Page 25

25

KIT

“I have a thing tonight,” I tell Miller the next morning. He’s wearing nothing but suit pants at the moment and pulling on a dress shirt.

I could die happy, watching Miller get ready for work.

He tugs at the shirt cuffs. “Will I see you after?”

“Yes, but it’ll be late. Expect me to be in a bad mood.”

He grins. “I always expect that, Kitten.”

I throw a pillow at him and climb from the bed to pull on yesterday’s clothes. “If you always expect that, it’s a wonder you want to see me at all.”

He crosses the room and tugs me against him. “Your mood mysteriously improves around me.”

I go on my toes and kiss him. “Arrogant. But probably true.”

When I get back to my apartment, I research returning to medical school while lacking the courage to actually call and discuss it with anyone, and then get dressed for tonight’s family dinner.

I wish I wasn’t spending the evening away from Miller, but the bright side of these get-togethers is that Harvey doesn’t normally come while Charlie and my dad usually do. Charlie will bring some model or heiress who can’t keep her hands off him and pouts when he ignores her to go talk to Maren. My dad will refer to Roger as “the longest suffering man in Manhattan” at some point, and my mother will be furious for a solid ten minutes before she forgets why she was mad. Maren will be there with her badly behaved puppies, who will destroy something or shit on the floor, only to be disciplined by Maren with cuddles and baby talk, which will provide a strong indication of how my future nieces and nephews will turn out. All in all, it’s pretty entertaining. I wish Miller could see it. I wish he could become a permanent part.

I arrive at the club and head to the room my mother has reserved—The Skyline Suite, her favorite, because it has a lovely view of the city through the floor-to-ceiling windows that line one wall and an endless mahogany table big enough to seat all of us, along with any surprise guests we bring along.

My stomach sinks the second I enter: Harvey has shown up tonight. Worse, he’s brought his idiotic brother, Buck, who has long “joked” about how we should have had a double wedding with Maren and Harvey.

“Let me know when you cut Blake loose” is how he’s ended every conversation I’ve had with him over the past year, so it’s no surprise when he immediately sidelines me and starts bragging about today’s gains on the market. I excuse myself to get a gin and tonic, but picking up on no social cues, he follows me to the bar, and he’s still following me when the door opens…and Miller walks in, his brow furrowed for a moment before his gaze lands on me.

I stare at him. Maren stares at him. My mother stares too. Only my father is unsurprised, reaching out to shake Miller’s hand. “The intrepid explorer! Glad you made it.” He turns to face me, my mom, and my sister—all of us incredulous. “I invited him to tell us how many times our Kitty Cat fell climbing that mountain.”

“Henry,” Miller says to my dad, “I was trying to give you the benefit of the doubt about sending Kit to Kilimanjaro, but you make it difficult by openly admitting you knew about her coordination issues.”

Everyone laughs aside from me. Why the fuck didn’t Miller tell me he’d be here?

Granted, I didn’t specifically say I’d be at the family dinner, but I told him I’d be in a bad mood and surely he could have connected the dots. We should have discussed it, at least. I’d have dissuaded him from coming at all, but even if he disagreed, there are a thousand questions that could be asked that might prove awkward, answers we should have worked out in advance.

Did you spend much time together?

Did anyone hook up on the trip?

Miller, where’s your place again? The Caribbean? Been there recently? Oh, you were gone the same days Kit was! How incredibly curious!

Miller circles the room, greeting everyone, and Maren is unable to take her eyes off him. He thought I was making too big a deal of the situation, but I know my sister: Miller has only gotten more handsome. He’s also charming and intelligent and funny and kind, whereas Harvey could basically only pretend to be those things for a minute or two and no longer pretends at all anymore.

And while I’d welcome her realization that Harvey is a bag of dicks, I don’t want her focused on Miller instead. So, in other words, nothing has changed in the last ten years: Maren and I both want Miller, and because of that, I’m going to insist that neither of us have him.

