Crossover Vignette: Love Interest x Perfect Fit

Our gazes catch the moment I enter the bar.

The grin Alex Harrison aims my way is powered by an incalculable wattage. I drink in the sight of him, my body reacting like a wilted flower’s first rainfall after drought. The near black, messy hair both of us love tugging at. His eyes crinkled in mirth, that delicate rose of Sharon tattoo on the inside of his lower arm I’ve run my lips, my teeth over a thousand times.

My heart unspools from the tight knot of his absence. We haven’t seen each other in sixteen days. That’s the longest it’s been since Alex trailed me over the Atlantic Ocean and stayed there.

We’re back in New York for our second wedding together – Alex’s cousin’s, this time – and of all places in the city for a reunion, he requested to greet me at Sleight of Hand, the bar where we first kissed.

He’s sitting in a shadowed booth in the corner, one arm stretched over the seatback, the other reaching for his old fashioned on the table. I head toward him, wheeling my suitcase behind me, my smile stretched wide. Alex takes a brisk sip as he watches me cross the room, a hunger darkening his crookedly handsome features.

He slides out of the booth and around my body in one smooth motion.

Bracing arms around my waist. A wide chest that my cheeks love to sink against. Cherry-and-whiskey breath by my ear whispering, “Hey, jagi” in a voice he usually reserves for private.

That voice is the tether to my sanity, and the scissors to snip it.

If the past two weeks of separation have been our personal hell of an aberration, then this is how we get back to normal. By touching and whispering and watching each other until we’ve had our greedy fill.

“Missed you,” I mumble into his button-down.

“There aren’t words.” Alex’s hands trail up my waist, over my shoulders to the nape of my neck. He palms my skin with one hand while the other fists into my hair. In his eyes, every good ache I feel is reflected back at me.

“Gonna kiss you,” he murmurs. “But since we’re in public, it won’t be how I want it. Won’t be what you deserve. Okay?”

I bite off a smirk and answer, “Oka –”

Our lips crash together, and there’s an immediate hum of pleasure, of remembrance, from our bodies. My hands fist into the fabric of his shirt to stop myself from untucking, searching for the skin beneath. Alex kisses me slow, his mouth warm and soft but insistent all the same.

I know he’s testing his own restraint the same way I’m testing mine.

When it becomes too overwhelming, all this holding back, he bites off a groan. His lips move upward to drop featherlight kisses to my cheekbone, my temple.

His hands slip through my sun-lightened brown hair. He slides my suitcase under the table and pulls me into the booth.

“Freddy made that drink you love.” His closest hand rests on my upper thigh. Alex nods at the icy, untouched grapefruit cocktail on a coaster in front of me.

“It’s like sinking back through time,” I say, recalling when we were last here and I was drinking this very invention. Alex and were on stools by the bar, the first gleams of interest dappling through every word we exchanged. My ex-boyfriend walking in by surprise had been the perfect excuse for us to lean in, test the potency of the electric current racing between us.

We’d kissed, and that was that.

I was gone for him.

“If only I’d known then,” he murmurs, watching me with chasmic eyes.

“Known what?” I half-whisper.

He shakes his head. Says, so simply: “This.”

This, I agree.

This inconceivable love we’ve made that feels ever expanding, limitless. I fell for Alex Harrison in a matter of months, and back then, I thought there was no possible way there could be more to what already felt like everything.

Except now, I know better.

The longer you’re with someone, the more your emotions grow. They wrap together like hungry spring vines until you’re so in tune, so enmeshed, you feel deprived of your actual lifeblood when you have to exist for two weeks apart.

“How are you?” I ask softly.

“Better now.” His thumb spells something on the skin of my thigh.

We haven’t gotten to FaceTime much between the time difference, work for me, best man duties and David’s bachelor trip for Alex. I’m on the cusp of asking him to give me every detail when a dirty blond bartender materializes on the other side of our booth.

“Thank you,” he says, glaring at Alex, “for not ripping off your girlfriend’s dress in the middle of the establishment I was just promoted to manage.”

“I barely kissed her.” Alex’s grip on me tightens.

“You call that barely kissing? Your performance made someone at the bar spill their drink all over my garnishes.”

“Freddy.” I grin at him.

His stony gaze softens when he turns to me. “It’s admittedly good to see you, Casey.”

“You too, and congratulations on your promotion. Just don’t forget it was your suggestion Alex and I kiss in this very bar the first time around.”

“She’s right, Freddy.” Alex moves his hand over my shoulders, smirking at his best friend while he pulls me deeper into his warm side. “You did this.”

