Beautiful

by Christina Lauren

  But then I saw what other information she’d provided.

  It was typed, like the rest of the page, so clearly Hanna had meant to include it all along. As if knowing I wouldn’t already have his address.

  I stared at the page. Even the sight of his name in stark black and white made me feel tight and restless in my skin. I wanted to step toward him, feel his long arms coil around me. I wanted to get a goodbye that felt like a see you soon, and not the see you around that I got on Sunday, and which—so far—hadn’t come to pass.

  I felt a surge of now or never climb into my pulse. Turning the key in the ignition, I pulled from the driveway. Instead of turning left, though, I turned right.

  Jensen lived in a stunning brownstone on a wide, tree-lined street. It was two stories tall, but narrow, with impeccable brick and a freshly painted green door. Ivy trailed up narrowly along one side, as if it had recently been pruned, and its delicate fingers held on to the wide white-framed window facing Matilda Court.

  A light was on in the front room. Another in the deeper spaces of the house. The kitchen, maybe. Or the den. In any case, I knew Jensen well enough to know that he wouldn’t leave both on if he weren’t home. One lamp on in an empty house: safety-minded. Two lamps on in an empty house: wasteful.

  A chilly wind blew a tangle of leaves down the street, and several of them passed over the tops of my feet, pulling my attention to the ground. It was dark—late enough that no one was out walking, no cars were pulling up at the curb.

  What in the bloody hell was I doing here? Looking for another serving of rejection? It wasn’t exactly true that I had nothing to lose: I still had my pride. Coming here after being blown off by a text message had a certain aura of desperation to it. Was this what it had come to? Had Mark and his thrusting bum taught me nothing? I looked up at the window again, groaning inwardly. I left London to get over one man, and opened my heart up to another to stomp on?

  Pippa Bay Cox, you are a bleeding idiot.

  God, what a nightmare. It was cold on the street and warm in my car. Maybe even warmer in a doughnut shop round the corner, where I could eat my feelings with a side of powdered sugar. A car pulled up to the curb behind me and I realized how I must look: standing in front of a house, staring in the window. I straightened as the automatic lock sounded in a bright chirp, and turned, walking directly into a hard body.

  “I’m so sor—” I began, dropping my purse. Flustered, I bent to pick it up.

  “Pippa?”

  I stared at the polished brown shoes on the ground in front of me, pondered the smooth, gentle voice that had said my name.

  “Hallo.” I didn’t bother to get up quite yet.

  “Hello.”

  I’m sure, to anyone witnessing, I appeared to be genuflecting at the foot of a businessman, but if there were some secret code I could tap on the concrete to make the sidewalk open and eat me, I would have done it in a heartbeat. This was . . . horrifying. Very slowly, I put the contents of my purse back in the bag.

  He crouched down. “What are you doing here?”

  Oh, Christ.

  “Hanna . . .” I said, reaching inside for my car keys. “She gave me your address. I thought—” I shook my head. “Please don’t be cross with her. Knowing there would be no lingerie-loving mistress inside with you gave me some bravery to stop by. I guess I wanted to see you.” When he didn’t immediately reply, and I wanted to burst into flames, I added, “I’m sorry. You told me you were busy.”

  A large hand came toward me then, wrapping around my elbow and pulling me up with him. When I looked at his face, I saw a faint smile there.

  “You don’t have to apologize,” he said quietly. “I was just surprised to see you. Pleasantly so.”

  I looked at his suit and then back at his car. “Are you just getting home?”

  He nodded, and I glanced at my watch. It was after eleven.

  “You weren’t kidding about the work thing,” I muttered before looking up at his house. “Your lights are on.”

  He nodded. “They’re on a timer.”

  Of course they bloody are.

  I laughed. “Right.”

  And without another word, he bent, wrapping his arms around me and pulling me closer so he could press his lips to mine.

  The relief of it, the warmth. There was no stutter to the kiss, only the familiar sweep of his lips across mine, the reflexive opening together, the aching stroke of his tongue. His kisses narrowed, shortened, until he was just placing tiny pecks on my mouth, my cheek, my jaw.

  “I missed you,” he said, kissing down my neck. Exhaustion was evident in the curve of his shoulders, the way his lids looked heavy.

  “I missed you, too,” I said, wrapping my arms around his neck as he straightened. “I just wanted to say hi, but you look like you might drop where you stand.”

  Jensen pulled back, looked at me and then up at his front door. “I am about to drop, but you don’t need to go. Come inside. Stay here tonight.”

  We passed through the downstairs without speaking. Jensen held my hand, pulling me with determination to the bathroom in the master suite—where he retrieved a fresh toothbrush for me—and, after we’d brushed our teeth in smiling silence, through the double doors into the bedroom.

  His room was full of muted colors: creams and blues, rich brown wood. My red skirt and sapphire-blue top looked like jewels in a river on his floor.

  Jensen didn’t seem to notice. His clothes fell beside mine and he drew me with him down between the sheets, his mouth moving warm and barely wet over my neck, my shoulders; his lips sucking at my breasts.

