Page 87
She had not suggested he go.
He had not suggested it either.
At some point the conversation had moved from the kitchen table to the living room. She wasn’t sure exactly when, just that at some point they were on the couch with the candles on the coffee table and the storm making its last sounds outside and it felt like the most natural thing, the two of them finding the same direction without discussing it, which was how they did everything.
She was telling him about her grandmother, the art teacher, the one who had first put a brush in her hand and said see what it does, and she’d been talking for a few minutes, comfortable, relaxed in the way she’d only started being able to be with him in the last month, and she’d turned to look at him in the middle of a sentence and stopped.
He was looking at her.
Not the distracted look of someone listening while thinking about something else. The full look. The one she’d catalogued over four months, the one that had its own weight, that she could feel when it landed on her the way you could feel direct sunlight, undeniably present.
Except this time it was different.
This time there was nothing careful in it. Nothing held back or managed or kept at deliberate distance. He was looking at her the way she’d been half imagining for months, and the candlelight was between them and the storm was almost gone and they were alone in her warm cottage and he had told her things tonight he’d never told anyone.
She stopped talking.
The silence settled between them, charged, electric, the air before something.
His eyes moved from her face, just briefly, to her mouth. Back to her eyes.
She felt that like a hand against her skin.
“You stopped talking,” he said. His voice was lower than usual.
“You stopped listening,” she said.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t.”
He reached over.
Slowly, because he did everything slowly, deliberately, with the full weight of his attention, and his hand found her jaw the way it had twice before, warm and certain against her skin, tilting her face toward his, and this time there was no cold air, no interrupted moment, no generator, no reason on earth for either of them to stop.
She let herself be tilted.
She looked at him, really looked, up close, in the candlelight, the face she had been learning for four months. The line of his jaw, the stubble she could feel under her fingertips when she reached up without thinking. The dark eyes that were on her completely. He smelled like woodsmoke from the candles and something underneath that was just him, warm and clean, the smell she’d found in the snow on Tuesday, the smell she’d been thinking about since.
“Allison,” he said.
Just that. Her name. The way he said it that was different from how anyone else said it.
“I know,” she said.
And she closed the distance.
Her hands slid up his chest and gripped the front of his flannel shirt. He made a low sound, something that started deep in his chest, as she pulled him down into a kiss that wasn’t soft or careful. It was hungry. Her tongue swept into his mouth, tasting him, woodsmoke and something uniquely Shane, something that made her stomach clench, and he groaned against her lips like she’d undone something in him.
His hands were immediate, tangling in her hair, cupping her jaw, sliding to grip her waist with the quiet strength that had been making her aware of him since October. He lifted her without apparent effort and she wrapped herself around him and she could feel him, warm and solid and wanting, and she made a sound she hadn’t planned on making.
He broke the kiss just long enough to look at her, breathing changed.
“Allison.” His voice was lower than she’d ever heard it. Rough at the edges.
She reached up and touched his jaw, the stubble under her fingertips, rough and real, something she’d been noticing from a careful distance for months. He turned his face slightly into her hand, a man who didn’t ask for things, accepting something, and she felt that everywhere.
She kissed him again. Harder.
He made a sound that she was going to think about for a very long time.
