He sets his fork down and takes my wrist with two fingers, the same place his mouth blessed last night. He doesn’t squeeze. He names my pulse with a quiet thumb. “Because you werebalancing on other people’s edges for so long that standing on your own feels like falling.”
I blink against the sting in my eyes. “You always do that.”
“What?”
“Point at a truth and make it sound like permission.”
He shrugs, the small, self-mocking one that says he didn’t earn the compliment and will keep it anyway. “Play your part at the gala,” he says. “Be your father’s right hand and the team’s smiling assassin with a seating chart. If you want me near, I’ll be near. If you don’t, I won’t make a show of wanting what can’t be hidden without damage.”
I turn the coffee mug between my hands. “Near.”
He nods as if we just agreed on something as simple as napkin color. “Then we’ll be near.”
We eat. We don’t rush. We’ve learned the trick of ordinary in a room built for extraordinary: chew, sip, breathe, repeat. After, he clears the tray like a man who has waited tables, and I step into the bathroom to wash my face and meet the woman who did last night. The mirror doesn’t lie. My mouth is swollen in a way only I would notice. My eyes look… not haunted, not this morning. Hungry. Fed. Ready to be hungry again.
When I emerge, towel slung around my neck, he’s buttoning his shirt, tie hanging loose like a promise he hasn’t decided how to keep. The sight of the knot undone makes my chest ache for reasons that have nothing to do with lust and everything to do with care: the way he let me loosen it with shaking fingers and didn’t make it a game, the way he watched my face more than my hands.
“I should go home,” I say.
He nods. “I’ll call a car.”
“I can drive.” I wincethe instant I say it, because my car is at the party hotel’s garage, and going back right now is a running-with-scissors choice.
“I’ll call a car,” he repeats gently.
I cross to him and take the tie like it belongs to both of us. “Let me.” I knot it slowly, carefully, a domestic intimacy that feels as dangerous as anything we did in the dark. He watches my mouth while I work. When I smooth the tie down, I keep my palm on his chest for a beat, feeling his heart knock against the bone I want to live under.
“Tell me to wait tonight,” he says, so soft I almost miss it.
“Wait,” I say.
“Done.”
He walks me to the door like a man walking his own heart to a cliff and asking it to jump without theatrics. In the hallway he doesn’t touch me. In the elevator, he does—one quick press of his fingers to mine, hidden between us like a gift I’ll find later in a coat pocket. The lobby is indifferent to us. Outside, the car idles. He opens the door. I slide in.
“Text me when you’re home,” he says, and somehow it doesn’t sound like monitoring. It sounds like the sentence you say when the person you want to keep has a life you don’t intend to steal.
“I will.”
He leans in, not to kiss me, just to look at me one inch closer. “You’re not breakable,” he says again, as if I didn’t believe him the first time. “You’re bright.”
“Go skate,” I whisper. “Make them chase you.”
He smiles, the rare one that shows teeth and makes me feel like I just punched through clean ice. “I alwaysdo.”
The car pulls away, and I let myself watch him in the rearview until he’s gone. Then I lean back, close my eyes, and rehearse the story I’ll tell if my father is waiting in my kitchen with coffee and disappointment.
The city is hateful and beautiful in the morning light. People walk dogs in coats more expensive than my rent. A woman runs with leggings like war paint and a face that says she enjoys being cold. The car drops me at the end of my block at my request. I like the last walk alone, the small reset that lets me shed the hotel and don the house.
Inside, the quiet is too loud to be empty. He’s here. Not physically—his boots aren’t by the door, his coat isn’t on a chair—but Wayne is in the way the fridge hums like a throat clearing, in the way the coffee maker steams like a warning flare.
He sits at the table, mug in hand, posture perfect because posture is what men like him control when they can’t control the people they love.
“You’re up early,” I say, keeping my voice level.
“So are you,” he says without emphasis.
I set my keys in the ceramic bowl like I always do. The clink is indecent. I pour coffee. It sloshes. My hand shakes less than expected. I sit across from him, the table between us a neutral zone I have no illusions about keeping neutral.
