Not handsome—though he was that, annoyingly. Beautiful in the way a person became beautiful when they forgot to perform and let the raw,unfiltered version of themselves breathe. I was watching Callum Hayes in his natural habitat, and his natural habitat wasn't an office or a gala or a pristine apartment. It was here, on a sidewalk, looking up at a building with an awe that decades of practice hadn't dulled.
“Am I boring you?” he asked, the tiniest apprehension creeping into his voice.
“Not at all. I like seeing you passionate about what you love. It’s literally the hottest thing I’ve ever seen.”
He paused mid-gesture—one hand still raised, pointing at a second-story window he'd been explaining—and looked at me. Really looked, the way he did when I'd said a thing that breached a wall he'd spent years building.
"Nobody's ever asked me to do this before," he said. "Jessica thought the architecture talk was—she called it shop talk. Boring. Self-indulgent."
"Jessica was wrong about a lot of things."
"She was."
"This isn't boring. This is you showing me how your brain works. That's—" I struggled for the right phrasing and landed on honesty. "It's intimate. More intimate than the gala or the dancing or even—" I gestured vaguely in the direction of his apartment, meaning all the dirty things we’d done together. "This. Watching you love a thing. That's the most naked you've been in front of me."
He stared.
"Over the top?" I asked.
"No." He stepped toward me, cupped my face in both hands, and kissed me on a sidewalk in a neighborhood where neither of us knew a soul. Not a performance. Not practice. Just a man kissing a woman in front of a hundred-year-old house that he'd described with the same tenderness he was now pressing against my mouth.
When he pulled back, his forehead rested against mine.
"Thank you," he said. "For today."
"We're not done yet."
"We're not?"
"Callum. It's two in the afternoon. We have an entire day left, and I still haven't gotten dessert."
He laughed. That real laugh—the one that crinkled the corners of his eyes and made him look ten years younger. The one I was collecting, hoarding, memorizing against a future where I might need the memory of it.
Don't think about that. Not today. Today is a no-logistics zone.
We kept walking. His hand found mine andstayed.
We ended up at a bakery three blocks from the neighborhood—a hole-in-the-wall I spotted from the car, drawn in by a hand-painted sign advertising "the best cannoli in the city, fight us."
The interior was cramped, warm, and smelled of butter and powdered sugar in a way that made my knees weak. An older woman behind the counter—gray hair pinned up, apron dusted with flour—beamed at us as we walked in.
"Two?" she asked.
"Two cannoli," I said.
"Two cannoli and two espressos," Callum corrected, then glanced at me. "I want to see how they pull a shot.”
"You're not allowed to critique."
"I wouldn't dream of it."
He would absolutely dream of it. But I let it go, and we sat at a tiny table near the window, knees touching beneath the surface, and ate cannoli that lived up to the sign's aggressive promise.
"Okay," I said, licking powdered sugar from my thumb. "This is a religious experience."
"The filling is excellent. Ricotta-based, not mascarpone. Traditional."
"See, this is what I mean. You can't just eat a cannoli. You have to deconstruct it."
