Page 86 of Weekends with You

“Henry,” I whispered. “Are you joking? We’re in the kitchen, and surely the Kennedys are still up.”

He put a finger to my lips. “Listen,” he said, turning an ear toward the rest of the house. Silence, save for the quiet hiss of the old radiator and the wind whistling outside. “Doesn’t sound like anyone’s awake to me, does it?”

“What’s gotten into you?”

“I’ve missed you, Lucy,” he said, his smile twisting into something more serious. “I just want to make the most of the time we have together.” He pushed my hoodie up from my hips just enough so his hands were against my bare skin, and I nearly lost all semblance of rational thought.

“You’re right,” I moaned, leaning into the warmth of his hands as he bent down to kiss my forehead. “Two days is not enough.”

“Maybe it won’t always be like this,” he said. I pulled back, looking at him with raised brows. He laughed gently, pulling me back to him. “I don’t know, Luce. It’s impossible to know what the future holds, isn’t it? You think you want one thing, but then when it’s right at your fingertips, you want something else entirely. D’you know what I mean?”

“What are you saying? Are you saying you don’t want to move?” I was trying to tread lightly, but my chest was burning at the possibility that this might be true.

He released me for a moment, pinching the bridge of hisnose with his calloused fingers. “Maybe,” he said, flicking his eyes to the ceiling and choosing his words carefully. “Maybe it isn’t what I thought it’d be, leaving London. I thought it had nothing left to offer me, but I might have been wrong.”

I looked up at him, at the softness in his eyes as they returned to mine and the curl of hair that had fallen into the center of his forehead.

“London would be lucky if you stayed,” I said. “She wouldn’t want you to sacrifice your dream or anything, but if you did decide she was the place you wanted to call home, she would be lucky.”

“Oh, would she, now?” he said, smoothing my hair and bringing his forehead closer to mine. I tried to keep my nerves steady, to avoid getting my hopes up, but was he really saying what I thought he was saying?

“If she got to spend more than two days with you at a time, I’m sure she would be thrilled.”

“As would I,” he said. “And I mean it, Luce.”

I ran my fingertips up the length of his arms and laced them through the curls at the back of his neck. In one swift motion, he sat me on the island like he had in my studio the night of the holiday party and brought his lips to mine. He tasted like mint toothpaste and whiskey. Every creak in the old house told me to pull away, but every hair standing up on my arms told me otherwise.

From my perch on the island, we were nearly eye to eye, which made it all the more intense when we did pull away. He leaned his forehead on mine, and I listened to the way his shallow breaths matched my own.

“We should—”

“Get out of the kitchen?” I finished for him, hoping that was where his sentence was going.

“You read my mind,” he said, laughing lightly against my lips. He ran his fingertips along my jaw, lifting my face so our noses were touching. “Come to my room, Luce.”

A new heat ripped through me, catching in my chest and sending my heart rate into overdrive. We both knew where this was headed. I weighed potential future heartbreak against the way he was looking at me now, the way his chest felt against the palms of my hands, and made the easiest decision I’d made about Henry in a long time.

“Lead the way,” I said, taking his outstretched hand.

Our slow climb up the stairs was punctuated by groans from the old wood beneath our feet and our uneven breaths, and the silence otherwise only amplified the tension between us.

At the end of the corridor, we slipped into his room, closing the door behind us as quietly as possible. Neither of us reached for the light switch.

He leaned over me, my back up against the door, and kissed me again. Soft at first, like he was testing the waters. I slid my hands under his shirt, feeling the warmth of his bare torso. His hands were already above his head, braced on the door on either side of me, so I lifted his shirt off, signaling my consent.

Hen and I looked at each other in the dark through half-closed eyes, and that second of recognition was all we needed. We might not have known what the future held for us, but we knew we both wanted nothing more than this right now.

Before long, his shirt was at the bottom of a heap of clothes, carelessly discarded.

In another world, this moment might have come and gone in the blink of an eye. At home in London, we might have torn our own clothes off without a second thought and been staring breathless at the ceiling only minutes later. But we weren’t at home. We were here, in this bed-and-breakfast, under thespell of an old Irish village where nothing was urgent and everything was sacred.

We took our time, savoring the feel of each other’s skin, the heat of each other’s breath, the sound of each other’s moans. Dense clouds obscured the dull moon outside the window, but our senses were only heightened by the darkness. The feeling of his teeth on my bottom lip sent pins and needles through my body, and his wandering hands electrified me entirely.

I felt the ripple of his naked back under my hands and thought of how many times I’d admired the way his shirts stretched across that very space. I thought of that tantalizing inch of skin left exposed between the old T-shirts and joggers he wore around the apartment, and let myself explore it. So much of Henry was familiar, but feeling his body in the dark was quite the opposite.

Being in the same physical space only two or three days a month meant Henry was continually revealing himself to me. I was getting to know parts of him slowly, intentionally, and every layer exposed something that drew me to him even more.

And now, every low growl, every swear whispered in my ear, every kiss on my neck painted Hen in colors I’d never seen. The way he said my name had an entirely new sound, and I would never be able to unhear it. I didn’t want to.

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