"Hmm?"
"Until my apartment's fixed. Three more days as your temporary roommate."
"Does that arrangement still apply? Given the current circumstances?"
I propped myself up on an elbow, looked down at him. In the low light from the windows, he looked younger. Unguarded. His hair a disaster, his mouth swollen from kissing, his eyes soft in a way I'd never seen during our coffee shop sparring matches.
"What circumstances would those be?" I asked.
"The circumstance where I'm falling for you." His voice was even, but I caught the tremor underneath. "The circumstance where this stopped being anarrangement approximately six minutes after I agreed to it. The circumstance where I want you to stay not as a temporary roommate, but as?—"
I kissed him. Cut off the sentence before he could finish it, before the declaration made this more real than I was ready for.
When I pulled back, he raised an eyebrow.
"Too fast?" I said. "I'm scared too. But I don't want to slow down."
"Neither do I."
I settled back against his chest. His heartbeat drummed under my ear—slowing now, drifting toward sleep.
Tomorrow there would be complications. The coffee shop and its dying equipment. Elena's visit looming on the horizon. The expiration date of an arrangement that no longer applied but still hung over us. The seventeen-year gap that didn't bother me but might bother the world.
Tomorrow I'd have to face the reality of falling for a man I'd pretended to date, in an apartment I'd stumbled into by accident, in a life I'd never planned and couldn't control.
But tonight?—
Tonight I was exactly where I wanted to be. In Callum Hayes's bed. In Callum Hayes's arms. Feeling more seen and wanted and certain than I'd felt in years.
I closed my eyes.
Slept.
And if I dreamed, I didn't remember—only the warmth of his body against mine and the quiet conviction that whatever came next, I wouldn't be facing it alone.
twelve
CALLUM
Four-fifty-two in the morning and I was wide awake, staring at a woman who'd upended every blueprint I'd ever drawn for my life.
Willow slept on her stomach—always on her stomach, one arm shoved under the pillow, the other flung toward my side of the bed as if reaching for me even in sleep. The sheet had slipped to her lower back, exposing the valley of her spine, the small constellation of freckles on her left shoulder blade that I'd kissed so many times I could map them with my eyes closed.
Her breathing was deep and even. Mouth parted. Hair a dark, tangled mess across the pillow. She'd gone to bed with it still damp from the shower, which meant it would dry in a shape that defied geometry, and she'd spend ten minutes in the bathroomcursing about it while I stood in the doorway pretending I didn't find the whole production magnificent.
I didn't move. Just lay there on my side, one arm bent under my head, watching her.
This was becoming a problem.
Not the watching—though that was its own brand of pathology. The problem was what happened in my sternum when I did it. A tightening. An expansion. Two opposing forces at war inside the same cavity, as if my body hadn't decided whether to hold on or run and was trying to do both at once.
Is this what it's supposed to feel like?
The question had been rattling around in my skull for days. Not idle curiosity. Not philosophical musing. An honest, almost desperate need to know if what I felt for the woman sleeping beside me was the real thing or just another miscalculation by a man with a well-documented history of getting it wrong.
Fifteen years of marriage to Jessica, and I'd never once lost sleep over watching her breathe. I'd loved her—or I'd told myself I had. She was smart and driven and we made sense on paper, the couple people described as a power match. We built a life together, had a daughter together, stood at a hundred dinner parties together and performed the choreography of two people who'd chosen each other.
But I'd never lain awake at four in the morning cataloging the freckles on Jessica's back.