  We’d never made love like this: without the awareness that had seemed to heighten everything on the winery trip. Here, it was just us in his bed, in his dark bedroom, our hands touching now-familiar skin, laughing into kisses. A heavy ache settled low in my belly, radiating between my legs, and his body grew hard and hungry over mine until he was there, pushing inside, moving with the same perfect curl of his hips, the same anchoring of his arms around me, the same press of his mouth to my neck.

  It was heaven, and it was hell. Relief was a drug: being here with him was as it always was—perfect; under his mouth and his possessive hands, it was impossible to not feel that I was the only person in the world who mattered. But this awareness was a torture—accepting for the first time how starkly temporary it all was. Knowing now that if I hadn’t come, he wouldn’t have made the effort.

  “It’s good,” he gasped into my neck. “Jesus, it’s always so good.”

  I wrapped myself around him, arms and legs and heart, truly, feeling once again what I had in Vermont. What reverberated between us wasn’t a respectful admiration but something with fire and depth, something that would be hard to shake. I felt, as he moved over me, shifting right where I needed, that the question of whether I could fall in love with Jensen was moot.

  I had.

  The realization made me gasp, a tiny cry that he caught, and he slowed, not stopping entirely but adjusting so that he could see my face.

  “You okay?” he asked, kissing me. Above, his shoulders shifted higher and back, higher and back. I stared at the muscular curve of his neck, the definition of his chest.

  “Will you ring me when you come to London?” I asked, in the absolutely most pathetic voice.

  Apparently I would settle for that.

  He slid a hand down my side to my leg, pulling it higher over his hip. With the movement, he pressed in deeper and we both shuddered from the relief of it, from the maddening ache. He tried to smile down at me, but it came out as more of a grimace from the tension all along his body.

  “I don’t come back until March. I’ll call if you don’t have a boyfriend by then.”

  It was meant to be a joke, I think.

  Or a reminder.

  I closed my eyes, pulling him back down, and he moved in earnest, tripping that wire inside me that seemed to make pleasure the only thing that mattered.

  It was goo
d that the thought slipped away—a boyfriend—and that it didn’t allow the twin thought to follow—a girlfriend—and that we could just move like this and climb higher and come in shaking, gasping unison, and we wouldn’t have to put our hearts on the line and try to make it anything more.

  FIFTEEN

  Jensen

  The thing about going away is that everything feels just a little bit off when you get back.

  I told myself this was simply the result of having an amazing vacation after years of never daring to take one. I told myself it was the result of having been someone looser, having unplugged, and the novelty of being surrounded every hour by close friends instead of the isolation of living alone. Maybe it was also the effect of seeing Becky again, and having our past shove its way into my present, initially not knowing what to do with it before realizing I didn’t need to do anything at all.

  But this unsettled feeling when I got home felt bigger than that. Yes, I was so busy I fell off my routine, skipping workouts and working through lunch to catch up. Yes, I was so wrung out by the end of the day that I came home and ate, showered, went to bed. I would get up and do it all over again. And it didn’t take a genius to know it was more than just the weight of my workload coming crashing down that had me feeling off.

  Pippa and I had both been clear on what we wanted—a little fun, a fling, and a break from real life—so why had I let myself feel more?

  I couldn’t stop thinking about her, daydreaming about our time together in the cabin, and wishing we could have all gone with her suggestion to stay there and pretend, for half of every year, that life in London and Boston didn’t exist. Six months with no phones, no email, and the people I cared about most right there at my side? It sounded like heaven.

  Having Pippa for one more night was more torture than anything. I had been stunned by the surreal wave of getting out of my car and seeing her staring at my house. It took maybe five full seconds for me to realize I wasn’t imagining it. I’d been exhausted, ready to forgo a shower for even ten extra minutes of sleep, but suddenly sleep was the furthest thing from my mind.

  The next morning she’d dressed and quietly kissed me goodbye, and left.

  A fling, I reminded myself. And that was that.

  Days later, I stared at the spreadsheet on my monitor, the numbers blurring at the edges. It was almost seven, and after hours of sorting through the same list of assets, I was ready to set the computer, the project files, and maybe even my office on fire.

  “I knew you’d be here, so I come bearing gifts,” Greg said, warily eyeing my desk and the stacks of files there. He set down a wrapped sandwich and then pulled a bottle of beer out of the pocket of his slacks.

  “No thanks,” I said with a faint smile, glancing up at him before turning back to my screen. “I had a bagel or something earlier.”

  “ ‘A bagel or something,’ ” he repeated, and instead of leaving, he folded himself into the chair opposite me. “You know, usually when people go on vacation they come back a little less . . . feral.”

  I pressed my fingers to my eyes, blocking out the light. Too little sleep and too much coffee had left me irritable and with a pounding ache at my temples. “I didn’t get as much done as I should have while I was gone, and now it’s sort of a mess.”

  “Did the junior staff not do what you left them, or . . . ?” he asked.

  “No, they did, they just . . . I don’t know. They didn’t do it how I’d have done it. Not to mention that I left the London office with the depositions finished and plenty of time to wrap up their end before the hearing and they missed the filing deadline.”

