He reaches across the table, slow enough for my body to argue and lose, and takes my right hand where it grips my left sleeve. He doesn’t pry my fingers open. He turns my palm up like you would if you needed to check for a splinter you couldn’t see. His thumb traces the smear of black paint across my knuckle, a line from the cage I drew earlier because I couldn’t not. The heat of his skin surprises me because I didn’t realize how cold my hands were.
“Don’t,” I say, reflex. It doesn’t sound likestop.It sounds likebe careful.I hate the difference and the way I hear it.
“I know,” he says, as if I told him something else. His thumb moves once more across the paint, slower, not pressing.He lifts his hand and I think he’s going to reach for the glass or his knife or the bottle. He doesn’t. He brings his thumb to my mouth and brushes the pad across my lower lip as if smudging away a thought that will get me hurt. It’s nothing. It’s everything. I don’t pull back. I don’t lean in. My mouth does the thing mouths do when memories push into the present: it parts.
“Stop playing games,” I whisper. It’s a plea against a man and my own instincts.
“This isn’t a game,” he says. His voice drops. He leans forward enough that the air between us remembers heat and his mouth stops a breath away from mine. He waits. A single suspended heartbeat long enough for me to tell myselfno.I don’t say it. He kisses me.
It isn’t a press meant to punish. It isn’t a demand. It’s slow and deliberate. It’s a claiming without taking, the kind of kiss that saysI couldbut doesn’t, because control is the point and both of us know it. The heat rises in my chest. A sound escapes my throat that would embarrass me if I had any room left for that emotion. I hate him in that second for knowing how to make it and hate myself for giving it to him. I kiss him back because my mouth knows the truth my rules can’t run from:I want this man more than I want to win this argument tonight.
The room tilts a degree. The fire clicks in the glass. The rain ticks harder on the window for a handful of seconds and then remembers quietly again. His hand still holds mine where he turned it, palm up, as if any more contact would ruin the point he’s making. I rise into it before I know I did. He doesn’t pull me across the table. He doesn’t chase. He meets me where I am and lets me stop.
I stop first. I break the kiss like a person pulling her hand away from a stove she kept on for a reason and then remembered she owns the knob. I stand because sitting keeps me in the room longer than I can bear. My calves hit thechaise and bend. It’s the kind of contact that reminds your body furniture exists to make you stay. I step sideways so I don’t sit.
“This is wrong,” I say. My voice shakes. It isn’t fear. Not exactly. It’s the reaction of an animal that knows it walked calmly into a trap and hates itself for not chewing its leg off to avoid it.
“You’re free to leave,” he says. He says it like the door is already open and there is no guard at the threshold. The room holds the silence I make with my hesitation and hands it to me like a mirror.
There are five arguments I can make. None of them matter as much as the fact that my feet didn’t move for one second longer than I want to admit. I wrench my hand from his and wipe my mouth as if I can take back what already happened. My palm comes away clean. No paint or proof. Just heat.
“We’re not done talking about the Sanctuaries,” I say. If I don’t say something that sounds like work I will scrape skin off to get this feeling out.
“Tomorrow,” he says, inclining his head. He doesn’t push the wine. He doesn’t stand. He doesn’t block. “We’ll visit the pilot wing. You’ll see what you need to see. You’ll ask the questions that matter.”
“You’ll answer some,” I say. “And keep the ones you think might cost you.”
“I’ll answer the ones that won’t cost a woman we haven’t met yet,” he says. “You can hate me for that. You can kiss me for it. You can do neither.” He leans back. A promise that he can hold his position without me in the room.
I walk to the door because if I stay I’m going to do something that makes me hate myself in the morning. The handle is cool. I turn it. The latch gives. The house is still quiet. I don’t look back. I pull the door open and step through.
The corridor breathes with me. The boards don’t complain. I keep my head level and my mouth closed and my hands at my sides, though what I want to do is run and then walk back in and then sit on the floor and then smash a glass and then hold still forever. I climb the stairs because I know where my room is and because this house knows where to find me no matter what I do.
Lila’s door opens before I raise my hand. She looks at my face once and doesn’t ask a question I don’t want to answer for free. “We got noodles,” she says, voice too bright. “They took out all my bones and replaced them with cooked spaghetti and now I’m a pasta person who loves you and wants to know if we’re ordering war food or peace food.”
“War,” I say. It comes out in a voice lower than mine. “But not for an hour.”
She scans me like a medic without touching. “You didn’t cry,” she says. “You’re not shaking. You’re… mad.”
“Yes,” I say. I step into my room and close the door quietly because slamming teaches a house more than you want it to learn. I go to the sink and run water because ritual makes you feel like you know what you’re doing. I splash my face with hands that still remember his skin. I dry it on a towel that doesn’t smell like anything. I make myself look in the mirror because I need to know what I look like when I’ve done a thing I told myself I wouldn’t do and did anyway.
My mouth is a little swollen. My eyes are too open. My shoulders are up where I told them not to be. I roll them down. I press my fingers to my lips. They’re still wet. I don’t know if it’s the water or the kiss. It shouldn’t matter, but it does.
“He’s a cage,” I whisper to the person in the glass. “Why do I want back inside?”
The mirror doesn’t answer. It never does. The house hums. Rain ticks. A gull complains like gossip.
“Tomorrow,” I tell the dark. “We do it my way.”
Chapter 22 – Cassian
The flames behind the glass pane are a lesson in control: bright, contained, and starving the room of nothing you don’t want it to take. I brace both palms on the mantel, head tipped toward the stone, and let the heat lick my face until the sting in my lip settles into a low hum. When I swallow, I can still find the line where she met me and stopped. I let her go. Part of me is proud; the other part is the hand you pull back from a pulse before you’ve counted enough beats to know if the patient will make it.
I take my hands off the stone and straighten. There is a glass on the low table, half full. Not mine. I do not kid myself; her mouth is why it matters. I cross the room, pick up the bottle, pour fresh into a second glass, and finish it in one long swallow that doesn’t qualify as tasting. Heat tracks down my throat into a chest that doesn’t want warmth. I pour again and set the bottle down because I am not a man who seeks courage in a bottle; I am a man who hates that he thinks of courage at all.
Replay is inevitable. Not the memory reel of her crossing the threshold—that I can turn off with a switch. The other kind. The kind that returns as sensation whether you want it or not. The sight of her shoulders tightening under the cardigan, the way she will never choose the softest chair in a room like this, the line of her throat when she refused to sip and refused to flinch. She kissed me back. Not because I demanded it. Because I waited. Because I let her decide when a breath becomes a yes.
She broke it first.
