Chapter 15: Say It Again

The young firefighter had already taken his post outside Lottie's door when we got back to the unit.

"Nobody gets past me tonight but the nurses," he said. "Go. She's asleep."

The night nurse promised to call the second anything changed.

I stood in the corridor in my one black dress and looked at Terrence.

He had not touched me once since the stage.

"Ten minutes from here," he said. "I live ten minutes from here."

"Then drive."

His apartment was one room and a kitchen on the sixth floor.

There was a bed made with hospital corners, a stack of journals, and no photographs of anyone.

He turned on one lamp and stood by the door with his keys still in his hand.

"I should take you back," he said. "You've had no sleep in three days. You stood up in front of two hundred people tonight."

"Dr. McCormick."

"Hannah."

"I treat your daughter," I said. "That is all this is."

His face changed.

"That's what you told me on the roof," I said. "Say it again."

"I can't."

"Why not?"

"Because I've wanted you since the cabin, and I told myself six years that you'd gone back to him because you wanted to."

I crossed the room and took the keys out of his hand and put them on the table.

"Then stop telling yourself things," I said.

I kissed him.

He made a low, broken sound against my mouth, and his hands came up and held my face.

For a moment he kissed me gently, and carefully.

I did not want gentle.

I bit his lower lip, and he groaned, and his hands moved down my back and pulled me against him hard.

"I've wanted this for six years," he said into my neck, and his voice shook.

"Then quit wasting it."

I found the buttons of his shirt and undid them one at a time while he kissed the side of my throat.

His chest was warm and broad, with dark hair going gray in the middle, and I put my palm flat on it and felt his heart slamming under it.

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