The Becoming of Noah Shaw (The Shaw Confessions Book 1)

AS I LEAVE THE OFFICE, I run into Mara on the stairs.

“You,” she says.

“Me.”

“You vanished.”

“I did.”

“Pretty quickly.”

“That obvious?”

“To me,” she says, then rises on her toes to kiss me . . . or to look past my shoulder at the now-closed door.

“What’s in there?”

“I had some stuff sent over from England.”

“Stuff?”

“Papers and things. All the laughing and drinking downstairs made me a bit homesick.”

“Liar.”

“I take offence.”

“Keep taking it,” she says. “What were you doing in there, really?”

She knows me too well. “I thought I might go through some of it, see if I can find anything mentioning Sam’s family.”

“Did you? Find anything, I mean?” Her eyes dart from me to the door again.

“Not tonight.”

She tilts her head toward the stairs. “Everyone left while you were gone.”

I take a step closer to her. “Did they, now.”

“Goose went back to the Gansevoort for another night or two, and Jamie went back to his aunt’s. He’s going to think about it.”

“About . . . ?”

“Moving in.” She narrows her eyes. “You invited him to live here, remember?”

“Sorry, I’m rather tired.” I regret the lie as soon as I speak it—Mara sees through it immediately.

“What’s going on, Noah?” She twists a finger in the hem of her T-shirt, dark grey with a brontosaurus pictured below the words THEY’LL NEVER FIND US.

I run my hand through my hair. “I don’t know.”

“Are you ever going to tell me? What you saw?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

She bites her lower lip, but she’s really biting back words. I close the space between us and kiss her before she can speak.

Her body is stiff at first, but she begins to melt in seconds. Just as she reaches for the back of my neck, I pull away and ask, “Have you seen the rest of the flat?”

A single shake.

“Would you like to?”

A single nod.

“Follow.” I turn away from her and pass the office without opening the door.

We turn the first corner. “How many bedrooms did you say there are?”

“Six.”

“Which one’s ours?”

“Tonight, all of them,” I say, and stop. She crashes into me and I catch her, pulling her hair gently, leaning to kiss the hollow below her ear. “And the living room.” My hand slides up under her T-shirt. “And the dining room.”

She bites my lower lip. “The pool table.”

“The kitchen,” I say as she rakes her hand through my hair.

“Show me.”

Breaking apart is excruciating. I grip her small hand tightly enough to shatter it—she’s holding mine just as hard. I don’t even need to turn on the hall lights—the moon and the city are bright enough to guide us.

We take the stairs again to the top floor. There are two rooms; only one has a bed, I know, because the other, I tell Mara, is to be her studio, if she wants.

“What I want is you,” she says. She pulls me inside the bare room, the ceiling punched through with three skylights. The night is clear enough and we’re high up enough to see stars.

I tug her back out. “Come.”

“I’d like to, but—”

“Cheeky,” I say, and open the next door. “Careful, or I may have to punish you.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” she says, seeing the white bed in the centre of the room, surrounded by view. She pries her hand from mine and backs up against it. There’s a large beveled glass floor mirror in one corner of the room, reflecting the city. Reflecting us. She glances over her shoulder at it, then me.

“You’ve thought of everything.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

She hitches up onto the bed, her fraying denimed legs dangling from crossed knees. “You know I know you like to watch.”

I reach her. Uncross those legs. “I do.”

“So”—her voice juicy with malice—“watch.”

I lean in to kiss her, and she pulls her head away and gently pushes me back. “Nope. From there.”

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, how could I ever love anyone else?

She slays me, slipping out of her shirt, the city lights kiss her skin but I can’t, not yet. She lies back on the bed so I can see the rise of her breasts as she lifts her hips to slide off her jeans. The clink of the button on the wood floor rings in my ears.

Down to a simple black bra and plain black boy-shorts and she’s still wearing too much. We both are. I start to pull my shirt up and over my shoulders until I hear, “No.”

I hear her breath and blood moving under her skin, a spiralling ache that matches mine, and it gives me a kick of surprise—it feels like ages since I’ve heard her last. Watching the fast rise and fall of her chest, I know she’s as tortured as I am. The power of her fizzes my blood, the lure of me burns hers.

This is not our first time, but it’s our first time here, in this place that’s ours, in this new age of us. And even though every second with Mara is different, this is different from even that. She knows it too. She takes off what she’d left on, and the swollen air between us weighs a thousand pounds. My muscles strain under the pressure of not touching her, but when she reaches up for me, I say no. I do what she did, but instead of extending that excruciating wait, I climb onto the bed. Even in the dark I can see her flushed cheeks, her berry-stained lips parted, the few scattered freckles that dust her cheeks. I don’t touch her skin, but I fill my hand with her hair, and let the strands that look like double helices fall from my fingers, the dusky city light making the few amber strands in her dark hair shine. I’m getting high on the scent of her, when she says, “We’re home.”

If I’d been standing, her words would have brought me to my knees. She touches me first, pressing her palm against the back of my neck.

Her touch throws off sparks of colours I’ve never seen and notes I’ve never heard, and I slide her beneath me and press my mouth to hers. The feel of her tongue sings high in my ears, but her body is low and purring. When she moves, I move with her. She shimmers with heat, that tortured ache rising in both of us as I get drunk on the taste of her. The sounds she’s making are dizzying, and when I hitch her long, lovely, coltish limbs around my waist, she’s shivering and—

If I believed in God I would pray, beg, anything to stop time, to live in this moment with her forever. Tonight is a perfect thing in a broken world, and she is the queen of it. Her pleasure, searing white, arrows through mine, and I would let the Earth ice over to keep the sun from rising, but after hours of her, it rises anyway, sunlight staining our sheets, our skin. After, I fall asleep with Mara in my arms.

I wake up in someone else’s mind.