The warmth in that single word slid straight through me.
“Morning,” I echoed.
He reached for me without hesitation, his hand settling at my waist like it had always lived there. The contact sparked something immediate and undeniable—less hunger this time, more recognition. Like our bodies were greeting each other before we could.
“You good?” he asked quietly.
“Yes,” I said. Then, after a beat, “Very.”
The corner of his mouth lifted.
What followed wasn’t frantic or wild. It was slower. Exploratory in a different way. Less about discovery and more about confirmation. About revisiting something you weren’t ready to let go of yet.
Time dissolved again.
When we finally lay tangled together, breathless and spent, sunlight had crept farther across the room, painting everything in gold. Connor pressed a kiss to my temple, then my hair, then rested his forehead against mine.
“This,” he said softly, “feels dangerous.”
I laughed under my breath. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
His expression shifted—not darker, exactly, but more serious. “Danger isn’t always a booming drum.”
I studied him for a moment. “Are you talking about us?”
“I’m talking about timing,” he said. “And momentum.”
Something about the way he said it made my stomach dip—not with fear, but with awareness.
“I want to go back to my apartment today,” I said gently.
He didn’t react immediately. Just watched me, as if reading between the lines.
“Okay,” he said finally.
“I don’t want to disappear into … this,” I added quickly. I gestured vaguely around us. “I love what’s happening. I do. But I also want my life. My routines. My residency.”
His thumb brushed my hip in a slow, grounding stroke. “I don’t want to take anything from you.”
“I know.” I hesitated. “I just … want you to be an addition. Not a replacement.”
His gaze softened.
“That’s fair,” he said. Then, after a pause, “I’ll come with you.”
It wasn’t phrased as a question.
I lifted my head slightly. “Why?”
He considered his answer carefully. “Call it intuition.”
Something in his tone made my pulse tick up, but I nodded. “Okay.”
We dressed slowly, lingering over small, intimate things—coffee in thick porcelain mugs, shared glances in the mirror, the way he kept a hand at my back as if the world might tilt without warning.
The drive across Paris felt different in daylight. Brighter. Less forgiving. I watched the city pass by the window and feltsomething like protectiveness toward it—toward the version of myself I’d been becoming here.
When we reached my building, I frowned.
