Something worth keeping.
“What’s the matter?”Arden asked, one brow lifted in challenge. “Cat got your tongue?”
Gideon’s smile came slow and unguarded, catching her off guard with its quiet realness. A laugh slipped from him, low and easy, as his gaze held hers. “Something like that.”
He leaned in, his hand settling lightly on her lower back, nothing showy, only instinct. Familiar.
He smelled like clean skin and the faint trace of cedar and warmth—whatever it was, it had already worked its way into memory.
“Let me show you my New York,” he said. “Not the version they put in guidebooks.”
She studied him warily, then gave a small nod. “Okay, but this tour better be good.”
He tookher to Central Park first.
The trees filtered sunlight through amber leaves, casting long slants across the gravel path. Somewhere off to the side, a saxophone played—faint and wandering, weaving between their steps.
He reached for her hand. A simple, grounding gesture.
She instinctively slipped her hand into his. Like she’d done it a hundred times before.
They slipped off the main trail, following worn paths softened by ivy and root. A weathered bench leaned behind a thicket of shrubs, half-lost to time. A pale bridge curved over a lazy stream, barely moving.
The city’s edge fell away step by step, until only the trees and the quiet beat of their footsteps remained.
“Is this your usual route?” she asked, nodding toward an artist hunched over a sketchpad beneath the wide shade of an elm.
“Often enough,” Gideon said, his thumb skimming hers, barely a thought behind the motion. “It’s one of the only spots in the city that doesn’t feel like it’s racing you.”
She followed his gaze across the water, where the sunlight shifted like breath on glass. “Yeah,” she said. “It kind of makes sense.”
They kept walking, shoulder to shoulder, letting the quiet fill the space between them.
The rhythm came easy. Like they’d done this before.
It didn’t feel new. It felt like a song she knew by heart, and she never wanted it to stop playing.
Next was the Met.The towering steps, the cool hush of marble halls, the kind of silence that held history.
She didn’t expect him to care about art, let alone have opinions. But then?—
“That one,” he said, nodding toward a canvas of a storm-torn sea. “Turner. He captured motion like no one else.”
She tilted her head at the canvas, stormy and alive, its waves wild and crashing toward something unseen. “You’re really interested in this stuff, huh?”
He glanced sideways, lips curving. “I like things with depth. The idea of control meeting chaos has always fascinated me.”
It landed deeper than she expected. Like he was talking about more than storms.
She looked at him, heart tripping a little at how easily that applied to them.
Next,they ducked into a narrow bookstore tucked between a record shop and a florist. You would miss the place if you weren’t looking, but he’d clearly been looking.
Tall wooden shelves stacked to the ceiling A little wild. A little magical. A shop that didn’t just sell books—it remembered them.
“You trying to seduce me in the poetry aisle?” she teased, eyeing him over the rim of a fiction display.
He just gave her that slow, private smile—the one reserved for her.“Would it work?”
