“You brought up the risks. The fallout. The press, my contract, my coach.” His thumb traces my jaw. “I want to know if you understand what you’re carrying and what this means to you. Not the version you’d give your father, Zoe, or anyone else. The real one.”
The real one.
The real one is his heartbeat under my palm an hour ago, the way I know his coffee order, the truck engine outside, the two minutes of held breath, and my hands still not entirely steady.The real oneis eleven discarded sketches, a twelfth one drawn at two in the morning, and the feeling when I pressed the stencil to his ribs and saw it sit right, saw it belong there. It’s the same feeling I get when a design clicks, and I know it won’t need changing.
The real oneis terrifying.
“I understand it,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“Yes.” I step back because I need the space to finish the thought without his hands on my face. “Which is exactly whytonight scared me. Not because I don’t want this, but because I do. Enough to understand what it costs.”
He watches me for a moment. Reads me the way he reads everything, patiently, without rushing to an answer.
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay?”
“Okay. We’re careful. We’re smarter.” He sits back down on the chair, positions himself back on his side, arm up. The professional returns to the thing we were doing before the truck pulled up outside, before the held breath, before all of it. “Finish the session.”
I stand there looking at him, shirtless, calm, the tattoo half-shaded on his ribs, his eyes forward, already steadying himself for the needle.
Something in my chest pulls tight and then releases.
I sit down, pull on my gloves, and pick up the machine.
“Two more sessions after this,” I say.
“I know.”
“You’ll need to be more careful getting here. Park farther away.”
“Already planned it.”
“And the window…”
“Blinds,” he says. “I’ll buy you blinds.”
“I don’t want blinds.”
“Then I’ll put them up, and you can take them down when I leave.”
I turn the machine on. “Breathe,” I say.
He does.
I put my hand against his side, steady myself, and go back to work.
Outside, the street stays quiet. The city goes about its business around us, indifferent and enormous. In here, the machine hums, the lines go down clean and exact, and neither of ussays what we both know—my father will drive by again, Lena is already watching, and the space we’ve carved out for this is smaller than we’ve been pretending.
But the bird is gaining depth beneath my hands, the feathers reading real now, the hidden diamond precise in its place.
And when I finally set the machine down for the night, Reece looks at the mirror for a long time without saying anything, and the expression on his face is worth every last one of the complications waiting on the other side of that studio door.
I just don’t know it yet.
Chapter Twelve
