The tea sits between us, patient as a thing that has learned to wait.My hands find the mug, and the first sip surprises me.It is sweeter than I expected, warm and steady in my stomach, a small, honest thing that does not ask anything in return.
The dream does not disappear.It clings like perfume on a coat sleeve.Still, it makes room.The room opens around this: a cracked open window, a ridiculous story about flaming bananas, two men trying to be ordinary with me.
I look at them.The man who learned how to stand where I will not feel cornered.And then at the man who lowers himself to the rug so our eyes can meet without me having to work to reach him.
“You’re both terrible cooks,” I say.
It comes out light, sharp, and somehow safe.It is nothing and it is everything.I wind that sentence like a ribbon around my wrist so I have a place to return to when the room tilts.
Barret’s grin is quick and uncertain, bright and nervous in the way the sun remembers how to come back.Eddie exhales like someone holding his breath for a long time and finally lets it go.
“Can I try outside?”I ask, voice small as tide foam.“Just the terrace.With you.”
“Yeah,” Barret answers immediately, already on his feet.“Yeah, we can do that.”
Eddie nods, methodically, checking the door and then me.“Shoes?”he asks.
I look down at my socks.Fuzzy, ridiculous.A tiny rebellion against polished floors and rules.
“These are enough,” I say.
We cross the room together.The terrace door opens, and a pale light slips through the fog.The terrace is a strip of stone that juts out over the cliff, a private edge to this cedar-and-glass mansion that feels absurd and impossible to all the old rules I learned.
The air bites, then eases.The old panic claws at my throat for a second, an animal waking.I press my hands to the rail and push against the world like I have a right to be here.I whisper, the sound thin under gulls and wind, “This is mine.”
No one corrects me.
They do not argue, do not pat my head, or tell me I am being foolish.
They stand there with me, two not-so-ordinary men who are learning the rules again, and that is everything.
The terrace boards are cool under my feet.The sea throws itself at the world and withdraws, again and again, as if practice makes permission.Barret stands on my left, not touching.Eddie, on my right, hands in his pockets like restraint is a language he’s finally learned.
The nightmare doesn’t leave.It just steps back, giving me a view.
“Tell me another stupid thing,” I say, and Barret obliges.Eddie adds one, and I stand there with tea heat in my palms, wind in my hair, and I hear the sound of water trying again and again and again.
ChapterFive
Eddie
I only come out to the terrace when I need to remember how to breathe.Today, I come to watch her find the world again.The terrace planks shine a little darker with fog.Cleo stands at the rail, tea cupped in both hands, sweater cuffs bunched at her wrists.Her socks look ridiculous and perfect—soft against stone—while the Pacific throws itself at the cliff as if it can move the world a single inch.
She doesn’t say anything.
She just takes space, as if she’s learning how to claim what was denied.Thank fuck there’s still a lot ofCleostill left inside Cleo.The part that angles toward air instead of walls.The part that answers panic with a window latch, that can catch a dumb story and turn it into breath.Watching her find the horizon, I feel something in my chest unclench.The panic of not finding her, of losing her forever, loosens just enough for me to breathe.
This isn’t victory.
Not by a long shot.Fuck knows what’s next.
Dorian doesn’t like to lose, and right now he’s not just losing his temper—he’s watching part of his domain slip.He thinks one of his partners took Cleo to punish him.Arthur Bradley, meanwhile, is planting doubt in Dorian’s mind and offering other paths.That’s the problem: we don’t know which of Dorian’s options is lethal and which is just cruel.
The question that won’t shut up: how do we give Cleo her freedom when we don’t even know whether she can walk among the living without someone trying to end her life or make her vanish?That’s not a problem you fix with paperwork and a lawyer.That’s a problem you fix with strategy and luck, and other people are willing to put their bodies between her and the nothingness that will destroy her.
I keep my hands in my pockets because I’m learning not to do the thing I want most—touch her.Touching the people I love grounds me, and right now I have to be careful with Cleo and with Barret.Neither of them are in the place where I can be myself—or even claim them.
Barret glances at me from the left, that look he gives when he’s watching to see if I mean what I say.He’s either approving or waiting for me to fail.I can’t tell which, and for now, I don’t need to know.