Miller finishes talking to my mother—I’m not sure why I resent how traitorously pleasant she’s being to him after he dumped Maren when I just had him going down on me over coffee this morning—before he moves on to me.

“Hello there, little Kitty Cat,” he says, giving me a hug.

“What the fuck, dude?” I whisper.

“I’ll explain later,” he replies before he draws away. “You look fucking amazing, by the way.”

He gives me a glance that says he would like to take me around the corner and repeat everything we did this morning, and as furious as I am about being blindsided, my core is clenching.

My mother is traitorous. My vagina is just as bad.

We’re all seated eventually—somehow I’ve wound up across from Miller and beside Buck, who is trying to look down my dress while telling me about the boat he’s just bought in a way that indicates I’m meant to be impressed. I murmur appropriately timed hmmm s and ohhh s while typing out a text to Miller.

WTF? How could you not tell me you were coming?

Miller

Your father invited me to dinner. I didn’t realize YOUR WHOLE FAMILY WOULD BE HERE.

But why would he do that?

I suspect it’s so you’ll see how easily I fit in and that this isn’t a big deal.

Except it hasn’t shown me how well Miller fits in at all—Maren has practically gone into a fugue state as she stares at him, as if she’s looking at both her past and her future at once. My dad might think he’s solved something but really, he’s just shown me how intractable the issue is: Maren thinks she loves Miller, and she thinks I’m the reason he left a decade ago, and the one outcome that will never be okay is if I get him instead of her.

I pick up my phone to reply but don’t get far.

“Kit,” snaps my mother. “No phones while we eat.”

Like I’m seventeen again. I’m surprised she hasn’t consigned me to a children’s table in a different corner of the room.

As dinner is served, Buck tells everyone about his boat, and they all manage to sound more impressed than I did. He’s the type of guy who loves holding court—the second someone asks Miller about his app, Buck’s trying to draw me into a secondary conversation, which I ignore.

I have no right to feel this, but I’m flooded with pride as Miller describes how he came up with the idea and how he was able to monetize it to an extent while making it free of charge in less developed areas. He’s even added a way to connect people without resources to surgeons who might be willing to treat them pro bono.

Maren is listening to him as if he’s hung the moon. Her eyes sparkle. Her cheeks and lips are flushed—signs of arousal.

I press a hand to my cheek—it’s warm, so I’m probably flushed too.

This is the effect Miller has on women. All women. Including, I’m sure, the woman who left her hair tie on his nightstand.

More questions are asked, and he sounds so fucking adult, and hot, as he answers, but every time he pauses, his eyes rest on me. Is it obvious to everyone at this table that we are not merely people who climbed a mountain together once?

“So,” says Charlie, turning to me and Miller, “I want to hear about Kit’s disastrous falls in Tanzania.”

“Screw you, Charlie,” I say. “I’m not that uncoordinated.”

“Remember that time Kit stepped in a bucket before we knew she needed glasses?” my mom asks Maren.

I’m the only one at the table who isn’t laughing. “As I recall, Mom, we did know that I needed glasses. You said the prescription was low enough that I could get by without them and that I didn’t want to be that girl .”

“Anyway, you were telling us about Kit’s biggest falls,” says Charlie, turning back to Miller like the utter dick he is.

Miller’s smile is gentle. “I don’t recall her falling. But I do remember her saving a guy with a broken leg.”

“You saved someone?” Maren gasps. “How could you not have told us this?”

I frown. “Because I didn’t save anyone. I wrapped up a guy’s leg. That’s it.”

“She also monitored everyone’s oxygenation and made sure that someone was directly behind one of the girls she was worried about.” Pride gleams from Miller’s eyes. It’s sweet but far too obvious.

“There isn’t a chance Kit didn’t fall over the course of an eight-day climb,” Charlie says, as a waiter refills his wine.

“I did,” I reply, “and Miller is being too much of a gentleman to allude to it. You should take notes, Charles.”