“I’ve created monsters.” Freddy sinks his chin against his palm, eyes flicking between us. “And with the wedding fever you’ll be exposed to over the weekend? I can share the position with David, but at least promise I’ll be a co-best man for yours.”

“Casey and I aren’t getting married.”

My gaze snaps to Alex. Simultaneously Freddy and I ask, “Why not?”

Freddy sounds curious; I sound alarmed.

Now Alex’s gaze is the one to snap over. He searches my face, confusion clouding his seismically, bewitchingly adorable features. “Because you don’t want to.”

He doesn’t phrase it as a question.

I blink. “When did I tell you I didn’t want to get married?”

Alex studies me. “Technically, you said it to your gran, at that restaurant in Notting Hill. I think your exact words were, That’s not really in the cards for us.”

I clap a hand to my mouth, remembering.

Gran loves Alex. It was only the third time we’d gone to dinner with her that she’d asked when we planned to tie the knot.

“I only said that to simmer her! She would have forced you into ring shopping before the month was out otherwise.”

“Oh,” Alex says after a moment.

“Did I not explain after we left her that day?”

Alex tilts his head. “No?”

Freddy is delighted by our miscommunication. “So, about that co-best-manhood?”

Alex rips his eyes off me to throw Freddy a look. “Yes, fine.”

Freddy hoots, then excuses himself when a new group of customers heads to the bar.

I lean my chin on Alex’s shoulder. He looks pointedly forward, the faintest trace of pink splashing across his neck, and fiddles with his lowball glass.

“Alex,” I say, smiling softly against his shirt fabric. “I’m sorry I forgot to explain.”

He turns his body to face me, a self-deprecating smile fighting to pull his lips up. “To be clear. You do want to get married?” This time, it is a question.

“I do,” I whisper, with a swoop in my belly that feels like bungee jumping off a windy, craggy cliff. Objectively terrifying, even though you know without a doubt you’re safe. “I’d love to be your wife someday.”

A small noise of pleasure, or maybe pain or even possibly both, shakes out of him. Alex pulls his face back so he can search my eyes for the emotion to back up my words. He finds it, then rumbles out lowly, “Thank fuck.”

My entire body heats at the implication that this is an idea Alex has been denying himself and has just discovered he’s allowed to let in.

There are about seventeen thousand other things we should say on this topic, but a shadow passes across Alex’s face. His eyes shift over my head, and his expression goes from intimately ravenous to convivial.

“Will Grant.” His voice lightens with that signature Alex Harrison warmth.

“I thought that was you.”

I sweep my giddiness just off to the side and twist away from Alex to glance at the man standing over us.

He’s tall, with suntanned white skin and a square jaw reminiscent of a superhero action figure. Blue eyes darker than most, like someone dropped a bit of gray in the color palette.

I squint, as if that will help me place him, since I’m almost positive I’ve met Will Grant before. But if I know Alex, he’ll –

“Case, you remember Will from that holiday party on the Upper East Side two Decembers back?”

My eyes light with the memory. Amusement flits over Will’s face as he smiles down at me. “I was the one in the –”

“Grinch costume,” I say, grinning. “You were with your twin sister and her boyfriend.”

“Good memory,” Will muses.

It’s easy to remember, I think, reaching back for Alex’s hand, when you’re with a person so intent on making you feel included.

“Sit down,” Alex offers, gesturing at the spot Freddy just vacated. “How are you?”

Will looks like he was heading out, but he sits anyway. I sip on my cocktail, listen in comfortable silence while the two of them talk about mutual friends, Will’s sister, his job change and his newest client, a company called Revenant –

“Josephine Davis?” I jump in. She’s the CEO and founder of Revenant.

Obvious, that Will Grant is a goner for her the second I say her name aloud. That name is like some kind of mollifying agent to him, a salve for his mind comprised of fourteen letters, two words. His shoulders relax. His eyes go warm. He swallows thickly.

“Yeah. She’s …” He drifts off.

Possibly because he doesn’t know what Josephine is to him.

Or possibly, because he’s trying to deny to himself what she is to him.

“Fuck,” Alex says lowly, watching Will with an amused half smile.

“I am. Fucked.” Will sinks against the seat back, looking equal parts devastated and thrilled.

It’s an ache I’m familiar with, but haven’t personally experienced since I said to Alex, be with me, and he responded by calling me his North Star, his safe harbor. That was a year and a half ago, on a rainy January afternoon outside a hotel near Covent Garden.

“Been there.” Alex pulls one of my legs between his underneath the table.

“Do you know how she feels?” I ask tepidly.

