I swallow. The glass is suddenly empty. “No,” I say, testing the shape of refusal in my mouth.
He nods, unoffended, unsurprised.
Then I say it—the other word. The truer one. “Yes.”
He exhales once, like a man who’s been underwater too long and found the surface. “Get your coat,” he says softly. “Don’t rush. Don’t look back. I’ll meet you at the elevators at five.”
His calm steadies me. It always has. We move like co-conspirators who know the plan because we wrote it in the same ink. I step back into the ballroom and the noise wraps around me like a cloak I’m shedding. My hands don’t shake when I take my clutch from the chair, when I slide my arms into my coat. The ribbon under my cuff kisses my pulse.You chose this,it says, not cruel, not smug. Just true.
Dad intercepts me near the entry, because of course he does. “Leaving?”
“I need air,” I say. “It’s hot.”
His eyes search mine. He’s looking for the lie. He doesn’t find one because there isn’t one. I do need air. I need a whole weather system that wants me to live inside it.
“Back soon,” I add.
He nods, slowly. “Text me when you get home.”
Home. The word will have two definitions by morning. I nod anyway. “I will.”
He lets me go. Not because he believes me, necessarily, but because he loves me enough to learn that belief and control aren’t twins.
The elevator lobby is quieter, the music smothered by carpet and distance. The gold doors reflect a version of me whose eyes have decided to stop apologizing. I press the call button with a finger that doesn’t tremble.
Hesteps out of a shadow as if he invented them. No coat yet. Suit jacket open. Tie slightly loosened, like his body told it the truth a few minutes ahead of his mouth. He doesn’t touch me. He doesn’t have to. The elevator dings. We step in together.
The doors slide closed on the party’s borrowed joy. The quiet is immediate and indecent.
We stand side by side, not quite touching, and watch the numbers climb.
“Say stop,” he says, not looking at me.
“I won’t,” I say, looking at him.
The elevator stops at a floor that isn’t ours. The doors open, reveal a couple arguing in the low, embarrassed way people argue in public spaces. They glance at us, at our too-calm faces, and decide to wait for the next one. The doors slide shut. He huffs a breath that sounds a little like laughter.
“Romantic,” I murmur.
“Real,” he says. “I’ll take real.”
“Me too.”
We reach the lobby. He gestures for me to step out first. Old-fashioned. Respectful. The hotel’s front desk staff doesn’t look up. Outside, the night smells like fresh snow and taxi exhaust, like every December I’ve ever survived and the one I’ve been starving to earn.
He leads, but only far enough to open the door. A car idles at the curb—black, nondescript, warm when the driver opens the door from the inside. Triston’s hand rests on the frame above my head without touching my hair or cheek, a halo that’s hands and not hands.
I get in. He follows. The door clunks shut on the version of me that stays put to make other people comfortable.
The driver glances at him in the rearview. “Where to, sir?”
Triston says the name of a hotel I know by reputation—good linens, discretion baked into the wallpaper, strawberries or no strawberries a standard item on room service. I look straight ahead and let my pulse do what it wants.
We don’t talk. We don’t need to. Streetlights strobe the car’s interior—gold on, gold off—like the city is checking in and deciding to leave us alone. His thigh is a careful inch from mine. The inch is everything. It says: I could. It says: I won’t unless you ask.
I press my palm flat against my knee and count my breaths to twelve. At eight, he turns his hand palm-up on his own thigh and leaves it there. An offertory. No pressure. No hunger dressed as patience. Just a place to put my hand if I need a place.
I take it.
