Page 74 of The Seven Year Slip

My fingers trailed down his chest and curled up under his shirt. I was thinking that I wanted to get out of my head. That I wanted to enjoy him,here. I was thinking how selfish that was, knowing what I knew, knowing this couldn’t ever work out. I was thinking how my aunt had been smart to set up that second rule, and I was thinking how thoroughly I was going to break it.

I traced the tattoo on his stomach, a small running rabbit. Gooseflesh rippled across his skin at my touch. “How many do you have?” I asked instead.

He inclined an eyebrow. “Ten. Do you want to find them?”

In reply, I pulled his shirt the rest of the way off, and he dropped it to the kitchen floor, and I traced another tattoo on his hip bone—a wishbone. “Two.”

Initials on the left side of his torso. “Three. Four,” I added, kissing the bunch of herbs gathered on his left arm, tied with a red string.

One on the inside of his other arm, of a road filled with pines. “Five.”

“You are impressively good at finding them,” he murmured as I slid off the kitchen table, and pulled him slowly into the living room. He kissed me again, nibbling my bottom lip.

“I never back down from a challenge,” I replied, and turned him around, planting a kiss on the butcher’s knife on his right shoulder blade. “Six.”

The seventh one was on his right forearm, a radish halfway sliced, falling apart.

Eight was small, so easily overlooked on his wrist, a constellation of dots that formed Scorpio. Ofcoursehe was a Scorpio.

“It’s getting harder,” he taunted.

“Is it, now,” I replied, and he realized what he’d said and barked a laugh, this time blushing himself, and I tugged him down the hall, kissing him as I pushed him onto the bed and climbed on top of him. He was, in fact, extremely aroused by my game, and that was very thrilling. Number nine was tucked just above his collarbone, his crescent-shaped birthmark below. It was a line of a heartbeat, and when I nibbled against the skin there, he made a noise that sounded, a little, like he was coming undone.

He murmured, “Pity you won’t find the last one.”

Of course I would. I was nothing if not an attentive listener. I gently turned his head to the side, hearing his breath catch, and pushed back the hair that curled around his left ear, planting a kiss on the whisk hidden there. “Ten,” I whispered. “So what’s my prize?”

He scrunched his nose. “Would you take a dishwasher?”

“Someone once told me it’s the most important role in the kitchen,” I replied.

“He might never make much of himself.”

“Oh, Iwan,” I sighed, taking his face in my hands, “I don’t care. I like you.”

And there it was.

My aunt’s rule broken; my perfect plan shattered. I knew Iwan wouldn’t be a dishwasher forever, and even if he was, it wouldn’t have mattered—dishwasher or chef or lawyer or no one at all. It was the man with gemstone eyes and the crooked smile and the lovely banter that I felt my soul crushing for.

Those lovely pearl eyes darkened to storms, to tempests, as he seized me by the middle and shifted me off him and onto the duvet. He pressed against me with his weight, dragging his hands up my thighs, under my skirt. “I’m going to take off your blouse,” he said, his fingers finding their way to the buttons on my shirt, undoing the rest of them one by one with those long, nimble fingers of his. I wanted them elsewhere. “I’m going to kiss every part of you. I’m going to commit every piece of you to memory.”

“Everypiece?” I asked as he reached back and unclasped my bra.

“Every”—he muttered as his mouth explored my breasts, his fingers following my curves downward, tugging at my skirt, slipping beneath my underwear—“lovely”—

I tensed in a gasp as his fingers toyed with me, my hands finding purchase in his messy hair.

“—piece,” he growled, and slipped his fingers into me, stroking me, as his tongue danced across the bare skin of my breasts. I squirmed beneath his weight, but he held me firmly and murmured sweetly, like chocolate, his words tart and coy like lemons, affirmation after affirmation into my hair. I was never the kind of woman tofall in love with a voice, but when I came, he pressed his mouth against my ear and rumbled, “Good girl,” in the exact way that made me lose all sense of self-preservation.

My aunt had two rules in the apartment—one, take your shoes off by the door, and I’m certain I’d forgotten to do that at least once.

So at least once I could break rule number two as well.

Just once.

But, unlike with shoes, all you need to do is fall in love once, though, to be ruined by it forever. “Birth control?” he asked between kisses.

I had to think for a second. “Um, yeah, but—”

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