“It’s good to see you,” he said. “You look … good.”
Her brows went up. “That’s the best you can do after all this time?”
It had been a gamble, guessing he’d respond the way he would’ve back then, but he must not have changed all that much because Mick laughed and took a step back to very clearly look her up and down before letting his gaze settle on hers.
“You look,” he said, “fan-fucking-tastic.”
“Better,” Alice told him. “Much better.”
Silence, a beat of it, then another. But not awkward. They’d had their share of those uncomfortable silences toward the end, struggling to find words that weren’t angry or frustrated or disappointed. It wasn’t like that now. More like they didn’t have to say a word, she thought, and forced herself not to look away from him.
He’d hardly changed.
“You too,” she added.
“Flowers?”
Alice gestured. “Yeah. Cookie asked me to get some. I can’t decide between the red and the pink.”
“Red.”
She gave him a half smile. “You think so?”
“You think pink roses are a waste.”
There it was, then. Proof he hadn’t forgotten her. Hadn’t unknown her. For a stupid second tears threatened, burning, and Alice blinked them away.
“These are pretty, though,” she said.
Mick shook his head, moving closer to push aside the pink flowers and reveal the red bush planted next to it. “You’re a red-rose kind of girl, Alice. Always were. Ouch, shit.”
The thorns had pricked him, bringing blood. Mick stuck his thumb in his mouth with a wince. Alice couldn’t hold back a laugh at his expression.
“That’s why you should always wear gloves when you handle roses. They bite.” She held up the shears. “Let me.”
Two, three snips and she’d added a half dozen long stems of crimson-topped green to her basket. He’d been right, of course. The red ones blended perfectly with the other flowers, and though she might have grown less vehement about her feelings over the years about the usefulness of pale pink roses, she would never like them as much as red.
“Alice! Mick!” The shout turned both of them toward the house, where Dayna was waving at them from the deck. Mick raised a hand. Alice, after a moment, did, too. Dayna cupped her hands around her mouth to shout again. “Dinner’s almost ready! And I can’t wait to see both of you! Get your asses up here!”
Alice gave him a look. “We’d better do what she says. You know she’ll come down and drag us up by our ears if we don’t.”
“Can I get that for you?” Mick reached for the basket.
He didn’t need to carry it for her, but she let him take it if only to feel the brush of his fingertips on her arm. She was still a little tipsy, though now it was hard to tell if it were still from the wine or Mick’s proximity. He took her elbow when her toe caught on a tuft of tough grass that threatened to trip her.
“Careful,” Mick murmured, and held onto her for a few seconds longer than was necessary to help keep her from falling.
When had she ever been careful when it came to him? There was no such thing, Alice thought, and that was what finally pushed her to put some distance between them. She had to get her head on straight. Just because they weren’t at each other’s throats didn’t mean he was anything more than a stranger to her, really, after all this time. No matter what they’d been to each other before, before was not now.
Dayna had come down the stairs from the deck to greet them, and they were all caught up in the frenzy of greeting. Hugging, kissing, squealing, and in the midst of it, Mick slipped away to take the flowers inside.
“So,” Dayna said, linking her arm through Alice’s as they both went up the stairs, Alice pausing to snag her glass from the railing. “It’s been forever since I’ve seen you. You look great. Your hair’s gorgeous.”
“It’s been like, six months,” Alice said. “I saw you at Jay’s just after Christmas.”
Dayna laughed. “Feels like forever. C’mon. Bernie’s got something cooking that smells so good I want to die for it. And I think I heard Jay pulling in just before I came out to get you guys. Paul will be late. He always is.”
“The old gang, back together,” Bernie said a few minutes later as Alice and Dayna returned to the now-crowded kitchen. He held a bottle of wine aloft. “Get pouring, everyone!”
Things got down to business. The party had started. Glasses were filled. Hors d’oeuvres consumed.
