Everyone Else in This Building Is a Returnee novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: The Kitchen

I closed the door of 1B behind us and leaned on it.

My kitchen was small and sunny, with a table for two and the dishes from last night still in the rack.

Perry stood in the middle of it with his hands loose, waiting.

"You said you needed to ask me for something," he said.

"I do."

"I'm ready."

"You're not. Nobody's ready for this one."

I pushed off the door and walked to the window and back, and he watched me do it.

I had planned the sentence on the stairs.

I had practiced it twice in my head, which was exactly the problem.

"I've never let anyone choose for me," I said. "Not once."

"I know."

"Everything I've done, I did for a reason I could defend. A job. A rent. A way out."

"Even you," I said. "I picked you for good reasons. You were kind, you were funny, you were there."

"That's fair."

"I want to pick you for no reason at all. I want to hand it over, and not have a reason."

He frowned, gently.

"I don't understand."

"I want you to decide. Right now, in this kitchen. Everything. What you want, what you do to me and in what order."

"Dara."

"Don't ask me. Don't read me. Not what I like, and not what I've said before. Just what you want."

"I don't know if I can."

"You burned the Book. This is what the rest of the pages were for."

He stared at me.

I had never seen anyone look at me with so much hunger and so much terror at once.

"If I get it wrong," he said.

"Then you got it wrong, and I'll have chosen to let you."

"What if you hate it?"

"Then I'll have hated it, and it'll be mine."

I held out my hands.

"You don't know what I'll say, Perry. Neither do I. That's what I'm asking for."

He crossed the kitchen slowly.

Each step looked like a decision.

He took my face in both hands, and for once his thumbs did not stroke or ask.

They held.

"Stand there," he said.

His voice was rougher than I had ever heard it.

"Don't move."

I stood by the table.

He walked around me once, looking, the way he looked at a panel he was about to open.

Then he stopped behind me and lifted my braid off my neck and laid it over my shoulder.

His breath landed on my skin, and I shivered.

"I've wanted to do this since the second loop," he said against my ear. "I never once let myself."

"Do it now."

"I will."

He kissed the back of my neck, and then my shoulder through my shirt.

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