Chapter 62 THE CHOICE
Ava's POV
The woman's name was Sera and she sat at the kitchen table like she owned it and answered every question Dominic asked her with the kind of calm that made it clear she'd been asked harder questions by more dangerous people and hadn't been moved by any of them.
I stopped listening after a while because my head was full and I needed air that wasn't loaded with tension and mystery and my father's presence, so I told Dominic I was going to find a shop in the village for basic things, toothpaste and something to eat that wasn't from whatever tin Elias had found at the back of the cottage cupboard.
He looked at me and started to say something and I said "twenty minutes" and he closed his mouth and nodded and I went.
The village was small and quiet and the shop was the kind that sold everything slightly randomly, bread next to batteries next to women's tights, and I went up and down the two aisles just breathing and being nobody for a few minutes and it helped.
I was reaching for something on the top shelf, standing on my toes, fingers just short of it, when I felt someone come up behind me and reach over my head and get it and I turned around to say thank you to a stranger and it was Adrian.
"Dominic sent you," I said.
"Dominic sent me," he confirmed, handing me the thing I'd been reaching for, and we stood there in the narrow aisle closer than the space required and neither of us immediately stepped back.
He looked tired, I noticed, properly tired in a way he never usually showed, his eyes a little heavy, a tension around his mouth, and I said without planning to, "are you okay," and he looked slightly surprised that I'd asked and then something in his face softened and he said "not particularly" and I said "me neither" and we stood there in the cramped little village shop being honest with each other in the way you sometimes could be with someone when the circumstances were already so far past normal that pretending seemed pointless.
Then I lost my footing.
The floor was slightly uneven and my shoe caught the edge of a low shelf and I went forward and Adrian caught me, both hands on my waist, and I grabbed his shirt to steady myself and we ended up with my face two inches from his and his arms around me and both of us completely still.
I don't know which of us moved first.
The kiss happened the way things happen when they've been building without either person admitting it, suddenly and inevitably, his mouth on mine and my hands still gripping his shirt and neither of us pulling back and it was different from Dominic, quieter and more careful, his hands on my face like he was holding something he wasn't sure he was allowed to have.
Then the shop door opened.
We broke apart and Adrian looked over my shoulder and grabbed my hand and pulled me to the back of the shop where a circular rack of hanging clothes took up most of the corner and we pushed into the middle of it and crouched down and the hanging fabric closed around us and we were completely hidden and completely pressed together in a space the size of a cupboard.
The shop owner's voice came from the front, talking to someone, footsteps moving around, unhurried, no reason to rush, and Adrian and I knelt in the dark middle of a clothing rack in a village shop in England and looked at each other and I could feel his breath on my face and my heart was going very fast and not entirely from the fear of being found.
His hand was still on my waist and I was still holding his shirt and the voices at the front showed no sign of leaving and we were so close I could feel the warmth coming off him in the small dark space.
He looked at me for a long moment and then his hand moved from my waist to my knee and slid slowly upward under the hem of my dress and I should have stopped him and didn't, just watched his face while his hand moved higher and my breathing got unsteady.
"Adrian," I said, barely any sound at all.
"Shh," he said, which was genuinely good advice given the two people six feet away on the other side of a clothing rack, and then he kissed me again, slower this time, his mouth moving over mine with a patience that Dominic never had, like he had all the time in the world and intended to use it, and I kissed him back and my hands slid up his chest.
His fingers found the buttons of my dress at the front and he looked at me and I looked back at him and didn't stop him so he undid the top three slowly, one at a time, and pushed the fabric aside and looked at me in the dim light filtering through the hanging clothes and the way he looked made my face warm.
He bent his head and pressed his mouth to the top of my breast, soft open kisses across the skin, unhurried, working his way across and then down and I tipped my head back against the hanging clothes behind me and bit my lip hard because the sound I wanted to make was absolutely not appropriate for a village shop on a Tuesday morning.
His hand came up and pushed my bra cup down and freed me properly and his mouth found my nipple and closed over it warm and wet and I grabbed the clothing rail above me with one hand to stay upright because my knees did something unreliable, his tongue rolling slow and deliberate, his teeth grazing just enough to make me gasp silently into the hanging fabric.
