Seven Day Loan
Page 11

“Eleanor, get back in the house.”
“You get back in the house. It’s your goddamn prison. Not mine.” She kept walking. It was cold out but she was too upset to notice or care.
“You’re in a jacket and jeans and it’s twenty-five degrees out.”
“Well, you should have thought of that before you asked me to stay.”
“That makes no sense whatsoever.” They were nearly to the edge of the long driveway. “I’m not the one running away.”
Eleanor turned around and stopped. She was at the end of the drive. Two steps back and she would be off his property and in the road.
“No. You’re not running away. You’re not running or walking or strolling or going anywhere. You’re staying and rotting and hiding. And there’s not much you and I haven’t done together this week, but I will not do that with you.”
Daniel took a step toward her. Just one but she took another step back.
“Eleanor.” Daniel’s voice was calm, controlled. He sounded like a jockey trying to gentle a spooked horse. “We can talk about this. Nothing has to be decided today. Just come in out of the cold. I’m cold, too, and I’m never cold. I know you have to be freezing. Come inside.”
Eleanor only looked at him. Even so angry at him, and cold and scared, she couldn’t deny he was breathtakingly handsome. Grief had left its mark on him. His eyes were haunted and his body lean and cold…like granite. She knew about granite, how you could build on it or be broken on it.
Still without a word she took the last steps back off his property.
“If you want me back in the house, come and get me.” She wasn’t mocking him. All she wanted was to help him.
“Don’t do this to me.” Daniel looked at her so gently that she was instantly ashamed of herself. But still she didn’t budge.
“You’re doing this to me,” she countered. “I love him with all that I am and you’re asking me to let that go, to leave him. I won’t do it. I can’t do it. I love him as much as you loved her. More maybe because if he died I would live like he would have wanted me to and not like some hermit in a cave.”
“Then just say ‘no’ to me. Let me ask you to stay and just tell me ‘no’. No frostbite or theatrics required.”
“I can’t let you ask me,” she said.
Daniel took a half step toward her.
“Why not?”
“Because,” she said looking down at the snow that caked her shoes like white icing. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to say ‘no.’”
“Why not?” Daniel asked again as he inched another minuscule step forward.
“Who he is and what he is…” she paused and tears flooded her eyes. “Every single second I spend with him I have to steal. I sleep in his bed and know there’s no place in the world I’d rather be but it’s the last place in the world I should be. I get Saturday nights with him, sometimes a Thursday night if I’m lucky. But never the mornings. What I wouldn’t give for a Wednesday or a Sunday morning…”
“You’re in love with a priest, Eleanor. What did you expect?”
“Not to be in love with a priest for starters,” Eleanor said, half laughing, half crying. “Every morning this week you’ve made love to me. You’re all mornings and afternoons and evenings and I didn’t have to steal a single second of it. You just have them all to give. So if you ask me to stay…Please, Daniel, don’t ask me to stay.”
When Daniel nodded, it was in agreement this time.
“The only thing I’ll ask is that you come back inside with me.” He was still on his property but when he reached out his hand it crossed over to her side. She took it and hated how good her small cold fingers felt wrapped up in his warm large hand. She hated it but didn’t let go until they were back inside.
Daniel let go of her hand but only so he could take her by the shoulders and pull her to him. He kissed her and undressed her at the same time. She was pinned to the front door before she knew it.
“I’ll let you leave,” he said into her ear as he lifted her by her thighs and pushed his c**k into her. “But I’ll make sure you miss me.”
He was relentless. Eleanor gripped his shoulders. He was still dressed. Only she was naked and spread out against the unforgiving front door. Only she was taking and taking as he was giving more and more of himself each time he pushed into her: she took his need, his sorrow, his determination to keep her, his anger that he couldn’t, his fingers on her clitoris, and finally his cum that poured into her as she shuddered from the orgasm that he’d also given her.
Eleanor wrapped her arms around Daniel’s neck as he lowered her feet to the cold floor. She leaned into him and inhaled his scent—warm and clean with the slightest hint of fireplace smoke—and committed it to memory.
“Don’t worry,” she said, finally letting him go. “I miss you already.”
Eleanor and Daniel lay in bed Thursday night, their last night, with their arms and legs wrapped around each other so that it was nearly impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. Tomorrow morning the car would come for Eleanor and take her back to the outside world and to him who she missed with every other breath and cursed with every breath in between.
“What will you do after I’m gone?” Eleanor asked, not knowing how else to keep avoiding the topic.