God help me.
Later that night, I stood in my room and tried to make it make sense. Julian’s lobster: impressive. Derek’s bourguignon: strategically calculated. Mason’s pizza: an honest admission of defeat.
Rhys had made me my Nana’s pie.
Julian wanted the crown — winning was what his entire optimized life had prepared him for. Derek wanted the prize — not me exactly, but whatever having me would prove about his own value. Mason wanted to be liked, to matter, to be more than comic relief in another man’s story.
Rhys didn’t want any of those things.
As I replayed the moment — his eyes tracking the movement of my fork to my lips, dark and satisfied and utterly focused —I understood with a jolt of pure terror that he didn’t want the game. He wanted me.
And standing in my room at midnight with cinnamon still on my tongue and the ghost of his almost-smile burned into my eyelids, I was starting to want him back. Not the crown or the show or the narrative forty million people were waiting for — just him. The man who remembered burnt crusts. The man who hadn’t touched me once in three weeks — who’d handed my water bottle to Mason instead of bringing it himself, who kept two feet of distance on a wrought-iron bench in the dark, whose restraint cut deeper than every calculated gesture from every man who thought he knew what I needed.
The man who listened like it cost him, and did it anyway.
I brushed my teeth. Washed my face. Went through the whole routine — cleanser, toner, the vitamin C serum Tessa had bought me that I pretended was unnecessary and used every night — someone who was going to sleep at a reasonable hour and wake up without having replayed a single moment of the afternoon. Someone whose entire understanding of what men were capable of hadn’t just been rewritten by a pie.
The cinnamon was still there. Under the toothpaste, under the cold water, under the toner that promised to remove everything. Steady and stubborn, like the man himself.
I turned off the light.
The cinnamon stayed.
CHAPTER 6
After Hours
“When he touches you like you’re a precious thing — and everyone notices”
RHYS
I couldn’t sleep because my hands smelled like cinnamon.
I’d washed them four times — soap, water, the aggressive scrubbing of a man trying to remove evidence — and still, when I raised them to my face in the darkness, there it was. Cinnamon. Brown sugar. The ghost of a pie I’d made from a memory I shouldn’t have kept, for a woman I had no business remembering this clearly. The rational part of my brain understood: scent memory, hippocampus, olfactory input. Biology. Nothing to lose sleep over. The irrational part — the part that had staged a hostile takeover around week two — kept replaying the moment Sloane bit into that pie and her face did something I’d never seen it do. Not Camera 2. Not the Queen’s composure. A wall cracked open, and what was behind it was real and undefended and I’d done that with flour and butter and a recipe she didn’t know I’d been carrying like contraband for three weeks.
If my engineering professor could see me now, he’d recommend demolition. The cracks were showing, the kind that didn’t respond to reinforcement, and the worst part — the part that had me staring at the ceiling at midnight as if I’d discovered my entire thesis was built on feelings — was that I didn’t want to repair the damage. I wanted to see how far the whole thing could lean before it fell.
I got up, pulled on a hoodie, and went to the garden. Not because I’d noticed she came here every night between 11:45 and midnight and sat on the same bench near the jasmine for exactly forty-five minutes. I went because I couldn’t sleep. That was the story, and I was committed to it, even though the only person I was telling it to was myself.
She was already there.
Of course she was, sitting on the wrought-iron bench with her shoes kicked off and her knees pulled up, wearing an oversized cardigan that swallowed her frame and made her look unthreatening — a lie of the highest order. Sloane Mitchell in a cardigan was more dangerous than Sloane in full Queen regalia, because the Queen was a performance I could analyze and dismiss. The woman in the oversized sweater with bare feet and mascara slightly smudged under her left eye was a problem I hadn’t designed a solution for.
“Stalking is frowned upon by most legal systems,” she said without looking up. Her voice had that particular texture it got late at night when the producer’s earpiece was out — softer, lower. The voice equivalent of taking off armor.
“I’m not stalking. I’m conducting a site inspection.” I sat at the opposite end of the bench, maintaining what I estimated was a safe distance — three feet, though my spatial awareness had become unreliable near her, an embarrassment for a man who measured things for a living. “The railing has an issue.”
“You came out here at midnight to check the railing.”
“I have a professional obligation to notice deficiencies.”
“And a personal obligation to avoid admitting why you’re actually here?”
As often, the corner of her mouth curved — the version she used when she’d caught someone in a lie and was enjoying the squirm. Asymmetric, more pronounced on the left side,disarmingly effective. That I’d developed a taxonomy for her smiles in three weeks was information I was choosing not to share with my therapist. Or anyone. Or myself.
“The pie was good,” she said, after a pause long enough to constitute its own statement.
“It was adequate.”