He moved to the other one and did it again, slower, one hand palming the first while his mouth worked the second, and I had my fist pressed to my mouth and my head thrown back and the voices at the front of the shop were saying something about delivery times and I genuinely could not have told you what language they were speaking.
His mouth kissed back up my chest to my throat and then my jaw and then my mouth and he kissed me deep and his hand slid back down my stomach and under the hem of my dress and kept going and I spread my knees slightly to let him because at this point dignity was a distant memory.
His fingers reached the edge of my underwear and pushed underneath and found me already soaking and he made a sound against my mouth that was so quiet only I could hear it, low and satisfied, like he'd suspected and was pleased to be right.
"How long," he said against my ear, barely breath.
I shook my head because I genuinely didn't know, since the kiss, since he caught me, since weeks ago if I was being completely honest with myself.
He stroked me slowly at first, just his fingers moving through the wetness, learning the shape of me, and I gripped his shirt in both fists and pressed my face into his neck and breathed against his skin and he took his time about it in a way that was genuinely maddening, like he was memorizing this, like he wanted to know exactly what worked before he used it.
Then he pushed two fingers inside me and I bit his shoulder hard enough to leave a mark and he hissed very quietly and his fingers curled and I saw actual stars.
He worked me slowly, deep and rhythmic, his thumb finding my clit and circling it with a patience I did not have, and the voices at the front of the shop were completely irrelevant now, just background noise behind the blood rushing in my ears and Adrian's breath at my temple and the sound of the clothes moving slightly around us.
"You feel incredible," he breathed against my ear, his fingers pressing deeper, "so tight, so wet, you have no idea..."
I grabbed his hair and pulled his mouth back to mine to shut him up because if he kept talking I was going to make a sound that would bring the entire village in, and he smiled against my mouth and kept his fingers moving and kissed me back and his thumb pressed down harder and I came apart completely, silently, shaking from my knees up, my whole body clenching around his fingers and my face buried in his neck and his name in my mouth with absolutely nothing behind it.
He kept going through all of it, slower, gentler, drawing it out until I was limp against him and my legs were only functioning through sheer determination, and then he stroked me gently through the last of it and his fingers withdrew slowly and I felt the loss of it like something being taken.
He looked at his hand in the dim light and then at me and brought his fingers to his mouth and held my gaze while he did it and I felt my whole body clench all over again like it hadn't just finished, like it was ready to start over, and the absolute unfairness of that made me want to laugh and also to pull him back down to the floor.
He reached up and fixed my bra and rebuttoned my dress carefully, his fingers steady where mine wouldn't have been, and smoothed the fabric down and then looked at my face like he was checking something and whatever he found there made his jaw tighten slightly.
"We should go," he said quietly.
"We should go," I agreed and neither of us moved for another full five seconds.
Then I pushed through the clothes rack and stood up and smoothed my dress down and picked up the things I'd dropped when I fell and Adrian stood up behind me and straightened his shirt and we walked to the front of the shop and I paid for everything and we went out into the grey English morning and walked back toward the cottage without saying a word.
Halfway back he said, "Ava," and I said "don't," not harshly, just, not yet, and he nodded and we kept walking.
We got back to the cottage and I pushed open the door and Dominic was in the hallway and he looked at me and then at Adrian behind me and his eyes moved over my face the way they did when he was reading something and I held his gaze and didn't look away.
He looked at Adrian.
Adrian looked back at him steadily.
Something passed between them, long and loaded, and then Dominic looked back at me and said nothing, just stepped aside to let us in, and I walked past him and his hand caught my wrist lightly as I passed, not stopping me, just a second of contact, a reminder, and then he let go.
I went to the kitchen and put the shopping down and stood at the counter and pressed both hands flat on the surface and breathed and the mark on my shoulder pulsed warmly and I thought about Dominic's face in the hallway and Adrian's fingers in the clothing rack and the woman named Sera sitting at the kitchen table and my father somewhere in this house and thought that my life had become genuinely unrecognizable and I had no idea what came next.
Sera appeared in the kitchen doorway and looked at me and said, "are you ready to hear what I actually came to tell you," and her voice was the same calm it had been since she arrived, like nothing in the world could shake it.
"No," I said honestly, "but tell me anyway."
She smiled, and this time it reached her eyes slightly.
"Your mother," she said, "isn't in New York anymore.”