He notices what I leave on my plate.
He notices what I leave on my plate.
“I’m not a huge fish person,” I say, and my voice sounds strange to my own ears. Small. Wondering.
“Tomorrow there won’t be fish.”
And the way he says it, so simply, so matter-of-factly, like adjusting my lunch order is the most natural thing in the world, like learning my preferences and reshaping his plans around them is just what he does, something inside my chest shifts.
Not breaks. Shifts. How frozen ground shifts in spring, when warmth finally reaches something that’s been cold for a long time.
Because it’s not just the fish. It’s everything. The breakfast deliveries that started appearing at my desk on Tuesday morning, warm, exactly the sort of food I’d choose for myself if I could afford to choose. The car service that shows up every evening at six, whether I’ve agreed to it or not. The new coffee mug. How he somehow knew that the draft in the design wing bothers me, because on Wednesday a maintenance crew appeared and fixed the air vent above my desk without anyone requesting it.
He’s rewriting the conditions of my daily life, one small detail at a time, and he’s doing it so quietly that by the time I notice, it’s already done.
And the thing is, I’ve seen this before.
Not with me. With Trish. Her mystery Caro, the one who sends her anonymous gourmet lunches and leaves imported chocolates on her desk and once had an entire bento delivered to her apartment when she mentioned she’d skipped dinner. Trish, who spent weeks insisting the lunches were “just a cultural thing” and “Caros are just like that” and “it doesn’t mean anything,” until the flowers showed up at her office and she had to hide in the server room to cry.
Is this a preter thing? Do they all look at humans and just...decide we’re one missed meal away from collapse? Is there some instinct that kicks in, some deep provider impulse that compels them to monitor our caloric intake like we’re endangered species they’ve taken personal responsibility for?
Or is it something else?
Because Trish’s Caro pays attention to her the way Alexei pays attention to me, and I spent weeks telling her that the lunches meant something. That a man who notices what you eat and remembers what you skip is a man who is paying a very specific kind of attention. That she should stop running from it.
And now the same thing is happening to me, and I can’t dismiss it with the logic I used for Trish without admitting that maybe Alexei’s attention means something too.
And I’m not ready to admit that.
“Why are you doing this?” I whisper.
He doesn’t ask me to clarify. He knows I’m not asking about the fish.
He comes around my desk. Slowly. That movement that gives me all the time in the world to stop him, to stand up, to put thedesk between us and sayno, this isn’t happening, you can’t just walk into my life and kiss me whenever you want and notice everything about me and make me feel things I swore I’d never feel again.
I don’t do any of those things.
I sit in my chair and I look up at him as he stops in front of me, and my heart is so loud I’m sure he can hear it, and I don’t move.
He leans down. His hand comes to the side of my face, and his thumb traces the line of my cheekbone, and I close my eyes because I can’t look at him this close. It’s too much. The pale eyes, the impossible beauty, the warmth radiating from his body, it’s like looking directly at the sun and I’m not built for that kind of intensity.
“Look at me, Zia.”
I do.
Because he asked.
Because when he says my name in that voice, I do whatever he asks, and that should terrify me, and it does, but not enough.
He kisses me.
And this one isn’t like the others.
The corridor kiss was gentle. The plane kiss was brief. The parking garage kiss was a claiming, quick and absolute. But this is slow. This is his mouth moving against mine with a thoroughness that makes my thoughts dissolve one by one, like words being erased from a page, until there is nothing left in my head except the taste of him and the warmth of his hand onmy face and the sound I make, a small, helpless, surrendering sound, when his tongue touches mine for the first time.
He makes a sound back. Low. Almost inaudible. A vibration I feel more than hear, and it sends something electric down my spine because it’s the first sound he’s ever made that wasn’t composed. The first crack in a lifetime of composure, and I caused it, and that knowledge is dizzying.
My hand finds his shirt. Not pushing. Pulling. My fingers close around the fabric and I pull him closer, and I’m kissing him back now, really kissing him, not just receiving but giving, and some distant, still-functioning corner of my brain is screaming that this is how it starts, this is exactly how it started with Billy, this is the moment where I let myself believe—
