Page 16 of Our Long Days
His discomfort is gone, and in its place is a familiar burning gaze, the same one that had my bones softening and core clenching.
“What did I say about apologizing?” he gruffs.
Through the layers of my sweater dress and coat, his touch sears my skin.
“You’re awfully bossy.”
Images of him telling me what to do the other night resurface. Memories already proving difficult to forget.
On your knees. Take me deeper. Fuck, like that, Florence.
Dex was clear. We agreed. One time. There’s a teeny-tiny morsel in my chest I won’t allow to take root or grow. If I feed it, I’ll convince myself the look he’s giving me means something more, that it’s not just me with a herd of horses charging behind their ribcage. That I’m not the only one leaning in. Closer. Closer.
Our lips are inches apart.
He swallows, the tendons in his neck rippling. “Florence, this—it can’t?—”
“Flo! Hurry, or we’re leaving without you.” Booth’s shout is the snap of an elastic band, severing the spell.
We break apart, looking anywhere but at the other. Dex stomps away, muttering to himself, and I run into the restroom.
The woman staring back at me in the mirror is unrecognizable. For better or worse is to be debated.
One night with Dex gave me a sense of control, but the after-effects are short-lived. The seed in my chest feeds off temptation, and the weeks and months that follow prove one time was too much for my pathetic little heart to handle.
CHAPTER EIGHT
dexter
FEBRUARY
Before my parentsmoved to Cape Elizabeth, the Sadler household was a second home. It still is.
Ted and Claire Sadler treated me like one of their own. My friendship first started with Patrick. We spent most weekends sleeping over at one another’s houses and summers wiping out on our bikes. Johanna followed not long after. She was a given, considering her relationship with Pat.
Family dinners with my best friend and his family are a part of my routine, something I rarely pass up. However, for the past three dinners, I’ve given lame excuses. Claire is a hard woman to turn down for a fourth time, especially as tonight is Jo and Pat’s engagement dinner.
Which is why I’m stuffed into my designated seat with a steaming slice of chicken pot pie in front of me.
It probably smells delicious.
The only scentI’maware of is coconut, intoxicatingly sweet, assaulting my senses every time Florence shifts in her chair.
Because her seat has always been directly on my left.
She was the last to arrive, swatting off comments from her brothers about her tardiness. Everyone’s attention was on the newly engaged couple after that, listening to them recap the proposal. No one noticed my rigid posture or how Florence and I stopped breathing any time our elbows brushed.
We’d bumped into each other twice in the last month but never this close or for so long.
I must’ve been a real prick in a previous life, because as I reach for the salt, so does she.
Electricity shoots up my arm, and the shaker crashes to the table, both of us jerking away.
All attention snaps our way.
“Uncle Dex has butter fingers,” Lottie, Patrick’s five-year-old daughter, announces. He and Lottie’s mom are fantastic co-parents, and Jo absolutely adores the little girl as her own.
As much as she’s to blame—though she’s completely unaware—Flo appears unaffected. She snorts at her niece’s comment.
