Chapter Text
Mary suspected the restaurant had been chosen for the welcome dinner for the express purpose of making the guests feel as though they had wandered into someone else's better life. All gilt mirrors and low golden light, it was the kind of place where the wine list was multiple pages long and no one so much as glanced at the prices. She had changed her dress twice before settling on her new emerald green one-shoulder dress that hugged her curves and fell just below her knees. She thought it would give her a boost of confidence but now, seated at the long table beneath a chandelier that dripped light like something rendered, she wished she had selected something more neutral. Less eye-catching.
Ann was beaming three seats down, laughing at something Jeffrey's brother had said, one hand pressed flat to her collarbone. The wedding festivities were just kicking off and she was radiating joy. Best friends since university, they had been together through thick and thin and Mary loved her for it. She loved Ann enough to have flown to Paris early to help with last minute planning, enough to stand up as her maid of honor in front of two hundred strangers on Saturday, even if the dress color of bruised plum may not be her favorite. Yes, she loved Ann enough to be sitting here now, half-listening to a groomsman describe his triathlon times, when she would much rather be alone, curled up with a good book.
Across the table, Tom caught her eye and mouthed “triathlon guy” with an expression of such theatrical suffering that she had to look down at her plate to keep from laughing. It was the great mercy of her life that Tom Hayward had moved into the flat across the hall from hers four years ago, and that some accident of building maintenance had thrown them together in the stairwell often enough to become friends. He had a way of making any room bearable simply by being in it. And she appreciated him handing her the small private joke, like a coin passed under a table.
She was still smiling at him when Caroline Bingley leaned forward.
"Mary." How Caroline managed to turn her name into an expression of doubt, Mary truly did not know. She was seated beside Will, in a magnificent ivory silk dress that Mary suspected had absolutely not been chosen by accident. "How many is this for you now? Weddings, I mean. You must be quite the expert."
"I don't keep count," Mary said as she reached for her water. Only Tom would know that was a lie.
"No, of course not." Caroline's smile never reached her eyes. It rested on her mouth like paint. "Only I said to Will on the flight over — didn't I say — that there's a particular kind of talent in it. Always the bridesmaid. Never—" she paused, delicately, as though searching for the word, though Mary understood perfectly where this was going. "—well. Never mind. I'm sure it's lovely, being needed."
The table had not gone silent. Conversation continued its low current at the far end, the groom’s side of the table clearly oblivious. But close by, a small pocket of quiet opened up surrounding Ann, Will, Tom, and the bridesmaid to Mary's left who had become very interested in her bread plate, for them, a small pocket of quiet had opened up, as Mary assumed they were deciding whether to acknowledge they had heard anything or not.
Mary felt the insult somewhere beneath her sternum, precise as a blade between ribs, exactly where Caroline had aimed. She could feel the emotion in her throat and worked, with effort, to present a smile— a small, unbothered smile, the kind she had spent years perfecting on her mother.
"I'll take that as a compliment," she said, and was proud of how level her voice was.
"Oh, it was one." Caroline's eyes moved over her, once, before she turned back to Will. "Darling, is there more of that Sancerre?"
Will was already half out of his chair, lifting a hand for the waiter. "I'll find some," he said, and Mary watched him go with something that was not quite envy and not quite contempt.
Across the table, Tom hadn't moved but she felt his eyes on her. When she forced herself to look at him, she saw his jaw set the way she knew it did when he was furious. He was normally not as obvious. She gave the smallest shake of her head and he held her gaze for one beat too long before looking away, lifting his wine again as though nothing had passed between them.
Mary reached for her napkin and refolded it in her lap, for something to do with her hands, and counted to sixty. This was the way she used to count through her mother's tempers as a girl. It steadied her. When she finally rose, it would look like nothing more than a woman going to find the ladies' room. Not a woman fleeing a table.
Mary excused herself before the fourth course arrived. The walk to the door felt very long. She was aware of the sound of her heels on the old stone floor, too loud in her own ears, as though the whole restaurant had gone silent purely to listen to her leave it.
Outside, the night air came as a relief so total, it was almost indecent. The clouds signaled a rain that hadn't arrived yet, and she could smell warm bread in the air. She walked a little way from the door, past the reach of the restaurant's light, and stood with one hand braced against the cold stone, breathing deep, furious with herself for needing to.
Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. As though she hadn't known. As though she needed to hear the thing her mother had been saying with her eyes for a decade now. That Mary was one-and-thirty and unclaimed. That whatever else she had made of herself, whatever she had read or known or become, none of it had yet produced a man willing to stand up in a church and attach himself to her publicly. Caroline hadn't told her anything new. She had simply said it in front of witnesses. Her mother at least limited her complaints to family gatherings.
The door opened behind her. She knew it was Tom before she turned.
"Hey." He came to stand beside her, hands in his pockets, looking out at the street rather than at her, which she understood as a kindness. Giving her the option not to have to face him right now. "You left before the fish."
"Tragic loss."
"I’m sure it was mediocre anyway." A pause. Somewhere down the street, a car door slammed, laughter, someone's heels on cobblestone fading into a doorway. "Caroline's a piece of work."
"Caroline's not wrong, is the trouble." Mary picked at her hands. "I am always the bridesmaid."
"Mary."
"No, I mean — truly." She laughed, and it came out wrong, thin. "This is my fifth trip down the aisle as a bridesmaid and I have absolutely no dating prospects. It’s not like I’m dying to be married, I love my life. I will probably never marry. But having Caroline of all people commenting on it, it’s just— ugh. I wish Will would ditch her.”
Tom didn't say anything for a moment. When she finally looked at him, he wasn't doing the thing Ann did, the wounded, sympathetic tilt of the head, oh, Mary. He was just watching her, steady, like he was waiting for her to get to the end of something.
"You know what I remember," he said, "about the day I moved in?"
"The day you moved in? Um… probably that I dropped a box of books on your foot."
"You dropped a box of books on my foot," he agreed, "My box, incidentally, that you'd offered to help carry up and then immediately weaponised it. And then you didn't apologize. You said, and I quote, 'that's what you get for hovering in a doorway blocking my way.’" The corner of his mouth moved. “And I knew I was never getting a moment's peace again."
"I apologized. Eventually."
"Five days later."
"I was building suspense."
He laughed, the one that came from somewhere low in his chest, and Mary felt some of the tension she had been carrying ease. He shifted closer now, his shoulder nearly against hers, and when he spoke again his voice had dropped its teasing register for something quieter.
"Caroline Bingley couldn't see what's actually in front of her if you drew her a diagram." He scuffed his shoe against the pavement. "You know she's been dropping hints about a ring for two months now. Will told Jeffrey at the stag dinner. She apparently brings up her friend's engagement ring at every dinner. She is terrified he's never going to ask, and she is right to be terrified, because I've heard the way he talks about her when she's not in the room, and it isn't like a man talks about someone he's going to marry."
Mary smiled, a little pleased that maybe Caroline wouldn’t be a permanent fixture in their small friend group.
"She is trying to tell you what your life is missing, and she goes home to a man she has to beg just to stay interested. That's not — that's not winning, Mary. Whatever she thinks she's got over you, it isn't that."
Mary said nothing. Down the street, someone's laughter rose and faded into a doorway.
"Some guy is going to figure it out eventually. The thing everyone else has been too blind to see." His eyes flicked to hers and away again. "And when he does, he's not going to need convincing. He's not going to need a friend's ring to realize what he has. He's going to be the one doing the begging."
He paused. "I don't love the idea of him, if I'm honest. Whoever he is." A beat. "But he's going to exist. And he's going to be very lucky."
Mary looked at him and she was struck, not for the first time but harder than usual, by the sheer familiarity of him — the crease between his brows when he was being sincere and hated it.
"You don't have to say things like that."
"I'm not saying it to be nice." His eyes found hers. "I'm saying it because it's true."
He didn't look away this time. The streetlight sat gold along one side of his face, and neither of them moved to fill the silence that followed, both of them simply looking at the other. With an unwelcome clarity, Mary was aware that she did not want to be begged for by some hypothetical man in some hypothetical future. She wanted for it to be him. For it to already have been him, for longer than tonight.
