"That wasn't part of the arrangement," I said. My voice sounded rough. As if the kiss had reached into my throat and rearranged that too.
She was still flushed, still breathing hard, still looking at me with those impossible eyes—amber andgreen and more honest than any speech either of us could have composed.
"No," she said. "It wasn't."
"Every rule we made this morning?—"
"Gone." She traced my jawline with her thumb. "Obliterated. Not even rubble. Just... a crater."
“And how do you feel about that?”
“Freaked out.” She held my gaze. Didn't waver. "I'm not sorry, though."
"Neither am I." And I meant it. Whatever came next—the complication, the fallout, the inevitable reckoning with the fact that our arrangement now carried a payload neither of us had signed up for—I didn't regret this. Couldn't.
She pressed her palm flat against my sternum. Not pushing. Feeling.
"Six more days," she said. "Under the same roof."
"Six more days."
"We're going to be terrible at boundaries."
"We're going to be catastrophic at boundaries."
That got a real smile—wide and unguarded, the kind she usually hid behind a quip. "At least we're self-aware about our inevitable failure."
"I've always believed in realistic expectations."
She laughed. The sound broke through the charged quiet of the apartment, warm and human andpurely Willow. She pulled back, sat up, ran a hand through her wild hair.
"I should go to bed," she said. "The real bed. The guest bed. Before we make this more complicated than it already is."
She was right. I knew she was right.
"Willow."
She paused at the hallway entrance, turned.
I wanted to say a dozen things. That I hadn't felt this alive in eight years. That she terrified me in ways blueprints and load-bearing walls never had. That I was falling, had been falling, and the only structural support I could find was her.
What I said was: "Goodnight."
She held my gaze for a beat. Smiled—smaller now, private, meant only for this moment between us. "Goodnight, Callum."
Her footsteps retreated down the hall. The guest room door closed.
What the hell did we just do? The couch was still warm where she'd been, the abandoned novel splayed on the floor, the taste of her still on my mouth—and I stared at the city doing what cities do: carrying on regardless.
Six more days under the same roof. The fake relationship now carrying the full freight of the real thing.A woman asleep in my guest room who had no business trusting me and did it anyway.
I picked up the fallen copy ofPride and Prejudice, smoothed the bent pages, and set it on the coffee table. Austen would have appreciated the irony. Two stubborn people, convinced they understood each other, blindsided by the discovery that they'd been wrong about everything that mattered.
I turned off the lights, stretched out on the couch that still carried the ghost of her warmth, and did what I'd been doing for weeks.
Thought about Willow Monroe.
Except now I didn't need to imagine. Now I knew. The taste of her mouth. The sound she made when I kissed her neck. The feel of her hands on my face, holding me as if I were worth holding.