And through all of it, the noise and clamor and hilarity, Alice felt the weight of Mick’s gaze on her, heavy as stone and hot as lava. She didn’t allow herself more than a glance or two at him, though. More than that and she’d have been the one staring, and how hungry would her gaze have been?
He circled her, though. Oh, sure, he talked to Paul and Dayna and Jay, to Bernie and Cookie. But he circled back to Alice, standing close enough that his shoulder brushed hers just often enough not to be coincidence. And finally, at last, she couldn’t feign any longer that she didn’t know he wanted to talk to her and only her. She closed her eyes for a moment, battling with herself. She could walk away. She should.
“Hi,” she said, turning toward him.
He had a beer in one hand. She a glass of wine. They stood in the same room they’d been in together many times, surrounded by the friends they’d both known forever. If she closed her eyes for a second, she might’ve been able to convince herself nothing at all had ever changed.
Other than everything.
There were conversations you could fall into naturally after having not seen someone for years. Job, kids, spouse? Alice didn’t ask any of those questions. Neither did Mick.
He asked her if she’d read that book. Seen that movie. Had she tried that restaurant?
Yes, no, yes.
“And you,” she said, when they’d all moved to the table and she had a plate of Bernie’s amazing pasta in front of her. “Have you been watching that show about zombie housewives?”
He had.
She smiled at him. He smiled, too. But then, even if it might’ve seemed for a moment or two that they were the only ones in the room, the truth was they were not alone. Bernie came to the table bearing a platter of grilled vegetables, and everyone oohed and ahhed, and Dayna raised her glass in a toast.
“To Bernie and Cookie, two people who really got it right.”
They had. Alice watched them kiss, the light of love in their eyes undimmed even after twenty years. She wasn’t the only one moved; Dayna had spoken with tears in her eyes and Jay snuffled audibly. She was glad she’d come, Alice thought without looking at Mick. Because this wasn’t about her and Mick and the mess they’d made of things in the past. This weekend was about her friends.
Dinner, as always at Bernie’s house, was delicious and decadent. Sitting across from Mick, Alice did her best to keep her attention on the conversations going on all around her, but it kept getting snagged by him. A word here or there. The way he shifted in his seat to reach for more salad, and she couldn’t stop herself from admiring how broad his shoulders were in the blue button-down shirt.
She excused herself from the table. Thoroughly buzzed from a fourth glass of wine and the way Mick’s foot had nudged her ankle too many times to be an accident, Alice shook her head in silent laughter as she made her way down the long corridor to the powder room. Light from the kitchen filtered in, but the hall itself was mostly dark. She put out a hand to guide her. Her fingertips skipped along the rough textured paint and brushed the rows of framed pictures on the wall.
Years of parties had been captured, imprisoned in cages of glass and wood. Captioned with the dates and Cookie’s wry humor—“St. Pat’s, 1997, the year we got more snow than a leprechaun has gold!” Alice was in many of these photos, her hair and clothes changing over the years more than she hoped her face had.
He was waiting for her when she came out of the bathroom. She knew the shape of him i
mmediately, although the way the shadows fell, he might’ve been anyone. He didn’t move when she took a step toward him, but he spoke.
“Hi,” Mick said.
“Hi.”
Did he reach for her, or did she take that last step to put herself up close, pressed along his body? It didn’t matter. In the time it took for her heart to beat once, twice, three times, Alice was in Mick’s arms.
The kiss fumbled at first. Faces turned the wrong way, teeth nudging the inside of her lip hard enough to sting, their noses bumping. An elbow in his side. He stepped on her foot. She pulled away, trying to breathe without gasping, and failing. Her fingers curled in the front of his shirt, and she tried to push him away but could not. She shouldn’t be doing this. This was not the place, and this was most definitely not the man. Her fingertips stroked the back of his neck beneath the feathery edges of his hair, worn so much shorter than he had back in their days.
