Page 61 of The Wife Upstairs

Not the Eddie who killed Blanche. I didn’t know that Eddie. But the Eddie from before, the one who had swept me off my feet with his easy smiles, his charm, the way he’d known exactly what I wanted beforeIknew it myself.

I focused on those early days now. Before we moved here, before things went darker than I knew they could.

“Do you remember that first night in Hawaii?” I asked him, rising up from the bed to stand in front of him, my hands on his shoulders.

His own hands easily came to rest on my waist, almost like a reflex.

“I invited myself to your room,” he said as I slid my hands from his shoulders, down his chest, moving even closer so that he had to open his legs to let me step between them. “You said you weren’t that kind of girl.”

The corner of his mouth kicked up a little at that, a dimple deepening, and I leaned down to kiss that spot, feeling him suck in his breath.

“I wasn’t,” I said. “Until you.”

Then I kissed him.

This part was so much easier than I thought it would be, maybe because kissing Eddie had always been one of my favorite things.

Or maybe because as I re-created that first night for us, it was easy formeto slip into it, too. I wanted Eddie to forget where we were, what had happened, what he’d done, but I was doing it, too.

Forgetting.

Slipping.

His mouth under mine made that so easy, and I wrapped my arms around his neck, pulling him in, my fingers in his hai—

“No, no, Jesus, Bea, this is fucked up.”

Eddie pushed me away, his breath coming fast.

I stepped back from the bed as he stood up, nearly stumbling in his haste to get to his feet.

His face was red, his eyes almost glassy as he raked a hand through his hair.

“We can’t,” Eddie said, and my heart sank.

“I shouldn’t have come today,” he continued, moving past me. “I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking, I don’t know—”

I reached for him before he could walk out, and he stopped, looking down at my fingers loosely cuffing his wrist. The energy in the room shifted, tightened, and sharpened.

Moving toward him, I cupped his face in my hand and he didn’t turn away.

“It’s okay,” I told him, my voice soft. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not,” he protested, but he didn’t move, and I leaned in.

“If you really don’t want to, we don’t have to,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “But I want to. I want you to understand that. I want this, Eddie. I wantyou.”

And I did.

I honestly did.

Which was maybe the worst part of all of it.

There was no holding back when I kissed him this time, no tentative testing of lips and tongue. I kissed him like I had that very first night, and he gave in, like I’d known he would.

It was amazing, really, how easy it was. How quickly our bodies remembered each other.

You love me,I told him with every kiss, every touch, every gasp.