Now it was my turn to decide how to answer it.
Chapter 8
It had been five days.
Five measured, deliberate days since the charity ball.
Five days since Creed had allowed himself to truly look at me.
Not a glance, or an assessment.Not even a look that lingered long enough to acknowledge what existed between us.
Time did not move forward so much as it pressed down, slow, and unyielding.Each day bled into the next, marked by meetings, briefings, and the careful performance of normalcy.Creed moved through it all with the same ruthless efficiency he always had.He commanded rooms with surgical precision, his voice calm, authoritative, impossible to ignore.People leaned toward him instinctively, drawn by the gravity he carried without effort.
But he never leaned toward me.
He did not avoid me in any obvious way.That would have been easier to endure.Instead, he perfected distance.His gaze skimmed past me like glass, cool and unbroken.When our paths crossed in the corridor, he nodded once.Polite.Impersonal.As if nothing intimate had ever existed between us.As if I had never been something he touched with intention.It was worse than anger.Anger would have meant engagement.This felt like discipline.
I told myself he was choosing restraint.I told myself this was how he survived conflict, by tightening his grip on everything else.But the silence carved into me anyway, slow, and precise, until I was no longer sure where I ended and the ache began.
I buried myself in work.Reports.Forecasts.Deadlines.Anything that required numbers instead of memory.None of it held.The quiet followed me home, followed me to bed, followed me into sleep that never quite came.
He is not unaffected, I told myself.
I saw it in the way his shoulders stiffened when I entered a room.I saw it in the way his jaw tightened when he thought no one was watching.He held himself rigid, like a man bracing against a current he refused to step into.
Still, what if holding back was the point?What if this was him choosing control over us?
By Friday afternoon, the office hummed with pre-weekend energy.Laughter drifted down the halls.Plans were made.People exhaled.I moved through it all like a ghost, smiling when required, nodding when spoken to, until I heard him.
Creed’s voice.
Low.Decisive.Commanding.
It carried through the glass walls of the conference room and cut straight through me.My pulse stuttered before I could stop it.I looked up, and there he was.
He stood at the head of the table with his sleeves rolled and his tie loosened just enough to signal fatigue without surrender.His hands were braced against the table as he spoke, posture rigid, gaze sharp.He looked exactly as he always had.
