“It isn’t a test,” I say. “It’s an experiment.”
She watches my hand as if it might be a blade. “In what?”
“In whether letting someone else choose the size of a bite is control or care to you,” I say. “There isn’t a wrong answer. There’s only a body that remembers something and a brain trying to file it.”
She doesn’t move her hands. She opens her mouth. I put the pear there carefully. Her lips close over the fruit and my fingers brush her lower lip to catch juice. Her breath stutters.
“Next time,” she says, swallowing, “bring napkins.”
“I brought my hands,” I say.
“That’s the problem,” she answers.
“My hands or your reaction to them?” I ask.
She makes a sound that isn’t a laugh and isn’t a word. She picks up the small fork and spears a fig and eats it herself without breaking eye contact.
I slide my chair closer until our thighs touch under the table. The heat where fabric meets fabric tells me more than any sentence would. She doesn’t move away. She presses back just enough to tell me she noticed.
“You’re in my house,” I say quietly. “You’ve set the terms of tomorrow’s call, and you’re getting what you asked for. Tell me why you’re really here.”
“Access,” she says. That’s the professional answer. It’s also true.
“And?”
“Because I wanted to see if the monster was real,” she says, her voice low enough that the hearth could swallow it if it wanted. “Or if he was just a story people tell about men with money and locked rooms.”
“And?” I say again.
Her jaw flexes. “Because the last time you put your mouth on me I didn’t sleep,” she murmurs. “And I needed to know if that was a fluke or a problem.”
“What did you decide?” I ask.
“That it wasn’t a fluke,” she says. “And that calling it a problem doesn’t make it smaller.”
My hand curls lightly around the back of her neck to feel the same pulse I counted with my eyes at the gallery and in the studio and in the clinic when she pretended she wasn’t shaking. The heat there tells me what I need to know about the line between fury and want.
“You don’t get to own my reactions,” she whispers in a dangerous voice.
“I don’t,” I agree. “I get to notice them and decide what to do with the information.”
“And what is that tonight?” she asks, leaning a fraction into my palm.
“That I shouldn’t take you.”
Her throat works once. “Because you’re noble.”
“Because if I cross that line and then I tell youno more secretstomorrow, you’ll stop believing me,” I say. “And because there’s a senator who would love to call what we are doing exploitation, and I won’t give him a photo that writes his headline for him.”
“You care about Caldwell even here,” she says, her jaw back to that set line.
“I care about winning,” I correct. “And I care about not using my work as cover for my body. Tonight is seduction. It is also restraint. Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“Do you hear yourself?” she asks. “You’re turning verbs into tools.”
“I build places with rules,” I answer. “Words matter.”
“Then stop sayingminewhen you look at me,” she says.