She could smell him, the same soap he'd used for years. It should have been the most ordinary thing in the world, this closeness, they had stood closer than this a hundred times, at parties, in the kitchen of his flat, waiting for the single elevator that served their building. But her heart was beating fast in a way that had nothing to do with Caroline Bingley.
"Tom."
"Yeah."
"What are we doing?"
"I don't know."
He lifted a hand and brushed a piece of hair from her face. "Mary?"
"Don't," she whispered but she didn't finish the sentence, because she didn't actually know what she'd meant to forbid. Don't be kind to me because you feel sorry for me, maybe, or Don't stop.
In the gap where the rest of the sentence should have been, he kissed her.
For something that rearranged the entire architecture of her life, it began so quietly. His hand at her jaw, barely there. The faint scratch of his stubble. The taste of the wine he'd had at dinner, and beneath that, something that was just him, achingly familiar and new all at once.
Their lips moved cautiously against each other, their breaths mingling. She sighed into his mouth which seemed to make him pause and start to pull back, his fingertips leaving her face. Her hands tangled in his curls, pulling him back to her. She heard a low growl from him as he kissed her again.
His hand slid down to the small of her back, wrapping around her and pulling her closer while she opened her mouth to his tongue. Her hands drifted down around his neck, one coming to rest against his chest, where she could feel his heart beating too fast, evidence that this was affecting him as much as it was affecting her.
"We should—" she managed, when he drew back far enough to breathe, forehead against hers, "—go back to the dinner. They’ll wonder where we are."
"We should," he agreed, not moving, his thumb tracing along her jaw.
"I don’t want to."
"Our hotel isn’t far from here," he suggested, and there was a slight blush on his cheeks that countered the bluntness of his words. "It’s only a few blocks."
She thought of every sensible reason this was a catastrophic idea and ignored them because Tom Hayward was looking at her like she was the only fixed point in the city. And she had wanted this — had wanted him for so long.
She took his hand. It felt, absurdly, like the bravest thing she'd done in years.
^^^
Tom’s hotel room was a sleek, modern room with white linen pulled taut over a wide bed, a floor-to-ceiling window looking out onto a slice of rooftops but Mary was aware of very little beyond the door closing behind them, the soft click of the electronic lock echoing loudly in the quiet space.
Tom turned to her, and for the first time in four years of Tuesday takeout and shared laundry cycles, Mary saw him without his usual certainty. The ease was gone. In its place was something unguarded, something almost unbearably vulnerable.
"We don't have to," he deferred. "If you want to go back. Nobody would—"
"Tom."
"Yeah."
"Stop talking.”
She closed the distance between them herself this time, her hands slipping over his shoulders, pushing his coat off and down his arms.
Whatever restraint he had been holding onto since the street did not survive long. His mouth came down on hers hard enough to back her into the door, one hand fisting in the silk fabric at her waist, the other coming up behind her head so she wouldn't hit the wood. He kissed her like a man who had been refused water. There was nothing tentative in it, this was open-mouthed and graceless.
She grabbed his tie and he followed, stepping even closer to her, pressing her flat to the door with the whole length of his body, his thigh slipping between her parted legs. The hem of her dress had ridden high enough that there was nothing much between them at all. She could feel the heat coming off him through their layers of clothing.
"God," he said against her mouth, barely a word. "Mary—"
"I know."
"This dress is sinful—" He kissed her again hard, then dragged his mouth to her jaw, her throat, teeth grazing the tendon there in a way that made her knees genuinely unreliable. "You walked into that restaurant in that dress and I forgot how to talk. Triathlon guy asked me a direct question and I just—" his hand slid down, spanned her hip, gripping the cloth "stood there unable to think about anything other than how to get you out of this dress."
His mouth found the bare skin of her shoulder. "I've never worked so hard in my life."
Mary rolled her hips down against the hard line of his thigh once, experimentally, and a bright shock of sensation shot up through her that made her gasp. "Oh—"
She wasn't sure if it was the movement or the words that had pulled it from her. Perhaps both.
Tom's hands at her hips closed harder around her as he lifted her up more, deliberately shifting her higher on his leg, giving her better leverage. The friction was rough through the thin damp cotton of her underwear, not nearly enough and far too much at once.