It was too late to run. His mouth found hers with better skill the second time. Tongues stroked. They breathed together. It was exactly the same as it had always been, yet infinitely, vastly different.
Alice broke the kiss again, this time to look into his eyes. She let her fingertips trace the lines of his brows, then down his jaw and finally to stroke a tender, inquisitive touch along his lower lip. His mouth parted when she did that. His eyes grew heavy lidded. Against her belly, the press of his cock grew hot and thick.
“What are we doing?” she whispered.
Any second, someone else would come stumbling down the dark hallway on the way to the bathroom and bump into them. Or worse, be smart enough to turn on the light switch at the other end of the hall and shove them into eye-stabbing brightness so they’d have to spin apart and fake an innocence nobody would be likely to believe.
“I’m kissing you.”
He did it again. A little harder this time, urging her to sigh. His hand slipped into her hair, tangling his fingers and tugging tight while the other one slid farther down to cup her ass and pull her against him.
Ten years was long enough to change many things. Regimes could rise and fall. Movies could become media franchises. Cities could be built. People could change.
But this kiss didn’t feel like ten years had passed. Yes, there were differences in the way he moved and touched her, in how he used his tongue. In the way he murmured into her mouth, her name at first and then, “I didn’t forget how good you taste, oh shit, Alice, you taste so good.” But it was all still Mick as she remembered him.
Breathing hard, Alice broke the kiss once more, this time to step back and put a hand on his chest to keep him from grabbing her immediately close. “Mick.”
“Alice.” His voice, rough and low and full of longing.
“What are we doing?” she asked him again.
He straightened. He took her hands, linking their fingers, pushing their palms together. “Whatever we want.”
* * *
I never met a woman who made me feel the way you did. You could turn me upside down in a second with a laugh. Turn me inside out when you said my name, all sweet and soft, on the edge of a gasp or a moan. Nobody else ever made me want to punch a wall or break a glass. My dad always told me a man who shows his anger with his fists isn’t much of a man, but damn, Alice, you had this way of making me lose my mind. You’d say you were being honest, and I guess you were, but your every word could be as barbed as an arrow, as honed and sharp as a sword, and you ran me through with them. You left me to bleed. And you didn’t seem to take any joy in it, but you sure did manage to do it over and over and over again.
—Mick to Alice, unsent
* * *
Mick could still taste her, even with the after-dinner coffee and chocolate mousse cake trying to replace her flavor. Kissing Alice had been like falling onto a soft bed after a week of camping on rocky ground. Like coming home.
Too bad they’d been interrupted by Paul. Or maybe it was for the best, Mick thought, watching her across the table as she sampled another of Bernie’s desserts. The sight of her tongue licking along the tines of the fork sent an uncomfortable tingle straight to his crotch. The make out session had already left him with a semi-hard-on, and it was taking its good damn time in going away.
He caught her eye. Alice gave him a wicked, slow grin and took another long swipe of chocolate from the fork. She knew exactly what she was doing, the same way she always had. Time hadn’t changed her very much at all, at least not in the obvious ways the years had affected most everyone else gathered around the table.
“Okay, teams,” Cookie announced. “I put everyone’s names into this hat, and you pull out the name of your partner. And I have prizes, of course!”
There’d always been prizes at Bernie and Cookie’s parties, to go along with the board game marathons that inevitably ending up spiraling into good-natured chaos the more alcohol was consumed and the later the hours went. Tonight, Mick was awarded a hat shaped like a hotdog for his winning round at Balderdash. Alice, wearing a pair of sunglasses with a mustache attached, stood to pose for a picture with him, taken by Bernie. Then a selfie with her phone, their heads pressed together, both of them laughing like idiots.
“There’s one for the fridge.” It was what she’d always said about something she meant to keep.
“Send it to me,” Mick said.
Alice paused. “I don’t have your number.”
“I’ll give it to you.”
“Mick, Alice, we’re ready to go again,” Paul called out. “Get over here!”
