Chapter 375: Diana’s Invite 2

*Ding*

*Ding*

*Ding*

Elsa pressed the bell with the familiarity of someone who had been pressing this specific bell their whole life and had developed opinions about how many times it required. She still had Sergeant Ted under her arm. Liam stood one step behind her with the bottle of wine in its paper bag, looking at the door.

Movement inside. Then the door opened.

Diana was wearing a fitted cream blouse tucked into dark trousers that sat high at her waist, her silver white hair done in a way that was different from how he had seen it at the hotel but equally considered, and she was smiling before the door was fully open, the specific smile of someone who had been looking forward to this and was not trying to hide that.

She looked the way she always looked, which was like Elsa’s older sister who had made very good decisions, the features the same but settled into something with more warmth and more presence, her figure carrying more of everything that Elsa’s carried with an additional decade of it behind her.

Her boobs pressed against the front of the cream blouse with the specific presence of something the blouse was working hard to be professional about and mostly succeeding.

’I so missed her,’ Liam thought, and the thought arrived complete and specific before he could do anything about it.

"Welcome, you two," Diana said, her eyes going from Elsa to Liam and then back to Elsa and then to Liam again and staying there slightly longer than the second look. Her smile changed quality by a small degree that Elsa would not have noticed and that Liam noticed immediately. "Liam. Welcome."

She was blushing slightly. Not obviously. Just the specific warmth of someone who could not entirely stop their face from doing what it was doing.

"Mom," Elsa said. "Stop trying to be friendly with him. You’re disturbing our date."

Diana looked at her daughter with the expression of someone receiving a correction they found entirely reasonable and were going to ignore. "Oh I’m sorry, dear." She looked at Liam with the rearranged smile. "I hope you two didn’t do anything too crazy before coming. From your date."

Liam opened his mouth.

Scratched the side of his head.

"Yes Mom, we did," Elsa said. "We’re dating. It’s a normal thing."

Diana looked at her daughter for a moment.

"You’re absolutely right, my love," she said. "Come in. Your father is expecting you both."

She stepped back and held the door open.

They came through into the entrance hall and the smell of the house arrived around them immediately.

Something had been cooking for a while, the deep warm smell of something slow and herbed reaching from the kitchen through the whole downstairs, sitting in the air alongside the softer scent of the candles Diana had lit on the console table against the left wall. Dark wood floors, warm lamp light, a staircase rising at the end of the hall.

Diana closed the door.

Elsa turned to Liam. "Dad’s upstairs. I’m going to go say hi. You wait in the dining room." She pressed a kiss to his cheek, her hand touching his arm briefly. "Give Mom the wine. I’ll be back in a few minutes."

She was already heading for the stairs, Sergeant Ted still under her arm, her footsteps moving up and then the sound of a door above.

Silence in the entrance hall.

Liam turned.

Diana was right there.

She took the wine from him with one hand and set it on the console table without looking at it, and her other hand moved behind him and found him through his trousers before he had fully processed that she had moved at all.

Her fingers wrapped around him with the specific familiarity of someone returning to something they had been thinking about for a significant amount of time.

"I missed you," she said into his ear.

Just those three words in her voice at that proximity produced something immediate in him that his body had apparently been saving since the last time they were in the same room.

He felt himself respond fully, and she felt it too because her hand was right there and she made a small satisfied sound.

"So you did miss me," she said, her hand moving slowly through the fabric, pressing and releasing with the patience of someone who was not in any hurry. "I wasn’t sure."

"Diana," he said.

"Mm," she said, not as a response.

"What if someone comes down," he said.

"That is genuinely the last thing on my mind right now," she said, her hand still moving, her voice warm and entirely unbothered.

’Ohh shit, i forgot she has all three hearts,’ he thought, her hand continuing its work, his body fully committed to the situation without his input. ’And she is standing in her entrance hall doing this while her husband and daughter are upstairs.’ He exhaled slowly through his nose. ’This is going to be a problem.’

She pressed slightly firmer.

He looked at the ceiling briefly.

She knew exactly what she was doing and was doing all of it with the composed confidence of someone who had decided the risk was acceptable and had filed that decision and moved on.

Voices from upstairs.

Elsa’s and her father’s, carrying down through the wood of the house.

Diana stepped back from him with the practiced speed of someone who had timed this transition in her head. She picked the wine off the console table and walked toward the kitchen as if she had been heading there the whole time.

