The line was going to break. And I was done pretending I wasn’t the one reaching for it.
CHAPTER 11
Finally
“When he kisses you — and it feels like coming home”
RHYS
I’d been sitting on a wrought-iron bench for forty minutes, which was thirty-seven minutes longer than any structural engineer would consider a defensible use of time. The bench was cold. The night air carried that particular late-spring density — humid, fragrant, an air that makes your shirt stick to your back and your judgment stick to nothing. The excuse I’d assembled for being here — fresh air, the need to think, a vague professional interest in the pergola’s joinery — had collapsed somewhere around minute twelve, leaving me with nothing but the truth: I was a thirty-year-old man sitting in the dark, waiting for a woman the way people wait for test results. Hoping. Dreading. Unable to leave until she showed up and told me what I already knew.
I’d been waiting since I woke up with her body curled against mine and my hand settled on her hip in a way my conscious mind had not authorized. Eighteen hours since the Proximity Test ended. Two more eliminations since then — names I barely registered, faces I couldn’t distinguish from the wallpaper, the show’s machinery grinding forward while I stood inside it feeling nothing about any of it. We were down to four: me, Julian, Derek, Mason. I knew this how I knew the weather — peripherally, a fact that existed outside the room where the only relevant information lived. A dinner I hadn’ttasted. A production briefing I hadn’t heard. A conversation with Mason where he’d asked me three questions about next week’s challenge and I’d answered none of them because the only thought my brain would produce was the exact shape of her mouth when she was trying not to smile. Mason, being Mason, had stopped asking questions and handed me a beer with the gentle resignation of a man watching a friend walk into traffic.
The gravel path crunched before I saw her.
Two things happened between that sound and her appearing at the garden entrance. First: my pulse spiked to a rate that would have interested a cardiologist. Second: I understood, with flat calm, having exhausted every scenario and every alternative, that tonight was the night the pretending stopped. I’d known it was coming. The awareness had been sitting inside me since she’d whispered good boy in a dark room and every excuse I’d spent a lifetime stacking fell over like dominoes. The only question was whether she knew it too.
She was wearing a sweater I hadn’t seen before, a loose-knit thing in slate blue that kept sliding off one shoulder, and she’d left her hair down — longer like this, darker in the low light, curling against her collarbone in a way that made my fingers ache. She wasn’t wearing shoes. Bare feet on gravel meant she’d come in a hurry, which meant she’d made a decision, which meant I was in serious, catastrophic, irreversible trouble. A trouble where you Google your symptoms at 3 AM and WebMD tells you to just accept it.
“You’re here.” The two words landed in the quiet garden carrying the weight of ten weeks of careful distance, midnight conversations, and every time one of us had found the other in this exact spot because it was the only place in the mansion that was only ours.
“I’m here.” My voice came out lower than I’d intended, rougher, stripped of the exactness I’d spent a lifetime maintaining. I sounded as if I’d rehearsed what I’d say and forgotten all of it the moment she arrived. Two words. She’d reduced my entire vocabulary to echo.
She sat down beside me. The bench creaked. She left six inches between her knee and mine — simultaneously too much and too little — and I tracked those six inches with the same obsessive focus I’d been directing at every distance involving Sloane since she’d walked into my sightline and turned proximity into a problem I couldn’t solve.
“I couldn’t sleep.” She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them in a posture that made her look smaller and roughly seven hundred percent more dangerous than anyone should be at midnight. “Kept thinking about—” She stopped. Started again. “I was lying in bed staring at the ceiling, and I realized I was waiting for you to breathe. For that sound. Like my body had adjusted to your sleep cycle in one night and now my own rhythm felt wrong without you next to me.” She laughed, quiet and self-deprecating. “That’s either the most romantic thing I’ve ever said or the opening line of a true-crime documentary.”
“Both.” I let that sit for a beat. “Possibly.”
“Helpful.”
“I’m an architect. We specialize in ambiguity.”
“You are literally trained in the opposite of ambiguity.” She turned to face me, and the movement brought her knee into contact with my thigh, and the six inches became zero. And the charge between us found its ground point and I felt it travel through denim and leggings and into muscle and bone with an efficiency that should have been impossible through two layersof clothing but was another law of physics that Sloane had decided to override. “Rhys.”
“Sloane.”
“We can’t keep doing this.”
“I know.”
“Meeting in gardens at midnight and pretending we’re two people who happen to enjoy horticulture at antisocial hours.” She was doing what she always did when nervous — talking fast, stacking clauses, filling the space between herself and whatever she was afraid to say. Where I went quiet to protect myself, she went loud. It was the most complementary design flaw I’d ever encountered. “Because I think we both know what this is. What it’s been since the Patience Test. Since before that, probably, since you made that stupid cinnamon apple pie from a recipe you memorized because I mentioned it once in a conversation you weren’t even supposed to be listening to—”
“I was listening.” The words came out with a directness that surprised me, clean of the usual protective layers. “I listen to everything you say. I file it. I cross-reference it. I remember the pie because you mentioned it on a Tuesday afternoon during a camera break, and you said your grandmother used to make it with Honeycrisp apples and too much cinnamon, and your voice went softer when you said it. Younger, the voice from before you had to be the Queen — and I memorized the recipe that night because I wanted to hear that voice again.” I paused. “That’s my version of a problem, Sloane. A man who can’t stop collecting details about a woman he has no business falling for.”
She stared at me, lips parted, and in the low light her eyes held a look I’d been afraid to name — recognition. Like someone seeing a locked door swing open for the first time.
“You memorized the recipe.” Her voice went soft.
“I memorized the recipe.”
“Because of my voice.”
“Because of your voice.”
The silence that followed was the loudest thing I’d heard in this garden. Full of two people breathing in the dark who were both running out of reasons to maintain the distance between them. She uncurled her arms from her knees. Her hand came to rest on the bench between us, palm down, fingers spread, near mine, her warmth crossing the half-inch of iron separating our skin.
“I’m going to say something.” She took a breath. “And I need you to hear it as Sloane. Just Sloane.” A breath that caught at the top. “I wasn’t planning on you. The show was supposed to be a statement. A middle finger to every man who’d ever talked through my sentences and told me I was too much for wanting basic human decency. It was never supposed to be the place where I met someone who—” She exhaled. “Someone who memorized my grandmother’s pie recipe because they liked how I sounded talking about it.”
