Page 48 of Make Me Love You

Taking a shower. Let yourself in.

Oh, thank God.

He turned the knob, half expecting it to be locked, in a cruel twist of irony. But it opened easily and he stepped inside.

And then stopped.

Christ. It was the same as it had been the last time he had stepped foot in this house nearly a decade ago. Nostalgia hit him like Goat charging at his knees. The dark gray couch was the same one they had watched movies on every Friday night, each of them lying with their heads at opposite ends and their feet tangled together in the middle. There was the Tiffany lamp Emma had broken in sixth grade with a rogue volleyball spike and he had painstakingly glued back together. He wondered if she had ever come clean about that.

Beyond the living room was the dining room, and past that the kitchen. He knew it like the back of his hand. There was a time when he could have been sure that if he opened the fridge, he would find his favorite blueberry yogurt. Mrs. Andrews had always kept some on hand for him, since he spent so much time there. After she got sick, and Emma took over the grocery shopping, she had continued the tradition. His chest ached. He doubted there would be blueberry yogurt in the fridge now. Emma preferred lemon.

He could hear the shower running upstairs, and he followed the sound. It was a large, rambling house from the Gilded Age, with three bedrooms on the second floor and four more on the third. He had no idea which room she had claimed for her own.

To his surprise, it was her old room. He wondered about that. Why hadn’t she claimed a bigger room, now that she had the house to herself? The third-floor bedrooms were the size of small suites, with large claw-footed bathtubs for soaking. When she was a child, her parents didn’t like the idea of her being so far away from them. Then when she got to high school, she didn’t want to be far from her mom, in case Mrs. Andrews needed her. But what was stopping her now?

She had left the door ajar and light spilled into the hallway. He poked his head in. “Emma?” he called over the noise of the shower.

“I’ll be out in a minute,” she hollered back. “You can wait in there.”

He assumed “in there” meant her bedroom and not the attached bathroom. Too bad. He wouldn’t have minded a second shower, not when it meant having Emma all silky wet.

He looked around. Like the downstairs, her bedroom was a time capsule to the past. Well, almost. The walls were the same pale blue he remembered, with the curtains a darker navy. The band posters were gone, as was the bulletin board where she had pinned pictures of her friends. Some of those pictures had made it into the frames that now topped the dresser. Not the ones of him, of course. Maybe she had burned those.

The bed, he realized suddenly. The bed was different. Bigger. He knew that for sure, because the feeling of being completely pressed against her, curling her tight into his body so she wouldn’t fall off the bed, was seared into his soul. It had only been the one time, the night her mother died, but he would never forget it, the desperate need to take her pain and make it his own.

He shook his head, trying to clear the memories. He did not come here to be sad. He was here to get laid, not reminisce about the past.

The sound of water abruptly stopped, and after a few agonizing moments Emma emerged, wet hair slicked back and a towel wrapped around her torso, obscuring the parts he most wanted to see but leaving plenty of bare, glistening skin above and below. Nostalgia fled. All that mattered was this moment, right now, with Emma standing mostly naked in front of him.

“Hey,” she said. “Sorry you were waiting. I realized I was pretty dusty from digging through the storage closet at City Hall. You would not believe the stuff they have in there. Most of it’s junk that needs to be tossed, but there are also these really cool old photographs that I thought we might want to display somewhere. Also—”

He could not care less about old photographs.

“Drop the towel, Ms. Andrews.”

***

Someday Emma was going to have a very serious talk with her body about the inappropriateness of its response to Eli calling her Ms. Andrews. When had something that had once annoyed her beyond reason suddenly become so erotic? Probably around the same time he had told her he wasn’t finished before putting his tongue between her thighs for the second time. Yep, that would do it.

“Ms. Andrews,” he said again, more sternly this time.

She shivered even though heat was spreading through her veins like liquid fire. She wanted to drop the towel, drop to her knees, whatever he demanded.

But she also wanted to fight.

To push him.

To see which one of them would break first. And, good Lord, she hoped it was her.

“Make me,” she said.

His eyes flared at the challenge.

Every cell in her body went on high alert as he moved toward her with deliberate, measured steps. She tilted her chin in an attempt to look defiant, or at least unaffected, when in truth her pulse was skittering like a wild thing and her breathing had turned to shallow pants.

He stopped just short of touching her. She couldn’t breathe. Agony.

“I’m not going to take it from you, Emma.”

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