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I slicked my tongue over my teeth. “Not tonight, though.”
When she glanced at the whiskey bottle, I saw the moment she conceded. “Not tonight,” she agreed quietly.
I swiped a hand over my mouth, slowly bending to pick up the stool that I’d swept aside. Once it was upright, I pushed it back into place.
Zoe stared, her gaze unflinching and unguarded. She wanted more. And I couldn’t possibly think about what that meant.
“Good night,” I told her.
She swallowed, silently watching me leave the room, and I wondered how many more times she’d watch me walk away before it got to be too much.
Chapter Twenty-One
ZOE
When I couldn’t sleep, I had a terrible habit of staring at the ceiling and pondering really deep existential questions.
About mistakes and regret. These two things had plagued me for months after I kicked Charles out of the house.
About finding your purpose. I’d spent a solid year on this one when I decided to take a sabbatical from working full-time because I knew I needed the break.
Loss and love and heaven and God.
Whether there were predetermined plans for our lives that we couldn’t see, or whether it was all truly left to chance. I was still wrestling with those.
And tonight I thought about first kisses.
I thought about what it meant when those kisses were the best first kisses I’d ever had in my life. Nothing I’d experienced came close.
It had to mean something, right?
I’d doze for a while, my eyes heavy with the tug of sleep, only to jolt awake when I remembered how Liam’s thumbs had played my nipples like instruments until I made sounds so perfectly aligned with the heat building between us that I couldn’t hear over the rush of my thundering pulse.
When I thought about his firm lips and the hot, demanding slide of his tongue, my breath would come faster, and my heart raced in my chest.
For hours, I tossed and turned, kicked at the sheets covering my legs, and smashed my overheated face into the pillow when I couldn’t pry the thoughts of him from my head.
My pulse was stretched thin across my entire body; I could feel it everywhere.
Feelhimeverywhere.
As the night wore on, interminably slow, I picked apart every millisecond of what had happened.
The gnawing worry that had plagued me all evening when he hadn’t shown up at his normal hour. The bone-melting relief when I realized he was home. The whiskey bottle in his hands. The look on his face because I knew something was wrong.
And the way my body had reacted when he laid his hands on my skin. The way my heart took a slow, tortured turn in my chest when he curled his body over my back and pressed his nose into my hair.
Honestly, it was a miracle I hadn’t shoved him down on the island and ripped his shirt clean in half. I wanted to. I wanted to finish what we’d started, and I couldn’t deny—no matter how much I should have—that I would have finished it if he hadn’t stopped us.
There would have been sex.
Kitchensex.
Messy, hard, glorious kitchen sex with Liam.
Complicated, glorious kitchen sex with Liam.
I laid a trembling hand on my face and tried to will myself to sleep, but it was a lost cause.
