Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 35

Chapter 35

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“Come to bed,” I said.

I took her hand and led her to the bedroom. The sheets were cool and crisp. She slid in and curled toward me as I lay beside her, and I pulled her close, her back against my chest, my arm around her

waist.

She was asleep in minutes.

I lay awake longer than I intended to, listening to her breathe, feeling the steady rhythm of her heartbeat

against my arm.

I did not think about the question that had surfaced in the glass room. I did not examine the thing that happened in my chest when she smiled. I did not consider what it meant that I had told her about my parents, something I had not told anyone in years.

I did not think about any of it.

I just lay there in the dark and listened to her breathe and eventually I slept too.

When I woke in the morning she was already up.

The smell of coffee reached me before I opened my eyes. I sat up and found her standing at the small kitchen counter in the royal blue pantsuit from the closet, the jacket tailored perfectly to her frame, the color making her skin glow. She looked polished and professional and completely devastating, and my body responded immediately and without apology.

“Why so early?” I asked, my voice rough with sleep.

She smiled. “The lab is going crazy. Pat is going crazy. Julian and Seraphine called me so many times last night that my battery died.” She picked up her bag and checked the contents. “I charged it this morning.”

“Seraphine kept calling me all night too,” I said. “Eventually it became enough of a bother that I turned off my phone and went to sleep.”

She paused at the door to the private exit. She was not looking at me but I could see the slight hesitation in her posture, the pause of a woman who wanted to say something and was deciding whether to say it.

She decided against it.

“I will call you later,” I said.

She looked at me. Something passed between us across the quiet room, a current that had no name in the vocabulary of the game we were playing.

Then she was gone.

She was predictable in the way that people who only ever think about themselves are always predictable.

I leaned back in my chair.

“Do not throw her out yet,” I said. “Let her wait. Make her feel humiliated. Make her feel stupid. If she is still there at closing time, have security remove her then.”

“Yes, sir.”

I checked the feed periodically through the morning. She was still there at ten. Still there at noon. Still there at two, her posture getting progressively stiffer, her jaw getting tighter, the foot tapping with increasing urgency.

She refused to leave.

I had to admire the persistence, in a detached sort of way.

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