Back With Baby, Ex Regrets Deeply novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Heriot Row

He swears I'm thinking of someone else, I marry him anyway and take him to bed to forget, and three years later a crate of my mother's slashed paintings arrives from Boston with my stepsister's note: bring the kid.

"We have met," I said. "You gave me your coat."

The registrar looked from me to him and went on smiling.

Alistair didn't blink.

"You must be thinking of someone else."

"Greyfriars. No. The little kirkyard down by the Water of Leith. It was raining. You had a gray wool coat with a torn lining."

"A lot of men in Edinburgh own a gray coat, Miss Odell."

His voice was low and even and exactly the voice I remembered.

Behind me my father cleared his throat.

"Faye. Let's not hold the man up."

I looked at Alistair for a long moment.

He looked back at me as if I were a reasonable stranger he was being patient with.

So I thought, fine.

Maybe I'd built a whole night out of grief and rain.

Maybe I'd needed someone so badly that I'd made him up and hung his face on a stranger.

"Fine," I said. "Let's not hold the man up."

The vows were short.

He said his without looking at a card.

I said mine looking at the rain.

When the registrar said he could kiss me, he only touched his mouth to my cheek, near my ear, quick and dry.

My father signed as a witness and was on the phone to his bank before the ink dried.

Then he flew home.

He didn't stay for dinner.

Alistair's house was on Heriot Row, a long gray terrace across from a private garden full of wet trees.

His grandmother met us in the front hall with a cane she clearly didn't need.

She was tiny and straight-backed and wore lipstick the color of a fire engine.

She looked me up and down.

"You're thin," she said. "And you've been crying for a week. Sit down, I've had them make soup."

"I'm fine, thank you."

"Nobody's fine on their wedding day, hen. Sit."

I sat.

She sat across from me and watched me eat every spoonful.

Alistair stood by the fireplace with a whisky he didn't drink.

"He tells me you draw rabbits," his grandmother said.

"Badgers, mostly. And one very anxious hedgehog."

"Good. I can't abide rabbits." She pointed her spoon at her grandson. "He can't draw at all. He drew me a horse when he was seven and I thought it was a sofa."

"It was a horse," Alistair said.

"It had cushions, Alistair."

I laughed.

It was the first time in eight days, and it came out of me like a cough.

Alistair looked over at the sound.

Something moved in his face and was gone.

The bedroom was on the second floor at the back, with a high bed and a window over the mews.

My suitcase had been unpacked for me.

My nightgown was laid out on the bed.

He came in behind me and closed the door, and stood there with his hands in his pockets.

"There's a room across the landing," he said. "It's made up. Nobody in this house will know or care which one you sleep in."

"Is that in the contract?"

"There's nothing about this in the contract."

I turned around.

He was very tall in that room.

His tie was loose and he looked tired, and he was watching me the way you watch a deer in a garden, not moving in case it runs.

I didn't want to be a deer.

I didn't want to be the girl in the cream dress with the whole line watching.

I wanted one night where I wasn't the thing that happened to me.

"I'm not going across the landing," I said.

I crossed the room and took hold of his loose tie and pulled.

He came down to me slowly.

I didn't.

I pulled the tie loose and let it fall.

His hands stayed at his sides.

I undid the buttons of his shirt, one by one, from his throat to his belt.

The rain moved on the window like it was trying to get in.

I pushed the shirt off his shoulders.

He let it fall.

He was warm under my palms, and still, and built like a man who worked with his body before he bought other men to do it.

I put my mouth on his collarbone.

His breath went out through his nose.

"You offered me the landing," I said against his skin. "You can still go."

"I'm not going anywhere."

I dragged my teeth down his chest and felt his stomach tighten.

I unbuckled his belt.

The leather came out of the loops with a sound like a snap.

I opened his trousers and pushed them down with his shorts, and my knuckles brushed his cock.

It was hard.

Because of me.

I looked up at him.

He was watching my hands like they were doing something dangerous.

"Take the dress off," I said.

"Faye." His voice was low and rough.

"I pulled you in by your tie," I said. "Get it off me."

He reached behind me and found the zipper.

The dress came down slow, like he was unwrapping something that might break.

Then it pooled at my feet and I stood in the little nothing I'd packed for a joke.

I reached up and touched the pearl earrings.

The cold of them against my neck felt like my mother's hand.

"The earrings stay on," I said.

"All right."

He looked at me for a long moment, all of me, and I didn't cover anything.

Then he stepped out of his trousers and pulled me onto the bed.

His mouth came down on mine.

Not the dry press at the registry.

