The compliment is small and perfect, and it warms me up inside.
Eventually, I swing my feet onto the cushion and—because it feels oddly natural now—I rest my heels on his thigh. He looks down at my socks, and then his hand closes around my ankle. It’s an absent-minded sort of gesture, as if he’s always been responsible for keeping me from floating off the furniture.
We stay like that for a long moment. The room remembers how to be warm, sort of. The lanterns settle into their pulse. The house is calm, and she wants me to know it.
I’ve made her happy again.
“We still need to finish our conversation,” he says.
“Which one?”
“The one where I wanted to kiss you in the orchard. And I know you wanted it, too.”
I flush. “Ah. That one.”
“That one.”
“It’s not a good idea,” I say. “There’s something between us. I feel it. I’m not ... delusional. I’m drawn to you. Attracted to you. But this is messy, and it’s complicated.”
I don’t say I’m scared to feel this much. I don’t say I’m worried you might vanish when the sun comes up. I don’t say I’m already halfway ruined by the idea of you, and I haven’t even had you yet.
I don’t say any of it, because naming those things makes them real. And real things can break.
“Such is life, Elsie.”
I try to laugh, but all I manage is a hot breath, shallow in my chest. “It wouldn’t work.”
“You sure?” he asks, and the worst part is—I’m not.
“I’m trying to be. I have to be.” I pinch the hem of the blanket so I won’t reach for him. “We should go to bed before we make a decision we’d regret in the morning.”
His thumb traces a slow, absent arc near my ankle. It’s nothing. It’severything.
“Two clarifications,” he says, voice low. “One: not everything that scares you at night is worse in daylight. Two: you’re not going upstairs.”
I blink. “Excuse me?”
“You’ll freeze to death on the third floor. Temperature’s dropping by the minute. Safer down here.”
“Together?”
He lifts a brow. “I don’t bite.”
“Not even a nibble?” I mutter, immediately horrified.
He smiles. Not big, but enough that one corner of his mouth learns something new. He stands and disappears, returning with an armful of quilts. He shakes one open, lets it fall in a slow collapse, then another.
“You can take the couch,” he says.
I raise a brow. “Such a gentleman.”
“I don’t want to hear about you waking up sore tomorrow.”
“Chivalry posing as practicality,” I murmur. “Noted.”
He tosses me a pillow. I catch it too close to my chest. It smells like lemon balm, and woodsmoke, andhim.
While he builds himself a pallet of quilts by the hearth, Hemingway circles twice and plops between us. The cat thinks it’s neutral ground. I know it’s wishful thinking, like laying a single thread across a fault line and calling it safe.
