“This isn’t a contract,” she says. Her breath is ragged and her mouth has a new line at the corner that wasn’t there when she walked in. “It’s a leash.”
“A lifeline,” I hear myself say. It comes out rough, like I dragged it through teeth.
“Same thing if you’re holding it,” she retorts.
“Then take the other end,” I urge.
We stand there while the rain finds new lines on glass. I can hear her heartbeat because the room is that quiet and because my brain has always been tuned to that frequency. I make myself move before I decide she doesn’t get to, before I decide proximity means authority. I step back to the table and put my hands on either side of the contract like a man bracketing a patient’s chart. Scar tissue on my knuckles pulls when I spread my fingers. She notices. She files it away without deciding what to do with it.
“Sit,” I say, more request than order. “Let’s go through it clause by clause.”
“I read it,” she says. She doesn’t sit.
She slides the contract off the table and into her bag. She takes her time, deliberate, not theatrical. The movement lets my brain catalog small things I ignored when she came in: a nick on her index knuckle. The way her left shoulder lifts a little when she reaches. The faint red along her lower lash line from too little sleep and too much light last night. The absence of perfume in favor of skin.
“You’re not going to pour the wine,” she says, her tone unreadable.
“No,” I say. “You didn’t come for it.”
“I didn’t,” she says. “I came for answers.”
“And?” I urge.
She looks at the window instead of me for the first time, the rain making lines of the streaks of water that run down the glass. “I got some,” she says. “And I got a reminder.”
“What reminder?” I ask.
“That there’s no such thing as a neutral room,” she says. “Even when it smells like cedar and someone makes a fire.”
“It’s my house,” I say. “I won’t pretend it isn’t.”
She nods as if that was an answer she needed to hear spoken aloud. She reaches for her coat. I move first and lift it offthe stand. I don’t step closer than needed to hold it open. She slides her arms in without turning her back to me fully. When she’s in, I release the collar and let the weight fall. One water bead slips off the hem onto the floor. It makes a small dark circle on the wood.
“I’ll think about it,” she says, her hand on the strap of her bag, and her body angled toward the door but not away from me.
“Good,” I say. “Bring your lawyer to the office tomorrow at ten. Mara will be there. Legal will pretend they are humans for an hour and then accept what we tell them to change. We’ll sign what we can. We’ll burn what we need to.”
She huffs something like a laugh. “You like burning,” she says.
“I like outcomes,” I respond.
We hold each other’s eyes in an old room filled with new rules. She lifts her chin a few degrees. It makes me want to put my hand back on her jaw and test the line we drew when I shouldn’t have but did. I don’t. I step to the side so the path to the door is clean.
She walks without hurrying. She doesn’t look back. She doesn’t slam the door because she isn’t a child and because slamming would give away more than she intends. The latch closes with the same soft click it made when she came in. The room exhales.
I don’t move for a full ten seconds. The fire keeps its small discipline. The rain keeps writing lines on glass like someone who thinks repetition writes outcomes. The taste of her is a precise thing I can’t pretend I imagined—salt, mint, and the absence of wine I didn’t pour.
I flex the hand that held her wrist and look at the way my skin marked where hers touched. The urge to go after her hits like adrenaline after a sprint: late, strong, not useful. I let it pass because breaking a rule after keeping one costs more.
I put both hands on the table and lower my head for one second like a man who just finished a procedure and knows the patient will live because he didn’t cut the wrong vein.
The fire ticks. The rain keeps at the glass. I lift two fingers to my mouth because the nerve endings there are still alive to a degree I don’t like admitting, even to myself, and press them once to the line that remembers her. It’s not reverence. It’s calibration.
“Next time,” I murmur to a room that exists, so I don’t have to lie to anybody else, “no table between us.”
Chapter 15 – Aurora
The lock sticks the way it always does after a hard rain. I jiggle, lean my shoulder in, and the studio door gives with a small complaint. Midnight air pushes past me like a tired animal. I step inside and close off from the hallway. The bolt slides. The chain lifts. I do the ritual without thinking, the way other people brush their teeth.