Will catches my eye, that pleasure-pain painted over his skin. His voice comes through stilted. “Josie is … confused. And incredibly busy, all the time. And she’s there. While I’m here.”

“Aren’t you from Texas?” Alex asks. The second part of his question dangles off, unsaid. Would you go back there for her?

Will nods, his smile light. After a stretch of quiet he asks, “How did you two know it was time to leave Manhattan?”

Alex considers this, his face concentrating. He didn’t follow me to London, though that’s the easiest way to phrase it. More accurately, the me he loves was the me who wanted to be there. So naturally, he wanted to be there too.

Alex is presently trying to articulate this in a way that makes sense to Will. But he gives up, dips his chin at me, and every day, we’re quicker at these unspoken conversations.

“It wasn’t that either of us thought it was time to leave Manhattan,” I explain. “We knew we’d always have this place. But we were ready to see who we could be, and who we could be for each other, in a different environment.”

Alex nods, squeezes my knee.

“Different environment,” Will murmurs, his stormy blue eyes tracking up to the ceiling, and I wonder if he’s considering that it’s not just his and Josephine’s physical locations, but their circumstances that need to be altered.

“I should go.” Will scratches behind his neck. “Packing to do.”

“Where you headed?” Alex asks.

“Work trip. South America.” He flashes us a loaded gaze. “With her.”

“That should be not at all fraught.” Alex grins.

Will shakes his head ruefully and stands, dipping his head at us. “Good to see you guys.”

“You too,” Alex says.

“Good luck,” I say.

“I’ll need it.” Will’s dimple pops out briefly through his smile. Then he’s gone.

Alex’s hold on me tightens. “Good guy.”

“You say that about everyone.”

“Well, I only keep the company of good people.” His nose catches on the curve of my ear. “Ready to go?”

The reason Alex didn’t meet me at the airport (which was upsetting to him and inconsequential to me) is because we’re only a few blocks from the wedding venue, where Alex finished rehearsing thirty minutes before I met him here. Now we’re off to the rehearsal dinner at a new Korean restaurant in SoHo, which the Yoon family booked out for the eighty-five-person guest list tonight. I was supposed to arrive stateside yesterday, but given the very London weather London was experiencing before my plane took off, I’m just thankful I’ll get to walk in beside Alex tonight.

In the cab, I fish my toiletries bag out of my tote and double check the haphazard makeup and hairstyle I managed in the LaGuardia airport bathroom. Alex doesn’t ask for my attention until I’ve stowed away my compact mirror.

“You look beautiful.” When I turn, he’s watching me with that expression. The one that’s glazed, but also concentrated.

He last looked at me like this about three weeks ago, when we were lounging on a blanket in Hampstead Heath. I’d been scrawling out some budget numbers on a notepad for a New Zealand trip one of the Take Me There editors was planning to feature. Technically on the clock, but it was a Friday at three, and Alex and I had both “worked from home” that day.

I’d caught him staring at me and given up on my paper sums, instead reclining and facing him. The summer sun was baking both of us golden, but I was hot for an entirely different reason: when Alex gets that look in his eyes, it usually means one thing.

That the sex later will be slow, and loving, and more emotional than can be described in any language besides the one only our bodies know.

“Jagi.”

“You can’t call me that. Or look at me like that,” I warn him, keeping my voice quiet in the hopes the cabbie up front can’t hear my words, and especially not their unsteadiness. “Not when we have to go socialize for the next four hours.”

Alex looks ready to protest, but after a few seconds of internal warring he rips his eyes forward. “We’ll make it three.”

At the restaurant, his family greets us with chaotic enthusiasm, his Aunt Jane on the phone with a delayed photographer, his cousin Angela (sister of the groom) rearranging place cards every time Aunt Jane turns her back.

“It’s like she completely forgot about some of our family branches’ utterly Shakespearean beef?” Angela grumbles as she hugs me.

The bride and groom find us next, and I meet David’s fiancée Michelle for the first time. They’re glowing tonight, surrounded by family, doped up on the promise of tomorrow.

We mingle and eat and listen to speeches, and Alex squeezes my hand before he stands and takes the microphone for the last speech of the night. He’s so himself in moments like this one: praise for his loved ones spoken to a captive audience, a wide grin on his face and Korean words peppering his English.

After the dishes are cleared, we have one more nightcap with Angela and steal away, just the two of us with my luggage in a cab headed for the hotel. Alex lets me shower alone, but when I finally crawl under the duvet, he’s over me in an instant, his mouth warm against my neck, his dark hair between each of my fingers.

How we touch each other tonight is a familiar, lived-in desperation. Like the scent of your favorite homecooked meal or the first line of your favorite song. Something you already know you love but are eager to indulge in all the same.

