“I got you all eel and various roe.”
“I hate eel and roe, you know that.”
“Next time stay awake.” The small things, laughter in the kitchen, takeout sushi, a kiss after the clink of glasses—they both knew how un-small they really were.
While they sat at the counter and he spread wasabi with his chopsticks on his favorite—o-toro—Heat told him the details of her search. And how frantic she had got. And how low. And she confessed about the night before last, when she had got herself drunk and nearly given up hope. He didn’t answer, but got up from his barstool and enveloped her from behind. The hug was more profound than anything he could have said.
When he sat back down, Nikki said, “Is it an understatement to call this heaven?”
“Let’s compare. I woke up sixteen hours ago with my hands cuffed behind me on the wet floor in the smelly hold of a scow. By the way, I’m making a unilateral decision: no cruise for our honeymoon.”
She set down her glass and took his hand. He turned to her and felt her eyes painting him. “What?” he said, toying with her.
“You know what.”
“I do know.” He swiveled to face her. “And it goes for me, too. Absence makes the loins grow hotter.”
She put down her napkin and stood, still gripping his hand. “Prove it,” she said.
Rook’s kiss took her by surprise because he met Nikki’s mouth with tenderness instead of the abandon she expected. His adolescent swagger had stripped away and exposed the unguarded man who kissed her softly as if he needed to revisit the hushed magic of their interrupted moment in the foyer—an urgent attempt to finish some profoundly inexpressible thought. The words that would not find his writer’s tongue found another way to reach her. Tasting him again, feeling his warmth and strength and vulnerability, sensing how he knew to slow the moment and create their own unique time and place, tapped a well of warmth inside Nikki that made her pulse race and urged her to want all of him, all at once. As if energized by her will, and helpless before it at the same time, she rose on her feet and pressed her body to his, backing him against the counter. His breath caught. He let out a faint moan and thrust himself closer. Then closer still. Nikki pulled her mouth from his, gulping for air. He whispered her name against her ear once, then twice, and she found his mouth again, kissing him hungrily.
They didn’t walk to the bedroom, they were transported as if airborne through the fluid darkness, and fell onto the comforter to kiss again and then pause, breathing, wondering at the hoarse cadence their excitement had created and staring at each other, absorbing the power of the moment and what they knew was to follow.
Still locked in her eyes, Rook let his hand drift, exploring, finding her just as Nikki’s hand found him. The lust they had been taunting, that deep mortal hunger pulling against its restraints, came to life.
After that, any sense of their being apart was vanquished.
In the murky span of the hammock hours between too late and too early, Heat and Rook stayed awake and talked. Exhausted, spent, it didn’t matter. They craved this as much as the lovemaking they had just shared. Nose to nose on a single pillow, he told Nikki how picturing her face kept him going when he had had no idea what fate would befall him as a captive—where, and at whose hands, he didn’t know. Over his storied journalistic career Rook had been abducted and imprisoned before. Once in Chechnya. Twice in Africa. In Paris, it had happened to both of them one night when they got snatched from the Place des Vosges for a ride in the trunk of a car courtesy of a paranoid Russian spy who wanted a secret meeting in the woods outside the city. “Bon temps,” she said with a chuckle.
“I’m sorry for the mill I put you through,” he said.