Liam walked to the dining room and sat down at the table.

He breathed.

He thought about sport. About specific sports statistics. About nothing in particular.

He was still thinking about nothing in particular when her father came through the archway from the hall.

A tall man, grey at the temples, wearing a collared shirt open at the neck and dark trousers, the build of someone who had kept himself consistent over many years.

His face carried the easy warmth of a man who had always found Liam uncomplicated to like.

"Liam." He came forward and took his hand with both of his. "It has been too long. Genuinely."

"It has," Liam said. "I didn’t even realize you’d been away until recently."

"No reason you would," he said, settling into the chair across from Liam with the ease of someone at his own table at the end of his day. "We kept it quiet. Just the two of us." He looked at Liam with the engaged expression of someone shifting gears. "But enough of that. How are you. Elsa tells me the business is doing well."

"Growing," Liam said. "New contracts. Good movement."

"That is exactly what you want," he said. "Movement at your stage. Everything else follows movement."

Diana appeared from the kitchen carrying the main dish, setting it at the center of the table. The smell of it arrived fully now, slow-cooked meat in something deep and herbed, the kind of dish that had been on since the afternoon and had been building since then.

She went back and returned with bread and a smaller dish of something roasted and a bottle of wine different from the one they had brought, and she filled glasses and sat at the corner of the table to Liam’s right.

Elsa came in and sat across from Diana, her coat off, Sergeant Ted on the empty chair beside her.

"So how was it? Your time together?, Liam asked

"Oh, that.."

"Sorry for cutting you off Dad." she said. "Please, tell Liam about the market. He needs to hear that one."

Her father’s face did the thing faces did when someone had asked them to tell the exact story they most wanted to tell.

"The market," he said. "Now that was something entirely different."

Liam took a bite of the food while her father gathered his beginning.

He looked at Diana.

She was watching him taste it with the composed expression of someone who knew exactly what they had made and was waiting for the information to land.

It landed.

"This is incredible," he said.

Something warmed in her expression. "Thank you, Liam."

"Mom is the best cook," Elsa said, already serving herself.

Her father launched into the market story with the energy of someone who had been waiting to tell it since they got back, his hands moving with the description, the fabric stalls and the colors and the specific chaos of a place that operated on its own internal logic that took two days to understand.

Liam listened.

Then something touched his leg.

Low. Under the table. The specific deliberate pressure of a foot finding the inside of his calf and staying there, not moving, just present, making its presence known.

He kept his eyes on her father.

Her father was describing the sound of the place now, the overlap of languages, the specific way the vendors called out.

The foot moved.

Slowly. Working upward along his inner thigh with the patience of something that had nowhere to be and all evening to get there.

"Are you alright?" her father said, pausing mid-sentence.

"Yes," Liam said. "Sorry. Please keep going."

He looked down briefly under the pretext of reaching for his bread.

Diana’s leg was extended under the table, her foot now at mid-thigh, her expression above the table carrying the same attentive interest in her husband’s story that it had been carrying since she sat down. Her leg was smooth and specific and visible from the knee down from his angle.

He looked at his plate.

Her father resumed the story.

"—and so I said to my wife, there is no way that man has not done this before because the ease with which he—"

The foot pressed inward.

Liam picked up his wine glass and held it in both hands.

Elsa was laughing at something her father had said. "Tell him the part about the guide," she said. "Tell him what the guide said when you got lost."

"Oh," her father said. "Yes. Well. We hired a local guide for the third day because by then we had accepted that we were not going to figure out the interior of that market on our own—"

Diana used her other leg.

Both feet now. Working together. One on each inner thigh, pressing inward from opposite sides with the steady coordinated patience of someone conducting an operation they had planned in advance.

’This is bad,’ Liam thought. ’This is genuinely bad. Her husband is sitting directly across from me telling me a story about a market and his wife has both legs under this table and I cannot move or react or do anything about any of this because Elsa is also sitting right there.’

Her father was building toward the conclusion of the guide story, his voice rising with it.

Elsa was leaning forward on her elbows laughing.

Diana’s feet pressed together.

Liam felt everything in him reach the specific point at which continuing to sit at this table was going to produce a result that could not be explained away as anything other than what it was.

He stood up.

"Sorry," he said, and the word came out slightly more compressed than he intended. "Could someone point me to the bathroom."