Page 133 of We Met Like This
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Youhadn’t thought of that?”
Oliver parked in my marked spot at the apartment. “I’m proud of you.”
“I am too.”
He turned off the engine and faced me.
I leaned toward him, ready to feel his mouth on mine.
He stopped me with, “We could just talk, Margot. If there’s more you need to say.”
“I love you, Oliver. That’s all I need to say right now.”
He kissed me, our lips coming together like they’d been denied their means of existence for the last couple weeks. His mouth was warm and he tasted like cinnamon.
“I missed you,” I said between kisses.
“I was lost without you.”
“I do love cars,” I said. “But can we go inside?”
“Let’s go inside.”
We managed to make it into the house with several points of our bodies touching the whole way. As soon as the door was shut behind us, he was peeling off my shirt. I was unbuttoning his pants and we were leaving a trail of clothes as we worked our way down the hall. In my room, he wrapped a strong arm around my waist and carried me the rest of the way to my bed.
“It’s not made,” I said against his lips.
“I didn’t notice,” he said back, lowering me to the bed and climbing on after me.
“Is this weird for you?” I asked.
“Your unmade bed? I’ll survive.”
I laughed. “No. That I’m Audrey’s sister.”
Those words had him collapsing to my side and propping himself up on his elbow. “You need to talk more.”
“I guess I do.”
He picked up my hand and brought it to his lips, resting his mouth against my knuckles while he thought for a moment.“Maybe it should be weird for me, but I hadn’t thought about your sister in years… no offense.”
“You don’t watch her daily videos online?”
“I didn’t even know she did that until you said something.”
At some point in our shedding of clothes and our bumping of walls on the way into the room, one of us had hit a switch, and the ceiling fan turned a lazy circle above us. I watched it rotate several times. “My whole life I’ve been compared to her and come up short. She’s always been better than me, older, prettier, smarter, more successful.”
He started to object but I held up my finger.
“She excels at everything. She even had two babies at once! And honestly, it was fine because we had such different interests that I could tell myself that I didn’t want the things she had anyway. But when I found out she had you first, loved you first, I didn’t think I could get past it.”
“And now?” he asked, tucking a lock of hair behind my ear.
“Now I realize that I can’t live my life constantly trying to impress my sister, trying to live up to the bar she set. And she doesn’t get to run my life along with her own, no matter how successful she’s turned out to be.”
“This is a very good realization.” His finger traced a slow line along the lace edging of my bra, the only piece of clothing left on either of our bodies, sending a shiver through me. “Also, you are the smartest, prettiest, funniest woman I’ve ever known.”