She found a rhythm without meaning to, riding his thigh in small tight circles while he held her hips and swore steadily into her hair. The muscle of his leg flexed under her every time she bore down. She could feel the seam of his pants at the exact spot where the pressure inside her was building. It was mortifying but she could not have stopped for any amount of money.
"That's it," he said, low, rough, his mouth at her ear. "God. Look at you."
"Tom—" She had her forehead against his shoulder, eyes shut, color flooding her face.
Heat gathered fast, faster than she was ready for. Using his shoulders as leverage, her hips moved on their own accord. It had been a very long time since anyone had touched her at all, and never with someone holding her steady and encouraging her to take it. She was going to come like this, fully dressed, against a hotel door, with Tom’s hands on her hips, her own panting like a soundtrack to a film playing inside her head.
That thought was what brought her out of the haze. Self-conscious thoughts zoomed rapid fire around her mind. This is too much. You look ridiculous. He'll see. She stilled, breathing hard, and Tom felt the change immediately.
"Hey." He tipped her face up. "Hey. Where'd you go?"
"I'm—" She couldn't look at him. "That was fast. That was embarrassingly—"
"Mary." He kissed her gently, brushing his lips across hers until her breathing settled. "That was the single hottest thing that has ever happened to me. Please believe that."
She made a sound that was not agreement and not denial, and he kissed her again before she could turn it into an argument. She felt the last of the panic dissolve under the kiss the way a knot dissolves when you stop pulling at either end.
"Can I ask you something," he said, against her mouth.
"Yes."
"Do you want this?" He got a hand under her thigh and lifted, hitching her leg up over his hip, which did not strike her as the action of a man waiting for an answer. "Do you want me?”
"Tom—"
He was walking her backward now, away from the door, one hand splayed at the small of her back to keep her from falling over. "I need you to actually say the word or I'm going to keep asking you all night."
The backs of her legs brushed the edge of the bed as he placed her down beside it, both hands now framing her face. His hair was a disaster where her hands had been in it. There was a mark coming up at the base of his throat that she had absolutely no memory of putting there.
"Yes." She said it clearly, ensuring she retained eye contact.
He exhaled like a man setting down something heavy, and dropped his forehead to hers for a moment, eyes closed. "Right," he said. "Okay. Good."
He turned her gently by the hips. His hands found the zip at her back with care and drew it down slowly. She felt each individual tooth give, felt the cool air of the room slide along her spine, felt his mouth move to her neck, then the point of her shoulder where the one strap sat, then the bare skin the strap had been covering.
The dress fell away, landing in a small green heap around her feet as she turned back around. Tom stepped back half a pace to look at her, and every instinct she had went immediately to covering herself.
He caught her hands in his, exhaling as his gaze moved over her. She made herself stand still under his gaze, bare but for her underwear. The city glowed faintly beyond the window behind him casting him in a silhouette, impacting her ability to see what he might be thinking.
"Say something," she managed, "or I'm going to combust—"
"I'm trying to think of something that isn't just your name."
She laughed while reaching for his tie, because she needed something to do with her hands and because it was the nearest thing. The knot had already been dragged loose at some point and it came away easily. She dropped it on the floor without looking where it landed and started on his buttons. She could feel a slight shake in her fingers that had everything to do with how closely he was watching her. When she got the last button free, she pushed the shirt off his shoulders and flattened both palms against his chest.
God, he was gorgeous. His shoulders had definition she had not accounted for, and the solid strength beneath them was not the sort built for admiration. It was the evidence of years of early morning habits. She could feel how hard he was breathing. He is nervous too.
"You're shaking," she said.
"Yes."
"Why?"
Instead of answering, he took her face in both hands and kissed her, and walked her back to the bed, unhooking her bra as he lowered her against the pillows and began, methodically, to take her apart.
Her head tilting back without her permission as he traced her throat with his tongue.
The place beneath her jaw his mouth found that made her breath stutter.
The arch of her own spine when he closed his mouth over her nipple, outside her control.
The sound she made when his fingers ghosted over her underwear — a sound she did not want to admit as hers.
He kissed his way down her body, over the soft underside of her breast, beyond the crease at her hip until his mouth was on the inside of her knee, her thigh, moving upwards as he drew her underwear down and off. When he finally settled between her legs and put his tongue to her she knew she would never be the same.
