“That is worse than cruel.”
“Hush, now.” She pats my hand, then uses my thigh to push to her feet. “Noa made an excellent lasagna for this evening and I’m hankering for a meal after sleeping for most of the day.”
I sigh, squeezing her hand before helping her into a stand. “Lead the way.”
The cushions don’t shift as Ma rises. It takes a second to collect my heart from the bottom of the well my stomach has become. But I do.
I offer Ma my elbow. “Is her lasagna as delicious as I remember?”
As delicious as her body?
“Better.” Ma leans her head on my upper arm as we head to the kitchen. “She adds this thing she calls aruenow.”
“Lovely.”
Out of all the Michelin starred restaurants I’ve eaten at, courting clients and regaling politicians, I always thought of her. Wondering if the next dish to grace my table was from Noa, and if she was happy, happier, without me.
Years ago, Noa’s meals used to fix any difficulties occurring in my life.
I kiss the top of Ma’s head, praying that fact still holds.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Noa
News of Stone Williams’s return surges through Falcon Haven like an uncontrolled STD.
I hear about him on the local radio as I drive. He’s mentioned as I walk into the Merc, first from the elders of our community clustered around a round table, whispering in disapproval about the antics landing him back here and his choice in career, but doing it with a saucy glint in their eye, like if only they were younger, they’d really give him hell.
Then I hear it while waiting in line for my coffee, the junior clerks behind the counter discussing whether he’s hotter in person.
Worse, I dreamed about him last night.
I prefer to call it a dream and not remembrance, even though the image was freakishly close to the times I woke up to him in bed with nothing but a crumpled white sheet separating me from him. Or how parallel the moment his eye cracked open and caught me staring was to what really happened, when he sprang from his side of the bed and landed on me, pulling the sheet overour heads and shielding us from the world as he slipped inside me. So easily because I was always wet for him.
He smelled the same, too. Smoke and cinder with a small wave of soap. How his back felt so warm, but the skin over his heart so much hotter. How his mouth played with my lips the same way he enjoyed sucking on my nipples. Tender, with a littlenipof dominance now and then.
As our lips met, as his tongue stroked mine, he stops his pumping, pulling his mouth away and saying roughly, “You take me so deep, Lavender. ”
No one’s called me that in years. It always came from him since the day he found me experimenting with a new recipe that included lavender sprigs. His fifteen-year-old self was so boggled by the use of a flower in cooking that he never let me live it down. Then, it became his moniker for me. A sweet, fragrant nickname, meant for only one person in his life.
My eyes shot open, and I almost fell out of bed. In a cold, dark, lonely room.
Another cold splash of reality hits me when I hear the ladies waiting behind me chime into the morning gossip, pondering which came first—his defined torso or cutthroat tactics in annihilating small businesses.
The brunette directly behind me murmurs to her neighbor, “Do you think that question could be applied to his peni?—”
“Thank you!” I practically yell when I grab my coffee from the counter and sprint away from the whirlwind that is Stone’s return.
The ruminating turns into curious wonderment as I breeze by, feeling the eyes on me like butterfly wings brushing relentlessly against my back.
“I wonder why she…”
“Do you think the poor girl’s still heartbroken?”
“Does she want him back, or…?”
“How hard it must be to see that handsome face again and not be able to mess it up for real this time.”