Which begs the question: why didn’t he just address the hair tie rather than hiding it? He’s a good guy...it seems really unlike him to be hiding proof of the woman who came before me rather than just confessing. All he had to do was admit he’d been sleeping with someone before he left for Africa. Hell, he’s slept with at least two women at this table…I was well aware he wasn’t a saint. It’s the deception that bothers me. The sleight of hand, as if I’m too dumb to have noticed it there or put it all together.

My phone vibrates.

Miller

Put on your sweater. Buck keeps looking down your dress.

I smile at Miller and tug my dress a little lower, leaning over slightly in Buck’s direction. “Could you pass me the salt?”

Buck makes sure to take a lingering look. I’ve slept with men who’ve spent less cumulative time looking at my rack than he has now.

“Which leads to another important topic,” says my dad, though I have no idea what was said prior to this. “Have you told them, Kit?”

I freeze, and my mouth goes dry. Is he about to out me and Miller? Was the previous topic of conversation disloyal sisters or backstabbers or inappropriate sexual relationships ?

He doesn’t know for sure that anything happened between us, unless my doorman informed him about my recent overnight guest. Which, I suppose, is very possible.

“Told them what?” I whisper.

“Kit’s leaving Fischer-Harris,” he announces. “In fact, she’s already left.”

There’s a cry from my mother’s end of the table, which is the sound one makes upon discovering you’ve lost your last bit of access to your ex’s billion-dollar company.

“That’s good,” says Harvey. “No guy wants to marry a woman at a job like that. It would be so emasculating.”

“It sounds to me as if you might be easily emasculated, then,” Charlie replies.

“What’s emasculating about being married to a CEO?” asks Miller.

“A man wants to feel like he’s the top dog in his marriage,” Harvey says. “You know it’s true, whether you’ll admit it or not.”

Charlie tips back in his chair with a brow raised. “Then I guess for your sake we should hope Maren never chooses to monetize any of her other talents.”

“Talents?” scoffs Harvey. “Since when is spending my money a talent?”

“I’m sure there are a million men in the city who’d kill to take her off your hands if that’s all you see,” Charlie replies with an icy smile as he swallows the remainder of the wine in his glass. The animosity between them slices through the room, rendering all of us silent as the plates are cleared.

“I’ll take an available Fischer girl if any are on the market,” Buck says, grinning at me.

Miller’s nostrils flare. “Back to the topic of conversation,” he says, looking my way, “what are you going to do instead, Kit?”

As if he doesn’t already know.

I hitch a shoulder. “Hopefully med school. I don’t know—my family hasn’t built a library for anyone lately, so it might be a little hard to get in.”

His mouth tips up at the corner.

Miller

Oh you want to play, Kitten?

It was just an innocent comment about the ease with which YOU got into an Ivy League school. Maybe it wouldn’t bother you if you’d achieved more on your own.

I’m going to bend you over the kitchen counter as soon as we get home. Once for every time Buck has stared at your rack.

I glance up. He was watching me read the message, and there’s intent in his eyes as if he’s already planning his steps, first to last.

Of all times, this should be the one where I say absolutely not , and I already know I’m not going to.

“I need to head out,” I announce, rising. “Thanks for dinner.”

“I’ll help you get a cab,” says Buck, and Miller stands.

“I’ll help her,” he says. “I’ve got to run too.” He’s so smooth. The kind of smooth that means he could juggle multiple women easily if he wanted to. I don’t think he would. But why did he hide the hair tie?

Buck says something about texting me— ugh —and I make a beeline for the front door.

Miller follows me out. We take different cabs but arrive at my building at the same time.

“That was ridiculous,” I say as we step onto the elevator.

He pushes my back to the wall and kisses me hard, as if we were apart for a very long time.

The elevator arrives on my floor, and he ushers me off. “Buck looked down your dress the whole fucking night, and you never tried to stop him.”

“I didn’t realize you and I were at the stage where I stopped letting other men get a good look at my tits,” I reply as I open the door.

He doesn’t even give me time to turn on the lights. His hand fists my hair as he leads me to the counter, guided by moonlight.

“Bend over, Kitten,” he growls.

I do as I’m told, now slippery and swollen with want. He could demand anything of me and I’d agree to it.