“This is new,” he groans, nosing along the thin strap of my cream satin nightgown.

“I’ve had it for two whole weeks,” I tease.

Alex props up on an elbow, staring at the garment’s delicate lace neckline in the low half-light. “Wedding fucking fever,” he growls.

I gaze up at him, confused, and utterly turned on. Beneath the covers, his hips sink like a stone through water against my core.

“You’d wear something just like this,” he clarifies, voice strained, as his eyes move up to mine. “The night of our wedding. Wouldn’t you? Won’t you?”

I nod against the pillow. “Probably thigh highs too.”

A choked moan escapes him, and Alex lowers his lips to mine in tender distress.

“You’re going to wear thigh highs,” he repeats, rocking our hips while his tongue traces the helix of my ear. “The first time we make love as husband and wife?”

No time to answer; he kisses me messily, eagerly, but I meet his frantic touches with an unordinary measure of control. A steady hand on his neck to hold him fast. A leg around his hip to gentle his arching.

Has our wedding been the focus of Alex’s imagination all night? I’ve had plenty of days to happily contemplate that future, but if Alex wasn’t allowing himself the same, it might’ve led to temporary fixation.

“My wife.” Alex drags his mouth to my chest.

His marriage kink is very quickly becoming our marriage kink, and I want nothing more than to play this fantasy to its conclusion – but a slightly louder part of my brain is telling me it’s irresponsible to use our wedding night as dirty talk until we have a real conversation about earlier.

As soon as my body stops reacting to his touches, Alex rolls off me intuitively. In the next second he’s sitting up, his back against the headboard. He pulls me onto his lap.

“Let’s talk about it,” he whispers, smiling at me softly.

I can still feel the strain of him beneath his slacks, still see the darkening swell where I bit his lip. His collar is upturned, a few of the highest buttons undone. I close my eyes to refocus.

“Would you never have said anything?” I ask. “Would you have gone on assuming I wasn’t interested in marriage based on one comment I made in front of a family member?”

He considers while his thumbs trace circles on my upper thighs. “I would have said something eventually, even if you never did. But it might have been years before I mentioned it.”

I frown. A few years isn’t the end of the world – far from it in fact – but I hate to imagine Alex sitting with this on his own. Feeling hesitant to bring marriage up, even casually.

“It’s not because you assumed I was planning to … I don’t know, move on?”

He shakes his head, pressing his forehead to mine. “I know you love me the same way I love you, Simba. But we’ve both been through plenty of life changes. I figured this might be an area you didn’t have an interest in changing. We live abroad. Your gran and father don’t get along, and I’m not on speaking terms with my dad – though I wouldn’t put it past him to break no-contact just to encourage a prenup.” He sighs. “There are reasons that made sense to me why you might not want to get married.”

“But none of them have to do with you,” I argue quietly. “With how honored I’d feel to be your wife.”

His exhale is shaky. Alex trails his lips across the tip of my nose, the high of my cheekbone, the hollow of my temple.

“The honor would be mine,” he whispers. “With you, it always has been.”

We likely have only a few more moments before descending back into a lust haze, so I try to make the best use of them.

“We don’t need to be engaged right now,” I say softly. “Or even soon. But nothing could dissuade me from wanting you. From wanting to be tied to you in every fathomable manner.”

He nods in wonder and whispers, “Someday.”

“Someday,” I echo.

Someday – some offhand, otherwise unremarkable day – Alex will ask if I’m ready. And I’ll say yes, because Alex will surely somehow know before he asks.

Someday, we’ll be engaged. I’ll cry through it, and afterward, we’ll plan the perfect wedding to exactly our tastes.

Someday, Alex Harrison will be my husband, and I’ll be his wife.

But tonight, our words devolve into sounds. Groans and gasps and private, whispered words against hot skin. Alex peels the nightgown over my head while I fuss at his buttons, his zipper, and soon my teeth are on his tattoo while Alex plays my body like it’s an eighteenth-century string instrument and he’s an orchestral prodigy.

He’s inside me shortly thereafter, his hands under my neck as he rolls against my shaking body in a perfect rhythm.

And once we’ve broken apart with incoherent pleasure, Alex kisses me slowly and pulls me over his chest. I’m warm and drowsy, thoroughly sated, and content not to move until morning. Alex combs his fingers through my hair, his stillness and sudden quiet a surefire sign of his inner peace of mind.

When I’m nearly asleep, Alex whispers, “I love you.”

“I love you too,” I whisper back, abducting his hand to kiss his knuckles. “And someday, I’ll say those words in a vow.”