Taking his time, Mick recited his number to Alice so she could put it in her contacts. A moment later, his phone buzzed with an incoming text including the picture. “Gotcha.”
“Do you?” Alice said with a lift of her brow and a toss of her head that set her dangling plastic mustache swinging.
Later, after the last of the wine had finally been drunk and the games disintegrated into laughter, when the kitchen mess had been tidied enough to make room for the breakfast cooking Bernie would be doing in a few hours, when everyone else had made their good-nights and headed for bed … when the house was quiet and still, Mick found her.
She was in the swing, as he knew she’d be. Big enough for two, hung from the branches of an enormous tree near the bottom of the yard and overlooking the chuckling stream that wound through Bernie and Cookie’s property. Down past the garden, it was a favorite spot, much coveted and fought over by everyone who came to stay. Tonight, it was all theirs.
“Hi.” He handed her a bottle of water and settled next to her without asking permission.
Alice moved over enough to give him space, but not so much that they weren’t still touching hip to hip. Her shoulder brushed his as she cracked the top off the bottle and took a long drink. “Thanks.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes. Every so often Mick pushed at the ground to get the swing gently rocking. The creek burbled and splashed, and somewhere, not so far away, an owl hooted softly. The wind sighed through the trees, bringing him the scent of her perfume.
“It’s good to see you,” she said finally.
Mick put an arm along the back of the swing to settle on her shoulders. “I wasn’t sure you’d think that.”
“Me neither, to be honest. Not until I did see you, and I realized it was going to be okay.”
He turned a little toward her. “More than okay, I hope.”
Alice said nothing. She didn’t move away from him, but she didn’t move closer, either. Her fingers toyed with the plastic bottle, tapping the sides.
His fingers brushed the back of her neck, beneath her hair.
She shivered.
Her lips parted, though if she actually spoke she did it so softly that the night breeze and rushing water ate her words. Mick let his finger trace a circle on her skin. Then a heart. When her back arched a little and she shifted, he stopped to let his hand gently cup the back of her neck.
“Mick …”
“I want to kiss you, Ali
ce. Again.”
She twisted to look at him. Her eyes glinted in a shaft of moonlight. “So kiss me, then.”
* * *
Our first public kiss was an accident. During one of Bernie and Cookie’s games, you and I were partners in some convoluted game of charades. Our word was love. I mimed a bride walking down the aisle; you drew hearts in the air with your fingers. But nobody could guess what we were trying to show, not until you took me in your arms and dipped me. You kissed me in an exaggerated, silent-movie kind of way, lots of wiggling around but no tongue. Somehow along the way, my arms went around you and I opened for you. Somehow, that kiss became real, right there in front of our friends, who were all screaming out guesses and none of them were right.
We lost the round, but I always thought we won.
—Alice to Mick
* * *
The kiss in the hallway had been furtive and desperate. Lunging. Fierce.
This time, Mick kissed her gently and slow, urging her mouth to open with the subtle motion of his lips on hers. At the stroke of his tongue, Alice shivered and broke it. There wasn’t much room on the swing for her to pull away. Instead, she put her face to the side of his neck and her arms around him. She let the scent of his skin envelop her, as much of an embrace as his arms.
There had been times when missing him had felt like someone had reached inside her and pulled out the part of her that remembered how to breathe. And times when she’d barely given the memories of him a second’s worth of her time. Touching him now, having him touch her … a river of fire rushed all through her. And there was that pesky, pain-in-the-ass thing about fire. It burned. You could touch a hot stove a hundred times to make sure it would still burn you, and it always would.
Well, Alice thought. So would this.
“Mick …”
He kissed her again. Harder. One hand on the back of her neck, the other going to her hip, then her ribs just below her breast. She couldn’t stop herself from arching a bit into that touch, doing her own urging with her body. It worked. Mick slid his hand up to cup her breast through the thin material of her dress. Her nipple went instantly erect when his thumb passed over it. She moaned.