James Byrne, having other ideas, greeted his wife's homecoming with the front page of the daily Bakersville Independent.
"Kavia Adnan!" His green eyes shimmered with hurt. "What the hell?" His anger-clenched jaw and messy bedhead stoked Kavi's fires. She looked down from his face, snatched delicious glimpses of his forearms, the tension in his shoulders. She could only imagine shoving James to the kitchen floor and ripping the shirt from his chest. Despite the 1970’s kitsch of linoleum, wood-paneling and Formica, Kavi's return gave the Adnan-Byrne kitchen the perfumed air of a honeymoon suite.
"Are you grinning?" James smacked the picture splashed across the front of the paper, showing his wife and two rando dudes in cuffs. "What is this?"
"Uh," Kavi took a breath, glad for the tangy air which no amount of bleach could scrub from her kitchen. She begged for a moment of focus but could only imagine the shirt pulled up from James's torso, his fingers desperate across her back. "It's been a fucking day and you're a sight for sore eyes. What was the question again?"
"I've been worried sick that my wife was being shanked in prison! I had to call off my 9 a.m. Shakespeare seminar to take the girls to school, and to top it all off, I have to find out from the newspaper that you're in some sort of writing group on Tuesday nights? You told me you update library servers!"
"Wait." A light filled Kavi's chest, threatening to over-inflate her ribcage, pop her like a water balloon of pure happiness. The pressure boiled off in an easy laugh. "You're angry about my writing group? You realize I was arrested, right?"
"Kavi." James folded arms across his chest. God damn...that chest. "How long have we been married?"
"Fourteen years."
"It was a rhetorical question, hun. We both know you wouldn't harm a fly."
Kavi pressed her body to James', took his face in her hands. Just to feel his skin, the warmth of his breath. She breathed deep his ineffable smell, smoke and salt and sweet at the same time.
"My god, I love you." Before he could retort, Kavi placed her lips to his, at first gentle, then firm to match the intensity of her emotion. James wrapped his arms around her, safe and sturdy, fingers tickling trails of goosebumps down her shoulders. She pushed James slightly, stared into his eyes. For a two-job household, especially one with overachieving teenage daughters, their schedules jammed tight with ballet and SAT prep and driver’s school, ‘two-parent, no kid’ time was literally fucking gold.
"Okay. I know we have a lot to talk about, but." Kavi’s eyes darted behind them to the darkened hallway, to the open bedroom door. "You know…the kids are at school…"
James kissed the hollow of Kavi's neck. "Because you were arrested and I had to call off work."
Kavi scraped her fingers up James' back, pulling desperately at the hem of his shirt. "Details, details."
"We're not done talking about this." James hefted Kavi into his arms, hands under her bottom. She wrapped her legs around him, desperate for the taste of his skin. Intertwined, they moved toward the bedroom but only made it to the living room sofa.
"I'm still upset you lied to me."
"Upset?" Kavi wiggled to get out of her pants. "Mmm. Use that."
No comments:
Post a Comment