Please Me, Daddy novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: The Hand on Her Back

Quentin's POV

I woke at six on Saturday with her asleep across my chest and my arm gone numb, and I didn't move it.

She had stayed.

I had expected the empty bed, because she had left it empty once before.

She lay curled on her side with one hand open on my ribs and the steel watch at her wrist.

I studied it in the gray light.

It was a man's watch, old and heavy, with a scratched crystal.

She had never taken it off, not in the shower, not in my bed.

I turned her wrist a quarter inch, carefully, and read the back of the case.

W.H.

Initials, worn almost smooth.

Half of Chicago had a grandfather with initials, and I let it go.

She stirred and said something into my skin that wasn't a word.

I put my hand on her hair, and a feeling went through me that I had no practice with.

I had spent ten years learning to stay in control of every room I walked into.

It had taken one woman in glasses to find the place where that didn't hold.

On Monday, the thirty-first floor held its quarterly mixer in the atrium.

Sixty people stood around with plastic cups.

I stood by the window and watched her from across the room, because I wasn't allowed to do anything else.

She wore the gray dress.

She had her glasses on and her hair twisted up, and she was laughing at something Robin Burke had said with her whole face.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Please Me, Daddy from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.