"Tom —”
He kept his hands hooked around her hips, holding her down, even as she twisted under him. He was steady, patient, almost unbearable. She felt overwhelmed, dizzy, and such intense pleasure that she grasped at her knees, the bed sheet, trying to twist away for a moment of relief.
“That feels— Oh my God—"
He hummed against her as he pushed a finger inside, letting her adjust to the feeling before he slid a second finger into her, curling them for maximum effect. His tongue was meticulous and merciless. Mary was inundated with emotion and feelings, sensations that were more powerful than she had felt before. As her pleasure escalated, she finally came with her heels digging into the mattress and his name muffled by her hand over her mouth.
Tom didn't stop his actions until she weakly pushed his head away, laughing as her body resisted any additional touching, trying to recover from its previous stimulation. She glanced down and the look on his face was almost as overwhelming as the orgasm itself had been. He playfully dropped kisses along her body and she could taste herself on his mouth when he reached hers.
"Well. I've never done that with you before," he joked as he grinned down at her.
"Shut up." She giggled, resisting the urge to hide her face from him. "That was— really good."
"Yeah?"
"You know it was."
Mary briefly reconsidered how honest she had been, because an insufferable smugness was now settling across Tom's face. He opened his mouth to say something else about it.
"Take these off," she said instead, and got her hands between them, to his belt.
He shut up immediately. She had the buckle open before he'd finished processing the instruction. He had to move to get out of them, but then he was back over her, and there was nothing between them but skin.
She reached down and closed her fingers around his cock.
She had the great satisfaction of watching every trace of smugness leave his face at once. He dropped his forehead to her shoulder and swore, quietly, into her skin as she stroked him.
Mary attempted to do what he had, paying close attention to learning how he reacted, what made him shake.
The twist of her wrist at the top.
The roll of her thumb over the head.
The exact, right pressure on his shaft.
She studied him until his hand came down over hers to stop her. "If you keep doing that this is going to be extremely embarrassing for me."
"Would it?" She was enjoying the payback enormously. "I thought you’d have better stamina than that."
"Mary." Half a laugh, half a plea. "I really can’t stress enough that you have to stop."
She withdrew her hand and he reached for his wallet. There was a small unglamorous interval of foil and fumbling that made them both laugh, and then he was over her again, braced on one forearm, the other hand guiding himself to her. Everything else went quiet.
He pushed in slowly but she still felt every inch of the stretch, the slow give of her own body. He stopped briefly, holding back, shaking from the effort, until she shifted her hips up in wordless demand and he sank the rest of the way home with a low moan.
Four years of hallways and takeout and elevator conversations collapsed into this: his weight over her, his cock buried inside her, his hand shaking where it cupped the side of her face.
"Look at me," he requested.
She wanted so badly to close her eyes, to turn her face into his shoulder, to take the pleasure without being seen taking it but she made herself watch his face as he began to move.
He set a slow pace with steady movements. His hips alternated angles until she gasped. He repeated that movement, that angle, over and over and she watched his composure start to fray at the edges; the clench of his jaw, the way her name kept escaping him like a prayer. She moved her ankles to lock at the small of his back, pulling him in deeper, causing him to lose his rhythm for a few strokes before he found it again.
"I can't—" His voice was ragged. "Mary, I'm not going to last, you feel—"
"Don't stop."
His hand moved between them, his thumb finding her, circling in time with his hips. Her second climax built with astonishing speed, rising up out of her core so intensely she clutched at his shoulders, at his back. Her mouth opened against his throat in a silent plea.
"That's it," he said, unsteady against her ear. "I've got you. That's it—"
She came around him, her lips pressed hard into his shoulder, and felt him follow almost at once, his hips stuttering as he said her name once more into her skin.
^^^
Afterward they lay tangled in sheets. Her head on his chest, his fingers moving slow and absent through her hair. They did not speak, the only sound in the room came from the low hum of the air conditioning, the rise and fall of his breathing. The small, treacherous thought appeared before Mary could stop it; one night with Tom was not going to be enough.
It did not occur to her to wonder what they had just done to four years of careful friendship.
That would come later.