Page 51 of His Good Girl

Neither did I.

Then the waiter arrived with dessert, and I nearly thanked him.

The chocolate tart was beautiful, a dark glossy round with a scatter of sea salt, a swipe of cream, and a few berries placed on top of it. I picked up my fork because it gave me something to do. Callum’s pear cake arrived with powdered sugar dusted over the top, and his espresso sat in a small white cup that looked ridiculous in his hand. He took a sip, and I watched the motion despite every sane instinct I possessed.

His mouth on the rim of the cup.

The slight hollow of his cheeks as he drank.

How his throat moved when he swallowed.

My thoughts went straight from that to his mouth on my neck, slow and hot, just below my ear. I imagined him there with such vivid force that my hand tightened around my fork. His breath against my skin. His lips pressing once, then again. The scrape of the stubble of his beard. His hand at my nape, holding me still because I could not be trusted to remain upright.

Need pulsed through me again, annoyingly insistent. Humiliated by my own body, I forced my attention to the tart and cut into it with the grim focus of a surgeon. I took a bite.

“Good?” he asked.

I closed my eyes before I could stop myself. “Ooohh…”

The tart was bitter and rich and smooth, salt catching at the edge of the chocolate, cream softening everything just enough. The taste of it was almost indecent. Or maybe I had made myself so sensitive that dessert had joined the conspiracy against me.

When I opened my eyes, Callum was watching me. Something hot and quiet moved across his face, gone almost before I could identify it. I had seen it, though. I knew I had seen it. It was the same small fracture I had noticed in his office when I said I understood it was a real job. The same reset. The same intentional return to control.

My body answered before I could stop it.

I pressed my thighs together again beneath the table and looked down at the plate.

“So very good,” I answered, too late.

“I gathered.”

His voice was slightly rougher.

It had to be the espresso.

It was not the espresso.

For several minutes, we were both saved by chocolate and old stories. He told me about a dinner my parents had hosted when I was little, one I barely remembered, where my father had tried to grill in a storm because he had ‘already committed to the steaks emotionally.’ Callum and my mother had watched from the kitchen while Dad stood outside under an umbrella, swearing at lightning as if it could be negotiated with. I remembered flashes of it from my mother laughing into a dish towel, to thunder shaking the windows, and my father coming inside soaked and triumphant with a plate of perfectly cooked steaks.

Callum told it better than I remembered it.

He told it like he had loved my father, but not in the vague, honorary way people loved their friends’ dead relatives after enough years had softened them into anecdotes. He remembered the cadence of Dad’s voice, the exact ridiculousness of his confidence, and how my mother would press two fingers to her temple when she wanted to appear exasperated but was secretly delighted. Listening to him felt like finding a box of photographs I had not known existed. Each story hurt a little, but the hurt was like pressing a bruise I wished was a tattoo.

“I forgot about that one,” I laughed, after one story about my mother hiding my Christmas presents in the dryer because she knew I never did laundry voluntarily.

Callum smiled into his wine. “She said it was the safest place in the house.”

“She was correct.”

“You were fourteen. Laundry was apparently an ideological issue.”

“I had principles.”

“You had a floor wardrobe.”

I laughed. “She told you that?”

“Your mother told me many things.”