When We're Thirty by Casey Dembowski (beautiful books to read .TXT) 📕

time since Will had shown up at her doorstep, Hannah could see how this might work. Will didn’t need a pretend wife or a fiancée. He needed it to be real and binding and searchable in the public domain. She’d spent much of last night worried that Will would have the same reaction as Brian to her insurance request. But since he was the one who had sought her out, Will needed her possibly more than she needed him. “So, it has to be legal?”

“Yes, it has to be legal.”

She laced her fingers with his, seeing how each finger fit into her own. She’d held hands with Will before; they’d had that type of friendship. There had also been that weekend he’d pretended to be her boyfriend when a particularly persistent law student wouldn’t leave her alone. Will’s hands were dry, and she felt a callus on his pinky. She wondered if he dragged his hand when he wrote. If he even wrote longhand enough for that to be possible. The texture of his hands held a story, and the longer their fingers stayed intertwined, the more she wanted to know it.

A shiver ran through her as she brought her gaze up. His eyes studied her face, not their hands as she had expected. Unbridled longing and desire and hope stared back at her. Then with a blink, each of the emotions dimmed, settling into curiosity. Before she could overthink it, she kissed him. Their lips moved against each other, clumsy and uncertain, but she couldn’t deny the spark. It had been there eight years ago, and it was still there now. She didn’t know what that meant for them, except that kissing Will unsettled her in ways both good and bad.

It’s not going to be forever, she reminded herself. One career saved and one knee surgery later, they’d move on with their lives, both better off.

“What was that?” he asked after they pulled away.

She ignored the breathiness of his voice and shrugged. “I wanted to know what I was signing up for.”

Chapter 7Will

Leave it to Hannah to make their second first kiss sloppy and confused and flavored of everything bagel. The kiss hadn’t been unpleasant—he didn’t think there was any way that kissing Hannah could be unpleasant—but it hadn’t been earth-shattering. It didn’t live up to the memory of that graduation-night kiss; it was not a kiss you told your children about. He shook his head, chiding himself for the thought. This wasn’t about that. And it might never grow into that. No matter what he had once felt for Hannah, he needed to keep his head on straight. But the little details of Hannah burned in his memory—her inquisitive golden-brown eyes when she caught him watching her, the freckle on the crest of her right cheekbone, and even the pen marks littering her right hand.

Hannah stood and held her hand out as if the kiss hadn’t happened. “Come on, I want to show you something.”

She chattered incessantly from the moment they got on the downtown subway until they skirted Washington Square Park. Even with the students and the tourists, the park smelled of freedom and creativity. Or maybe that was just the scent of weed wafting off half the hipsters they passed. He didn’t miss the hipsters. As Hannah led them down a side street, he could already imagine her office building—quaint, classic, full of stories waiting to be uncovered. Why Hannah wanted to show him where she worked, he wasn’t exactly sure. The magazine she worked for was small—he was ashamed to say he’d never picked it up, though he’d seen it a few times. It was unlikely they were the Google of magazine offices, but she’d insisted, and he was kind of excited to see how she lived.

She unlocked the office doors with a key—not a swipe or fob, but a physical key. Musty, stale air, heavy with the scent of hardwood and old city brownstone, greeted them. The scent took him back to long ago production nights in the Brown House with Hannah and a mismatched group of wannabe journalists. He wondered if Hannah had felt the same way when she first walked in, if she felt it still, and if it somehow grounded her to this publication.

She sat down at one of the smaller desks with a picture of a coworker and her girlfriend in one corner. “When I started, this was my desk.” She rubbed her thumb over a worn spot that on closer inspection showed her initials carved into the wood. “I’d finished my masters, and Deafening Silence was just opening in New York. It looked so much like the Brown House here, and Riley was young and broken and determined. It became like home. Five years later, I feel more like myself between these walls than I do in my apartment.”

He waited for her to continue, to add to the end of the statement, to give it meaning. Loving your job was a privilege not afforded to many, but to love it more than your home life felt an uncomfortable balance. Even with everything that had happened these last few months and the even more tenuous ties to his family, home was still better than work.

“There’s... I-I need health insurance,” she said after a few false starts. “My job doesn’t have benefits. I can’t afford the marketplace plans, and I have a chronic knee injury.” She grimaced at his expression. “I was in a car accident and injured my knee over a year ago, but without insurance... it’s been too long of me trying to fix the problem myself. Honestly, at this point, I probably need surgery.”

“So, it has to be legal,” he said, parroting her words back to her.

She nodded. “It has to be legal and include access to your health insurance, which I’m assuming you have.”

“Yes, I have health insurance,” he said slowly. Health insurance had been on his list of reasons Hannah might agree to