“Whose ponytail holder was on your nightstand?” I demand.

He stiffens for a millisecond. “You’re bothered by a fucking ponytail holder? You’re carrying a guy’s ashes in your purse .”

His hand slides between my thighs, pushing my panties to the side so he can play there for a moment, sliding down my center—torturously slow—before he presses two fingers inside me, and then does it again.

“Please,” I whisper. “Please. Fuck .” He’s using both hands now. My palms press flat to the counter, needing to hold onto something.

“You look so good like this, Kitten,” he hisses. “With that perfect ass in the air and your legs shaking.”

“Fuck me,” I plead.

He laughs. “Oh no—you ran your smart little mouth once too often tonight. I’m going to take my time with this. You’re going to drench my hand before I finally give you what you want.”

My knees wobble. “Miller,” I beg. And then it hits me and all I can do is whimper, biting my lower lip to keep my sounds in as I come.

I’m still coming when the sound of a zipper lowering hits my ears. “Spread,” he demands, forcing me to widen my legs, and then he slams into me. There’s nothing gentle about it—nothing considerate. He’s barely begun and I already feel as if I’m going to come again.

I gasp and he bends low, his mouth against my ear, his left hand covering mine, his right hand between my legs. “You love baiting me, don’t you, Kit?”

“You love it too,” I gasp. “Don’t act like it’s all me.”

“Yeah,” he grunts. “I always have.”

* * *

I’ve come three times before we’re finally at the cuddling-in-bed stage of the evening. I sort of feel like we just had our first fight, but I’m not even sure what it was about. The ponytail holder? The ashes? Buck looking down my shirt? I really have no idea. But I was mad, and I think he was mad, and now neither of us are.

“So, how much does my dad know?” I ask.

Miller’s arms tighten, as if he suspects the answer will make me bolt. “He hasn’t heard anything from me,” Miller says. “But Kit…you did go away with me for four days. He’s a smart guy. I imagine he’s made some assumptions.”

“Well, I don’t know what he thought that dinner would accomplish, but it definitely didn’t?—”

I’m interrupted by my ringing phone. I don’t know why I jump out of bed to grab it. Perhaps because this whole situation feels like a grenade is in our hands, and Miller’s appearance at dinner was the slow slide of the pin.

Or perhaps it’s because there’s a fifty percent chance that at least one member of my family watched me and Miller tonight and figured us out.

“Kit, I’m coming up,” sobs Maren. I hear the ding of an elevator.

“You’re coming up here ? In my building?” I shout, looking toward Miller.

His eyes widen and he jumps from the bed, pulling on his khakis.

“I’m going to ask Harvey for a divorce,” she sobs.

“Okay,” I whisper. “I’ll be here.”

I hang up and turn to him. “Maren is on the elevator,” I gasp. He grabs his shirt and shoes and looks around him frantically.

“I’ll go down the stairs?” he asks.

When I nod, he presses a quick kiss to the top of my head and runs out the door with his shirt and shoes in hand while I race to my room for a robe, snatching up the boxers and socks Miller left on my floor and shoving them under the bed just as I hear Maren letting herself in.

Her eyes are swollen from crying, but she comes to a dead stop when she enters. “Is someone else here?” she asks.

“What?” I reply, my voice weak. “No. So what happened?”

“This apartment reeks of sex,” she says, wiping her eyes. She steps forward, past the kitchen, and points at my room off to the left. “That is a sex bed, and you have sex hair.”

“I have no idea what you are referring to.”

“Was it Blake?” she asks, swallowing and forcing a smile. “He was so pissed last week. You must be incredibly good in bed if you were able to win him back that fast.”

I lead her to the couch. “It wasn’t anyone. Tell me what happened.”

Her shoulders sag. “I just…Harvey was such a dick over dinner and such a dick on the way home, and all I could think was about how nice Miller was when I dated him. I mean, I know he bickers with you, but he was never like that with me, and then he kind of put Harvey in his place with that whole thing Harvey said, about how it would be emasculating to have a wife who works, and?—”

My heart is in my throat. “That was Charlie, Mare.”