  “Oh shit.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You know none of that is your responsibility,” he said.

  “I mean,” I countered, “technically it’s my—”

  “Your job was to run through the depositions,” he said, interrupting me, “not file the fucking paperwork. And of course you didn’t get as much done on vacation as you’d have liked. That’s why it’s called vacation.” He enunciated every syllable, reaching for an old dictionary on my shelf to begin thumbing through the pages. “Give me a second and I’ll look it up for you. I can’t believe you actually have a dictionary . . .”

  Reaching across the desk, I took it from him. “I get that, strictly speaking, it wasn’t my task,” I said, turning back to my computer, “but there’s that mess to clean up as well as the things that came in while I was out, and—” I let out a breath and rolled my shoulders before calmly saying, “It’ll be fine. It’ll take some catch-up, but it’ll be fine.”

  He stood, ready to leave. “Go home, have some dinner, watch TV, something. And start again tomorrow, yes, but leave at a decent time. You’ll burn yourself out this way, and you are too good at what you do to let that happen.”

  “I will,” I mumbled, watching as he turned toward the door.

  He laughed. “You’re a liar. But have a good night, Jens.” And when he was farther down the hall, he called out again, “Go home!”

  I smiled and then blinked down at my spreadsheet.

  He had a point. Long hours and no social life had become the norm. I was the only junior partner still in my thirties; without a spouse or kids to get home to, it hadn’t ever been a hardship for me to stay late. I was fortunate to be at this place in my career. I remembered how hard it was in the early days—I’d struggled to acquire enough billable hours a year, and hoped I was good enough that the senior partners put files on my desk.

  Now I was drowning in work, with more cases than I knew what to do with, and unable to leave for any extended amount of time without the world inside my office walls imploding. Yeah, it was a problem of my own making, but I didn’t know how much longer it could go on. I loved my job, loved the orderly, nonnegotiable balance of the law. It had always been more than enough, until it just wasn’t.

  The cup of coffee I’d been nursing for the last hour had gone cold, and I pushed it aside, opening my drawer and counting out change for the vending machine down the hall.

  My phone was next to a pile of quarters, and on a whim—and knowing I’d probably be here for a few more hours—I picked it up. There were about fifteen missed calls—many of them from Ziggy—and a handful of texts. The most recent was a text from Liv.

  Ziggs wants you to go to her house for dinner.

  I’m at work, I typed back. Why didn’t she just text me herself?

  You’re at work? WHAT A SURPRISE, Liv answered right away. She says you’re not answering your phone.

  Guilt and irritation twisted in me. Ziggs was the last person who should be complaining to Liv about me working too much.

  I looked around my desk and then at the clock. The building was silent but for a vacuum running down the hall, and exhaustion hit me like a warm, heavy wave. Dinner at Will and Ziggy’s sounded amazing. I was tired of this chair and the endless emails, stale coffee, and takeout. Ziggy worked almost as late as I did; they would probably just be starting. I texted her that I was headed over and then shut my computer down, shut my phone off.

  The giddy levity I’d felt only days ago had already evaporated, and I was right back where I’d started: tired, marginally lonely, and hungry for the warmth of real company.

  I parked at the curb and made my way up to the house, noting the way it glowed on the darkened street. Tiny lights dotted the flowerbeds and shone up into the trees; lamps filtered through sheer curtains on the second story. From where I stood I could see into the living room and just down the hall, where my sister and Will stood, wrapped in each other’s arms. Through the open window, a Guns N’ Roses song drifted out onto the street. They were slow-dancing in the kitchen to “Sweet Child O’ Mine.”

  Fucking romantics.

  On the porch, the pumpkins were gone, but in their place was a hammered tin planter bursting with fall flowers. On the door was an autumn-themed wreath.

  “Hey,” I called out, stepping inside.

  Penrose boun
ded around the corner, tail wagging.

  I bent to pet her, ruffling her ears. “They finally let you come home?”

  “Yo, Bro!” Ziggy called from the kitchen.

  Penrose spun in circles before rolling at my feet for a belly rub. I kicked off my shoes, set them by the door, and followed the dog as she bounded down the hall.

  “You came,” my sister said, stepping back from where she’d been dancing with her husband.

  Bending, I wrapped my arms around her and pressed a kiss to her head. “Of course I came. I love Will.”

  She punched my arm and then walked over to a pile of vegetables on the counter.

  “Can I help with anything?” I asked.

  Ziggs shook her head. “Just dancing, finishing the salad, you know. Preference on dressing?”

  “Whatever you have is fine.” I watched them work in tandem for a moment before telling them about Becky showing up at my house.

  My sister turned and gaped at me. “She did what?”

  Will, who had been searching through the refrigerator for a head of lettuce, looked at me around the door. “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  “How long did she stay?” Ziggs asked, incredulous.

  “I guess about forty-five minutes?” I scratched my jaw. “I mean, I basically told her that she was welcome to get it off her chest if it would make her feel better, but it wouldn’t do anything for me. She went on a bit about realizing now that she’d felt too young and like she hadn’t had any adventures yet.”

  Will whistled. “She’s kind of a dick, right?”