom chose the bulbs because they were the color of her favorite lipstick. In the spring the yard would turn red from them and yellow from daffodils.” I flashed the daffodil on my arm. “Like nature was throwing a party, she’d say.”

I swallowed hard, the next part of the story a stone in my throat. Leo waited, his hands gentle on my hips.

“She died in February, and afterward, when I missed her, I could go sit in the flowers and put my hands in the dirt. She’d always said it centered her, to do that.

But Greg brought in guys who ripped out the whole backyard a few months after she died.

When I came home from school, everything smelled like cut wood and chlorophyll, and the yard was just dirt. ”

Leo’s hands tightened on me. “That’s horrible.”

“Then he laid down a lawn. Just grass. And having only one plant in a place is bad for the ecosystem.” I sniffled a little. “There used to be noise out there, you know? The birds singing, and bees buzzing, wind in the trees. But after that, it was just silent.”

“Mari.” My name carried so much, sympathy and grief, gentleness and something else, something wild I didn’t want to name.

Soon. Soon I’d tell him that whatever he was feeling for me, I couldn’t feel back. “I’m cold,” I said now.

He moved back on the mattress, reached for me. When I climbed back into bed, he pulled the comforter all the way over us, making a little world of white. From there, it was an easy slide into kissing him, touching him, taking him inside me again.

Twenty minutes later, when we were lying around getting our breath back for the second time, I looked at the stark white room, the plain furniture. It all looked so basic, almost like real people didn’t live here. My hands clenched on the sheets. Wait a second…

“Leo? What is this place? A friend’s?”

He hesitated, then smiled sheepishly. “Don’t kill me. It’s an Airbnb.”

Indignation made me sit up. “But I told you not to spend money.”

He sat up, too. “On a hotel room, yes. Which this isn’t.”

My fingertip found his chest and poked. “That’s semantics, and you know it.”

He tugged me close with a laugh. “Can you blame a poor man who’s had a delicious American sex goddess drop into his lap?

” He framed my face with his hands. “I wanted a place for us so much. This was the only thing I could think of. Didn’t you want that, too?

” His face fell. “Unless you don’t want to do this again. ”

I couldn’t imagine only having sex with Leo Ross once. Every atom of my body was pissed off about the idea. “OK, I take your point. But you have to let me pay, too. It doesn’t have to be half, just something.”

“It’s really that important to you, to feel like you’re paying your share? You won’t accept this as a gift?”

I shook my head firmly. “Too big.” What if I didn’t please him? What if he got tired of me?

Leo sighed a little. “All right.” His mouth turned up a little, and he said wryly, “Orgasms don’t make you any less stubborn, do they?”

I opened my mouth to argue, but my stomach gurgled loudly instead.

“That was quite a noise,” he said.

I got out of bed to find my jeans and fished out my phone. “Oh my God, it’s after eight. No wonder I’m starving.”

He blinked when I showed him my screen. “Oh, yeah, it’s well past dinner, isn’t it?”

“You’re not hungry?” I asked, astonished.

A shrug of his narrow shoulders. “Not really.”

Come to think of it, I didn’t see him eating all that often. Besides Friday-night dinner, I’d sometimes seen him eating a few carrot sticks or nibbling on a chocolate bar, but not much else. “I’m going to go see what I can rustle up,” I said.