"I work at a hotel."
"Hence the suggestion to change."
I stared at him. He stared back, chin lifted slightly, that particular look in his eyes that I was starting to recognize. Stubborn about the oddest things—lighting, napkin folds, the proper way to wash dishes. But somehow I didn't mind. Somewhere along the way, I had started finding his small fixations endearing rather than annoying.
I went to change.
Dinner was good. Of course, dinner was good. Everything he made was good, even when he burned things or oversalted them or had to restart from scratch. The man approached cooking like a military operation, with research, strategy, and relentless perfectionism.
Tonight was chicken in some kind of cream sauce, served over pasta with vegetables arranged artfully on the side. The wine wasdecent, probably cheap but drinkable. The candles flickered on the table, casting warm shadows across everything.
It looked like a date.
That was the problem. It looked exactly like a date.
But I was tired. It had been a long week, full of covering for my unexplained absences, dodging questions, and jumping at every mention of the Langford name. The careful performance was wearing me down. And the candles were bothering me in ways I couldn't articulate.
"You don't need to make everything fancy." The words came out harsher than I intended.
Tobias's hand stilled on his wine glass. "What?"
"The candles, the table settings, the wine glasses." I gestured vaguely at the whole arrangement. "All of it. You don't need to impress me."
Something shifted in his expression. The softness I'd grown used to seeing hardened into something closed off. Careful.
"I wasn't trying to impress you." His voice was controlled, level. "I was trying to make dinner nice."
"It was already nice."
"Clearly not nice enough if you're complaining about candles."
He stood abruptly, collected his plate, and walked to the kitchen. His back was rigid. The set of his shoulders was tense in a way I hadn't seen since the first night.
The silence that followed was awful. Heavy in a way silence hadn't been between us since I'd found him in that service corridor.
I'd fucked up. I knew it immediately, the way you know when you've said exactly the wrong thing and there's no taking it back.
"Tobias."
No response. The sound of water running in the sink.
I pushed back from the table and followed him into the kitchen. He was standing at the sink, not washing anything, just letting the water run over his hands.
"I didn't mean—"
"It's fine."
"It's not fine. I'm sorry." I stopped a few feet away, close but not too close. "I'm not good at this."
"At what?"
"Having someone around. Caring about..." I paused, unsure how to finish. Caring about things. Caring about him. Caring at all.
"It's fine," he said again, but his voice was softer now. Less controlled. "I understand. I'm a guest in your home. I shouldn't be changing things without asking."
"That's not—" I ran a hand through my hair, frustrated. "You can change whatever you want. The candles aren't the problem."
"Then what is the problem?"
