One step too close
1126 Words
(Reese)
I did not expect to find him on the other side of the door.
I had spent the last hour telling myself the worst of it was over. The shock of seeing him in the hallway. The moment where my body forgot five years of careful distance and went completely still. I had pushed through all of that and come out the other side and I was fine. I was going to be fine.
Then I opened the door and Noah was standing there.
He was not leaning against the frame the way a casual visitor would. He was standing straight, his jacket on, his keys in his hand, and he was looking at me in a way that had nothing casual about it at all. The composure he had worn in the hallway earlier was gone. His eyes were direct and open and full of something he was not trying to hide anymore.
I had not seen him look at me like that in five years.
My hand stayed on the door.
"Noah." His name came out flat, which was what I had aimed for.
"You going to invite me in?" His voice was lower than it had been in the hallway, rougher at the edges. "Or are you afraid I'll find traces of your fiancé?"
The way he said fiancé told me everything. He had not believed it. Or he had believed it and it had made things worse. Either way he was standing at my door and that meant he was not done with this conversation.
Neither was I, if I was being honest.
I stepped back and let him in.
He walked past me and I caught the scent of him, tobacco and leather and something underneath that I had no name for, just a familiarity that my body recognized before my head could stop it. I caught a glimpse of the patch on the back of his jacket as he passed. I did not recognize it but it looked like it meant something to someone.
I closed the door and turned around.
He had already turned to face me. The distance between us was not much. The apartment was mostly empty still, just the furniture in its place and the boxes I had not gotten through yet, and in that open space there was nowhere to move that would not make it obvious I was moving away from him.
I crossed my arms instead.
"Five years and you just walk in here like that," I said.
"You let me in," he said.
He was not wrong. I had nothing to say to that so I said nothing.
He took one step closer and the space between us got smaller in a way I felt before I could measure it. "You have a fiancé and you introduce him to me in a hallway like I'm somebody you just met."
"You are somebody I just met," I said. "The person I knew was a long time ago."
He looked at me for a moment without speaking. Then he reached up and touched my face.
His fingers rested against my cheek, light and careful, and my entire body went quiet. Not the quiet of being calm. The quiet of everything stopping at once.
I should have stepped back. I knew I should have. Every clear and reasonable part of me was aware of that. I had a plan and the plan did not include standing in my half unpacked apartment letting Noah Prescott touch my face like the last five years had not happened.
But my feet did not move.
"I never stopped thinking about you," he said. His voice was barely above a normal volume now. "Not once. Not in five years."
"You broke up with me," I said. My voice came out steady, which surprised me. "You said you didn't love me anymore. You said it like it was easy."
"It was not easy."
"You did a good impression of it."
Something moved across his face. Not guilt exactly, something older than guilt. Something that had been sitting in him for a while.
"I had reasons," he said.
"I know you did," I said. "And I spent a long time trying to figure out what they were. Then I stopped trying and I got on with my life. And my life is good, Noah. I built something real. I don't need you to come back and explain yourself."
"I'm not here to explain myself."
"Then what are you here for?"
He answered by closing the remaining space between us and kissing me.
It was not the slow careful kiss of someone asking a question. It was the kiss of a man who had been holding something back for a very long time and had run out of reasons to keep holding it. His hand moved from my cheek to the back of my neck and I felt the cold of his rings against my skin and the warmth of his palm and I forgot for a moment what I had just said.
I forgot a lot of things.
I had told myself I was over him. I had believed it too, or something close enough to believing it that it had worked for five years. I had dated other people, built a career, filled my life with enough noise that the quiet spaces where he used to live had gotten smaller and smaller. I thought I had closed them off completely.
I had not.
I kissed him back.
The moment I did his other arm came around me and I felt the leather of his jacket against my hands and the solid weight of him and five years collapsed into nothing. Not because I had forgiven him. Not because the things he had done to my heart had been undone. But because my body had its own memory and it was stronger than my pride tonight.
His mouth was familiar in a way that made no sense after this long. The way he kissed me, the pressure and the intention behind it, it was the same and different at once. The boy I remembered had kissed me like I was something to be gentle with. The man kissing me now had no gentleness in him, only certainty, like he was claiming something that had always been his and he was finished pretending otherwise.
I let him.
The last clear thought I had was that I would deal with this in the morning. That I was allowed one night of bad decisions in a life that had been otherwise very carefully managed. That whatever this was, it did not have to mean anything beyond what it was.
Then I stopped thinking altogether.
- Writer
