The Billionaire's Fight for Redemption Starts at Five A.M. novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: Sunday

At nine on Sunday night, I turned off the gym lights, locked the front door, and went upstairs to wait.

My apartment is three small rooms above the old laundromat.

The ceilings slant, the radiator knocks, and the window over the bed looks down on the street.

I'd cleaned it twice.

I'd put on a clean shirt and taken it off and put on a different clean shirt.

At nine-oh-four there was a knock at the side door, soft.

I went down the stairs two at a time and opened it.

Cal stood on the step in jeans and a dark sweater with snow melting in his hair.

He had no flowers and no wine.

He had nothing in his hands at all.

"I thought about bringing something," he said. "Then I thought, she'll tell me to leave it on the step."

"Good thought."

"So I only brought me."

"Come up."

He climbed the stairs behind me.

I felt him the whole way.

At the top, in my narrow kitchen with the light over the stove burning yellow, I turned around.

He stopped a foot from me.

"Not one minute of tonight goes on the sheet," I said. "I want that on the record."

"Dee."

"I mean it. Downstairs I'm your..."

"You're a woman who has told me three separate times that she won't let me pay for anything."

He put his hand against the side of my face.

"I came up these stairs because I wanted you."

"No one signed anything."

I turned my face into his palm.

Then I took the front of his sweater in both hands and pulled him down to my mouth.

It was nothing like the supply room.

There was no one to listen for and nothing to hide from.

His mouth moved slowly against mine.

I backed him up against the refrigerator.

A magnet shaped like a boxing glove fell off the door and bounced on the floor.

"Hold still," I said.

"Yes, ma'am."

I pushed the sweater up his chest and he lifted his arms and let me take it off him.

Under it he was lean and long and pale from a life spent in rooms.

I followed the faint line of hair down his center with the flat of my hand.

I put my mouth on his shoulder.

He shuddered all the way down.

"You've been looking at me for a month," he said, and his voice came out rough. "My turn."

He took the hem of my shirt in both hands and waited.

I raised my arms.

When the shirt was gone he simply looked, in the yellow light, at the plain black bra and the freckles.

He looked at the old scar across my ribs, from a bad fall off a ring post at nineteen.

I'm not a small woman.

I have a boxer's shoulders and a coach's hips and thighs that carry me up a ladder with a paint can.

I have never in my life wanted to be looked at.

"You're the strongest-looking woman I've ever seen," he said. "I have no idea what to do with that."

"Start by not saying it like an apology."

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