Counterfeit Gravity

The counter was cold against the backs of my thighs. That was the first thing I registered, that sharp bite of quartz through the thin cotton of my underwear, and then Shohei's mouth was on mine and I stopped registering anything else.

He tasted like black coffee and the faint bitterness of the antacids he chewed like candy. His hands were planted flat on the counter on either side of my hips, caging me in, and I had my legs hooked around his waist because apparently I'd decided somewhere between the doorway and the kitchen that dignity was a luxury I couldn't afford tonight.

My leggings were somewhere on the floor. I'd kicked them off while he was still unlocking the door, which says everything about how the last three hours had gone. One shoe was still on. The other had flown somewhere near the refrigerator when he lifted me onto the counter like I weighed nothing, which, given the way his forearms flexed under his rolled-up sleeves, was probably true.

"Shohei." His name came out ragged against his jaw.

"Hm." He didn't stop. His lips dragged down the side of my neck, teeth grazing the spot where my pulse was doing something frantic and stupid. His right hand left the counter and found my hip, fingers pressing into the skin above the waistband of my underwear.

I should've stopped this. I knew that. I'd known it when I followed him out of the bar, known it when he flagged the cab, known it when his thumb traced circles on my knee the whole ride and neither of us said a word. I knew it the way you know a bridge is out ahead of you, too late to do anything but brace.

"We shouldn't," I said.

His hand stilled on my hip. He pulled back just enough to look at me, and there it was, that face I'd spent six weeks wanting to punch. Sharp cheekbones. Tired eyes that made you think he hadn't slept properly since the last time the city had disappointed him, which was probably yesterday. The gray at his temples caught the kitchen light and made him look older than forty-three, though not in a bad way. In a way that suggested he'd earned every one of those years the hard way.

"You're right," he said. His voice was level. It always was. "We shouldn't."

He didn't move.

I didn't either.

This was the problem with Shohei Haizono. He could say one thing and mean another and make you believe both at the same time. Six weeks ago I'd sat across from him in a conference room in the financial district, notebook open, pen ready, and he'd told me with that same measured calm that he couldn't help me with my investigation into the Kessler deal. He'd been polite about it. He'd even seemed sorry. And then he'd walked me through exactly which questions to ask and which doors to knock on, without ever once saying he was doing it.

I'd gotten the story. A good one. The kind that makes editors return your calls.

And then I'd made the mistake of going back for more.

"You're still thinking," he said.

"I'm always thinking."

"That's the problem." His thumb moved against my hip, a slow drag across the bone. "You think too much. It's going to get you hurt."

"By you?"

"Especially by me."

He said it like a fact. Like weather. I hated how much I liked that about him, the way he never pretended to be anything other than what he was. Most men I'd dated spent the first month performing. Shohei had performed for exactly one conversation before he'd apparently decided it wasn't worth the effort and just started being himself, which turned out to be a man who solved other people's problems for a living and couldn't solve his own, who kept everyone at arm's length and then looked surprised when they noticed.

I reached up and touched the silver ring on his right hand. It was warm from my skin. He flinched, barely, a twitch in his jaw that anyone else would've missed.

"You never take this off," I said.

"No."

"Why?"

He looked at me for a long moment. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere down the hall, a neighbor's dog barked twice and went quiet. His hand came up and caught my wrist, not hard, just enough to stop me from turning the ring.

"A man I used to be wore it," he said. "I keep it to remember he's dead."

"That's dramatic."

"Most true things are."

I should've asked more. That's what I do. I ask questions until people either answer them or walk away, and Shohei had been walking away from me since the day we met. But right now, with my legs around him and his shirt wrinkled under my hands and the taste of him still in my mouth, I didn't want the story. I wanted him to stop talking.

So I pulled him back down by the collar and kissed him again, harder this time, and he made a sound low in his throat that I felt in my chest.

His hands moved. One slid up under my shirt, palm flat against my spine, and the other hooked into the waistband of my underwear like he was considering his options. I arched into him. The counter edge dug into my ass and I didn't care.

"Ashley." He said my name like a warning.

"I know."

"Do you?"

"I know what I'm doing."

He laughed. It was a quiet, humorless thing. "No, you don't. Neither do I. That's the point."

But he didn't stop. His mouth found the hollow of my throat and his fingers slipped lower and I gripped the back of his neck hard enough to leave marks. His belt buckle pressed cold against my inner thigh. He was still mostly dressed, charcoal suit pants undone but not off, shirt untucked and rucked up, and I was in a t-shirt and one shoe and nothing else, and it should've been ridiculous.

It wasn't.

Every time his fingers moved I forgot another reason this was a bad idea. The Kessler story. The fact that he'd lied to me on day one and told the truth on day thirty. The way he looked at me sometimes, like I was a problem he couldn't solve and it was killing him.

"You're going to regret this," he murmured against my skin.

"Probably."

"Tomorrow."

"Definitely."

His hand stilled. He pulled back again, and this time there was something different in his face, something raw and unguarded that I'd never seen before. For a second he looked young. Then it was gone, folded away behind the tired eyes and the measured calm, and he was Shohei again, the man who negotiated peace between people who wanted to kill each other and went home alone every night.

"Tell me to stop," he said.

I didn't.

He waited. Three seconds. Five. The ring on his right hand caught the light as he flexed his fingers against my hip.

"Tell me to stop, Ashley."

"No."

He closed his eyes. When he opened them, the decision was already made, and I watched him make it, watched the exact moment he chose to stop being careful. It looked like a man stepping off a ledge.

His mouth came down on mine and his hands moved and the kitchen tilted sideways. I wrapped my arms around his neck and held on, and somewhere in the back of my mind a voice that sounded like my editor asked me what the hell I thought I was doing.

I told it to shut up.

We had until morning. That was the deal neither of us had said out loud, the one I could feel in the way he touched me, like he was memorizing something he planned to lose. Tomorrow he'd go back to being the mediator with the dead man's ring. I'd go back to being the reporter who got too close to her source. We'd pretend this was a mistake.

But right now his hands were on my skin and his breath was hot against my ear and the counter was still cold under my thighs, and I had never in my life wanted to be wrong about someone so badly.