Silken Signal

Chapter Three

The next day was useless.

Ellen worked, spoke, drove, answered things, nodded at the right moments, but none of it really held. Her body had already decided it was elsewhere. Every quiet second brought him back: the pressure of his hand at her waist, the look on his face when she stepped into the courtyard, the irritating, unmistakable pull of wanting a man she had barely touched and had already nearly walked away from.

By late afternoon she was angry with herself for thinking about him so much.

By seven-thirty she was dressing for him.

Not obviously. Not cheaply. She would have hated herself for that. But she chose clothes with a different hand than usual. A dark silk top that moved when she breathed. Jeans that held her well. Low heels. Hair loose. No necklace. Mouth soft, not painted. The whole thing said nothing she could be held accountable for and everything he would notice.

At two minutes to eight she walked downstairs and found him waiting outside the building.

He was standing under the weak wash of the entry light, one shoulder against the brick, hands in his pockets, dark shirt open at the throat. He straightened when he saw her, and that one small movement -- that immediate change in him -- gave her a low, private thrill.

For a second neither of them spoke.

Then Ben said, "You look dangerous."

Ellen kept coming until she was standing right in front of him. "That's not much of an apology."

"It wasn't meant to be."

"No?"

"No." His eyes moved over her, not hurriedly, not rudely, but in a way that made her newly conscious of herself from the throat down. "It was just true."

That did not help.

She said, "You look like trouble."

"I think that's been established."

They went to a bar on Hillhurst, dim enough to flatter everyone and quiet enough to let a sentence land properly. They sat close, not touching. The drinks were cold. The room had that polished Los Feliz hush that made everything feel a little more intimate than it should have.

Up close, without the excuse of windows or distance, Ben became more dangerous, not less. He was intelligent in a way that didn't advertise itself. Funny when he chose to be. Careful with language. He did not crowd her or overplay the night or act as though last evening had bought him anything. Which made the wanting in him more obvious, not less. Ellen could feel it under everything.

They talked. Real talk, which was the problem. Architecture. Editing. LA. New York. Bad apartments. Better books. Why neither of them had left the city despite threatening to do it every year. The sister came up, and he explained her properly this time, with enough detail to satisfy her and enough embarrassment to amuse her.

"You really should have led with that," she said.

"I know."

"And yet you didn't."

He looked at her for a long second over the rim of his glass. "I wasn't thinking very clearly where you were concerned."

The line should have been too easy. It wasn't. It landed with humiliating force.

Later, outside, they walked slowly through the warm night. Los Feliz had that rare LA quality of seeming accidentally romantic when it wasn't trying. Trees overhead. Windows lit gold. Cars moving by in low, indifferent streams. Their shoulders brushed once, then again. The second time neither corrected for it.

At the next corner, waiting for the light, Ben said quietly, "I kept thinking about you in that shirt."

Ellen turned to him. "This one?"

"Yes."

"That feels like a narrow focus."

"It isn't." His gaze dropped, then came back to her face. "But it's where I'm starting."

Something tightened low in her body.

The light changed. They crossed. At the far curb he put his hand at the small of her back, light but unmistakable, and the contact went through her like heat through metal. She stopped walking.

Ben stopped too.

"That," she said.

His hand fell at once. "Sorry."

"I didn't ask you to stop."

He looked at her then with a steadiness that made the whole street seem to recede around them.

"Ellen," he said, and her name in his mouth felt slower than other people's mouths had ever made it.

"Yes?"

"I am trying very hard."

She took one step closer. "At what point do you stop trying?"

His laugh was low and short and had very little ease in it. "That depends how cruel you intend to be."

That was enough. More than enough.

She stepped into the shadowed edge of a storefront and said, "Come here."

He did.

The kiss was immediate and it was hungry.

Thank God for that. If he had kissed her delicately she might have lost patience with him then and there. Instead his hand came to the side of her face, the other to her waist, and his mouth found hers with the unmistakable force of a man who had spent too long thinking about this and had finally been given leave to stop imagining.

Ellen made a small sound into his mouth and felt him react to it.

His body came closer, not careless, not pushing past her, but closing the distance in a way that made every part of her newly aware. His hand at her waist tightened once. Her fingers slid into his shirt. The city was still there -- traffic, distant voices, light moving over the pavement -- but it had become background now, almost abstract. The only thing with any real shape was the pressure of his mouth, the warmth of him, the strain of restraint still visible in the way he held her.

When he drew back it was barely an inch.

"Tell me if you want me to stop," he said softly.

The fact that he said it then, breath altered, hand firm at her waist, made her want him more.

"I don't."

His eyes held hers for one beat longer.

Then he kissed her again.

This time her back touched the wall. His mouth moved more slowly at first, and somehow that was worse. Better. He kissed like a man who had noticed too much already and intended to confirm all of it. Ellen could feel herself opening under it, her body answering before thought could interfere. Her hands moved over his chest, his shoulders, up into the back of his hair. When her fingers tightened there he exhaled against her mouth, and that sound went straight through her.

He kissed the corner of her mouth, her jaw, her throat.

It was only her throat and yet it felt indecently intimate, the sort of touch that made the body anticipate more than was happening. Ellen tipped her head back. Ben's hand slid from her waist to her hip and stayed there, strong, controlled, making her acutely aware of the line of her own body under the silk: the rise of her breasts against the top, the warm inward curve of her waist, the shape of her hips under denim. She could feel him registering all of it, not abstractly but with a kind of focused hunger that made her feel vividly, dangerously female.

"Ben," she said, almost under her breath.

His mouth paused at her throat. "Yes?"

"Are you going to keep doing this out here?"

He lifted his head. His eyes were darker now, his control visibly under strain.

"No," he said. "Not unless you want me to."

"I don't."

"Good."

They walked back to the building with almost painful composure. The lack of touching between them was its own form of heat now. By the time they climbed the stairs to his apartment, Ellen felt sharpened to pure nerve.

Inside, his place looked exactly right in a way she hated noticing. Books stacked properly. Lamps well chosen. A long work table. Curtains half-drawn over the windows, the whole room softly lit and private at last, as if the city had been shut out in their favour.

"Do you want a drink?" he asked.

"No."

"Good."

That made her laugh once. "That sounded less like hospitality."

"It wasn't hospitality."

He came toward her slowly. Not giving a performance of restraint, just giving her room. When he reached her, his hand touched the side of her face, then slid into her hair, and the tenderness of that touch made what followed feel rougher, hotter, more earned when he kissed her again.

This time there was no wall, no street, no one passing, no interruption. Ellen kissed him back with open hunger. Her hands went under his shirt and found warm skin, solid muscle, heat. He made a low sound against her mouth that felt more intimate than words.

"Bedroom," he said.

She looked at him. "Yes."

He took her hand and led her down the hall.

In the bedroom the light was low and warm. The bed was unmade in the ordinary way real beds were. Nothing theatrical. That helped. It made the whole thing feel less like a scene and more like a decision.

Ben turned to her at the edge of the bed and stopped.

He touched her face once, then her hair, then let his hand slide slowly down the outside of her arm.

"Still yes?" he said.

Ellen held his gaze. "Still yes."

That mattered. She felt it settle between them.

So when he kissed her again, and his hands moved over her with more confidence now, more intention, it did not feel like he was taking. It felt like she had opened the door and he was stepping through it with exactly the right amount of care and appetite.

He undid her top slowly enough to make her aware of every second. When the silk loosened and fell away, the air met her skin and she felt his eyes on her with a concentration so intense it almost made her shiver. The bra beneath it suddenly felt like very little. His hands hovered for a moment, then touched her with a measured reverence that made the wanting in him seem even less manageable.