He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “You’re going to be the death of me, Miss Adams,” he muttered before burying his face against her skin. “But first, do you want me to make breakfast?” He’d said it in the spot where her shoulder met her neck, his plush lips brushing gently against her throat, and when his wandering fingers grazed across a sensitive spot on her thigh, Audrey yelped a laugh and tried to squirm away.
“No! Not there!” she squeaked.
But Theo realized what he’d found, and his attention snapped directly to it. He grabbed her and held her closer, tickling her harder while she laughed and thrashed, his expression lighting up with delight at having discovered yet another one of her secrets.
They took turnsfreshening up in the bathroom, and when Theo emerged again, back in his long-sleeved black shirt and gray college sweatpants from last night, it was to find Audrey looking at all the things on his shelves in his living room. He had quite a collection of media, but one thing bothered her.
“Where’s all your art?” She turned and watched him in the kitchen while he gathered ingredients. Pancakes, eggs, and bacon were on the menu, all of which he’d refused her help with, and he straightened and gave her an odd look as he placed a flat top griddle across his expansive set of gas burners.
“My art? You’ve seen some of it. It’s around.” He gestured absently upstairs.
“The red paintings?” He nodded, and Audrey turned back to the shelves, carefully tugging one of the vintage vinyl albums out to examine it—an old Fleetwood Mac one from the seventies. He had virtually no knickknacks, nothing he might have really needed to dust, and none of it was glass. “Those are really cool, but didn’t you say glass was your medium? I thought you’d have some of it on display or something. I’d like to see it.”
He looked up at her sharply. “I did say that, yes. But if you want to get very technical about it, you could say I’m actually a mixed-media artist. Iprimarilywork with glass, but I incorporate…other stuff too. And I have a more traditional design business on the side.”
“Then where is all of it?” She pushed the record back into its place until it was flush with the others again.
Theo rolled his lips together and began cracking eggs into a bowl, his right hand trembling while his left held the bowl steady. He frowned and held it up to the light for inspection, but deemed it safe from stray pieces of shell before continuing. “I don’t keep a lot of it here. It’d get too cluttered, and uh…no, I just don’t keep most of my stuff here.” He shook his head. “Some of it is down in the studio, though.”
“Will you show me today?”
He shook his head even more emphatically this time. “No. That’s not a space for guests. It’s awful, and I’d want to make sure everything was…everything was safe before you went down there.I haven’t worked in a while, and I’ve left it a horrible mess from the, uh…the last time I tried.”
His neck went red again, and he concentrated on whisking the batter together while Audrey continued to poke around on his shelves. He’d put music on again, something slow and contemporary and shoegazey this morning, streamed from his phone to the retro record console, which was apparently modern and doubled as a Bluetooth speaker. There were a bunch of books and records, most of which were vintage, and a truly impressive array of Blu-ray and 4K movies on his shelves.
“Where did you get all these vinyls?”
“They were my dad’s collection. He used to make me listen to them while we worked in the shop together, and whenever he put one on, we played a game where I had to guess the year of the album. He called it part of my ‘essential musical education.’ ” Theo shook his head as he added more flour to the batter and stirred it in. “He was insistent about it. Wanted his son to have taste, he said.”
She hummed. “Well, sounds like he succeeded.”
“I suppose so. At least, Ihopeso.”
Audrey turned her attention back to his collection, but on a second glance, one thing stood out. Nestled at the very bottom corner on the shelf all on its own was a jet-black motorcycle helmet, sleek and cool and expensive-looking, like most of the other things in Theo’s brownstone. She bent down and picked it up, turning it over in her hands. It was exceedingly heavy, but it didn’t look out of the ordinary.
“Do you have a motorcycle?” she asked, and the sounds of whisking from the kitchen abruptly stopped. “Because if you do, that’s really hot. Can we ride it sometime? Or do you—”
“No!”
She wasn’t sure how he was able to move so fast with such a pronounced limp, but Theo was behind her all of a sudden, his face aswhite as a sheet. “Uh, I—I do, yeah, but I don’t ride it anymore.” He held his hands out and waited for her to pass the helmet to him. “I’ll just take that, and…put it in its place. Which is definitely not on that shelf.” When she didn’t immediately hand it over, he plucked it gently away from her with both hands and hurried down the hall behind the staircase, waddling into a dark room she hadn’t gone in yet before emerging a minute later, breathing heavily and running a hand through his hair. It flopped luxuriously around his ears, and Audrey pursed her lips with a growing frown.
He went back to making pancakes in the kitchen, and she stalked over to him, watching him closely. “I think you owe me a secret. You didn’t confess one last night. And I did.”
Theo had been spooning batter onto the heated griddle, the bacon and scrambled eggs ready and waiting nearby. “Roo doesn’t count?” He gave her a sheepish grin and some of the color returned to his cheeks.
“No. Roo doesn’t count.”
“All right.” He blew out a deep breath and tapped the spatula anxiously on the counter. “So, well…I have a trust fund. In case you didn’t gather that.” The color in his cheeks deepened.
“You’re a nepo baby?”
“Oh god, please don’t put it like that.” Theo covered his face with one massive hand. “My mom’s family is loaded and the trust is from my nana—I was her only grandchild—but I’ve never really liked using their money. My dad came from nothing, so I’ve generally tried to make my own way, even though I recognize how much privilege I grew up with.” He flipped the pancakes and laid out the strips of bacon to start crisping up. “But that’s not how I bought this house, though. That’s just what I came from, and what I’m sitting on.” He grimaced. “And how I started my artistic practice. Getting into this sort of thing is, admittedly,veryexpensive. The startup costs for equipment can be staggering.”
“Then how did you get this place? It’s incredible.”
He sighed deeply again and winced. “Again: don’t tell any other artists. I’ll be labeled as a sellout, but…I sold some art for a truly insane amount of money in my early twenties. Like, a criminal amount.”
“Isn’t that the dream, though?” Audrey frowned at him. “To not starve, to hit it big?”