This was open and hot and he kissed me like he'd been deciding for hours and had finally decided yes.

I made a sound into his mouth.

He swallowed it.

His hands were everywhere, my ribs, my hips, the backs of my thighs.

He put his mouth on my breast and I arched off the bed.

"God."

"Not yet," he said.

He kissed down my stomach, slow, like he was memorizing the route.

Then his mouth found my pussy and I stopped thinking.

He held my hips down with both hands.

I grabbed his hair.

It was soft and dark and I pulled.

He made a low sound against me and did something with his tongue that made my legs shake.

I was already wet.

I'd been wet since the tie.

He licked me like he had all night and no plans for morning.

I came with his name in my mouth, the first time I'd ever said it like that.

"Alistair."

He didn't stop.

He kept going until I was shaking and pulling his hair hard enough to hurt.

Then he looked up at me from between my legs.

His mouth was wet.

"Again," he said.

"I can't."

"You can."

He put his mouth back on my clit and sucked.

I came again in under a minute, loud, my heels digging into the bed.

The sound came out of me like a sob.

He crawled up my body and put his forehead against mine.

His cock was hard against my thigh.

"Please," I said.

"Please what."

"Don't be careful with me."

His eyes went dark.

"Say it again."

"I don't want careful. I want you to fuck me. I want to feel it tomorrow."

Something in him broke open.

He pushed my knees apart and settled between them.

The head of his cock pressed against me.

He pushed in slow, one long inch at a time, and I felt every bit of it.

I was full.

He was thicker than I'd thought, and he went deep, and I made a sound I'd never made before.

"Look at me," he said.

I looked.

His face was tight, his jaw hard, like he was holding on by one thread.

"Good girl," he said.

Then he fucked me.

No more slow.

He drove into me hard enough that the headboard hit the wall.

I wrapped my legs around his waist and took it.

I wanted it.

I wanted to be ruined by something that wasn't a clerk's office at ten in the morning.

"Harder," I said.

He gave me harder.

His hand came up and cupped my jaw, not gentle, and turned my face so I had to look at him.

"You wanted to forget," he said.

It was a growl.

"I want you to remember this instead."

I clawed his back.

I didn't care.

I was close again, climbing, and he knew.

He reached between us and found my clit with his thumb.

"Come on my cock," he said.

I came apart.

It hit me like a wave and I clenched around him and screamed.

He followed three strokes later.

He buried himself deep and came with a sound like it was torn out of him, his hot cum spilling inside me.

His whole body went rigid over me.

Then he collapsed.

He was heavy and hot and I could feel his heart hammering against my ribs.

We lay there while the rain kept on.

He pulled out of me slow, and I felt his cum on my thigh, warm, and I didn't move to clean it.

I didn't want to move.

I wanted to lie in the mess of it and feel wanted.

He shifted onto his back and pulled me against his side.

His chest was damp.

I put my head on it.

For a long time neither of us spoke.

His hand came up and stroked my hair.

Once.

Then he stopped, like he'd caught himself at something.

His hand settled on the bed.

I closed my eyes and listened to the rain and his heart slowing down.

In the gray morning he kissed my shoulder and got out of bed.

I listened to him dress in the dark.

At the door he stopped.

"Goodnight, Faye," he said, though it was morning.

That was all.

I lay there and told myself it was fine.

I'd gotten what I came for.

So had he.

Three years later a crate came from Boston.

Two men carried it into the front hall on Heriot Row, and Teddy came running in his socks to see if it was a bus.

It wasn't.

It was my mother's paintings.

Twelve canvases, all the ones that had hung in her studio on Marlborough Street.

Every one had been cut.

Long clean slashes, corner to corner, the way you'd open a box.

Alistair's grandmother saw them over my shoulder and said a word I'd never heard her use.

Taped inside the lid was a card in round pink handwriting.

"Clearing out your mom's junk! Dad's signing the house over to Dorian and me on the 13th, so we're finally making it OURS. Thought you'd want these. Happy early birthday. Love, Laurel."

The 13th was the day before I turned thirty.

The day before the house would have been mine.

Alistair came down the stairs on his phone and stopped when he saw my face.

"What is it?"

I held the card out.

He read it once.

Then he went quiet.

"I'll have the plane ready by tonight."

"No."

"Faye."

"Two seats," I said. "Me and Teddy. This one's mine."

He looked at the cut canvases for a long time.

Then he looked at me.

"Two seats," he said.

I turned the card over to put it back in the crate.

There was a P.S. on the back.

"Bring the kid. Dorian's dying to meet him."

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