She shakes her head. “No, it was Miller. And he also said the thing about how millions of men would be happy to take me off Harvey’s hands, which I thought was?—”

“That also was Charlie.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t think so. But anyway…I finally saw Harvey through everyone else’s eyes, and I mean, yeah, I knew he was kind of a pompous dick, but I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten until tonight. It just suddenly hit me that I could be so much happier with someone else.”

And the someone else she has in mind is Miller. He represents, for her, all the things in the world that could make her happy.

“I don’t blame you, you know,” she says, “for him leaving? I mean, if we’d kept dating back then, it would have ended. We were both so young that maybe you did us a favor.”

It hits harder than it should. I suspected for a very long time that she thought I was at fault, but this confirms it. And…I no longer think I was.

Miller liked sparring with me. And in my seventeen-year-old mind, it seemed entirely possible that I’d just pushed him too far. As an adult, one who knows him fairly well, I’m certain nothing I ever said would have driven Miller off had he wanted to stay.

“Did you a favor?” I ask weakly.

“He left then, but now, you know, we’re adults. Our lives are in different places, and we’ve both grown up.”

She thinks this is their second-chance romance. This is Atonement and I’m the bratty little sister who drove them apart, all so they could find each other again. It’s incredibly far off the mark, but the wrongness of what I’ve been doing is absolutely suffocating.

If she finds out—and she will if this continues—it’s going to look as if I drove the love of her life away only so I could claim him for myself. She’s going to think I stole something from her twice, something that would have made her perfectly happy.

And I knew this. That’s why I was panicked to even let Maren know he was on my trip, why I swore him to secrecy about meaningless things. And now here I am, sleeping with him every night, sexting him at a family dinner.

I’ve been slowly boiling myself to death, falling deeper and deeper into something that I shouldn’t even have had a toe in.

And now I’ve got to force myself out.

She cries for a while about how hard it’s going to be to leave Harvey. Not because she loves him, so much, but because she wants children the way I want my next breath, and they’ve been doing in vitro , and now she’s going to have to start over.

I’m worried because Harvey is the type to take it all very, very poorly.

“Do you want to sleep here tonight?” I ask.

She smiles, wiping away her tears. “In your sex bed? No thank you. I’m gonna go to Mom’s. There’s nothing like several veiled suggestions about weight loss to cheer you up during a marital dispute, I always say.”

I hug her. “She’ll probably suggest ways you could be livelier in bed too.”

She laughs. “She will. Thank God I have you, so I know there’s some hope for normalcy, despite our gene pool.”

I see her out, and then slide down the wall with my phone clutched to my chest. It has to end. It unequivocally has to end.

“Hey there,” he says, answering on the first ring. “Is Maren okay?”

“I can’t do this anymore,” I whisper, the words choked. “I’ve loved every minute, but it’s got to stop.”

“Kit, don’t do this,” he says. “Look, let’s talk this out. I’ll come over and?—”

“No,” I whisper. “That will just make it harder for me to do what I should have done a long time ago. Miller, Maren is getting a divorce and half the reason for that is you. Because she remembers how nice you were, and she’s even giving you credit for things you didn’t say tonight. I know you and my dad think it’s crazy, and maybe it is, but I know my sister. She convinces herself of shit, and she’s convinced that I broke you up the first time and that maybe now things are going to get sorted out.”

“Except I don’t want Maren,” he says. “There’s nothing anyone can say that will change that.”

I swallow. “It doesn’t matter. Because she believes these things are true, and I can’t be the one to crush her when she learns they’re not.”

“I’m crazy about you, Kit,” he says. “I don’t think you have a clue. Please don’t do this.”

“I love you, Miller,” I reply. “But don’t call me again.”

I hang up, so heartsick it’s hard to breathe.

I’ve said those words to people before, but it never hurt the way it just did.

Because this was both the first and the last time I’ll say them to him. And I’d like to keep saying them forever.