“I’m on a bench at midnight with the host of a reality show. You tell me.”
She laughed, and I felt it everywhere — against my mouth, in my chest, through her body into mine. Her laugh in the dark was the most dangerous sound I’d encountered in ten weeks of studying this woman’s sounds with a focus that would have concerned any reasonable observer.
“This can’t stay secret.” Matter-of-fact. Not fear — logistics. The voice of a woman who ran a television show and understood that production had eyes everywhere except this bench.
“I know.”
“People are going to find out. About us. And when they do, it gets complicated.”
“I know.”
“And you don’t care.”
I pulled back enough to look at her. Full face, moonlit, hair ruined from my hands, wearing the expression of a woman thoroughly kissed and resetting her expectations for the entire category. “I spent ten weeks on this show pretending I didn’t care about you,” I said. “That was the complicated part. This is the simple part.”
She cupped my face in both hands — a mirror of what she’d done the night she said good boy, the gesture that had dismantled me then and dismantled me now — and pressed hermouth to mine softly. Short. A period at the end of a very long sentence.
“Then stop talking,” she murmured against my lips, “and kiss me like you mean it.”
I meant it. I held her face and kissed her with every minute of the ten weeks I’d spent pretending I wasn’t falling, every midnight conversation, every time I’d watched her walk away and had to stop my hand from reaching. I kissed her until the garden and the moonlight and the cameras all went distant and the only things left were her warmth and the sound she made when I held her — a sound I fully intended to earn again, repeatedly, for the foreseeable future.
And she kissed me back. Like she’d been waiting. Like I was worth the wait.
We stayed in the garden until two in the morning.
We talked. We sat tangled on the bench with her legs draped over mine and her head against my shoulder and her fingers tracing idle patterns on my forearm that she probably didn’t realize she was drawing and that I was committing to permanent memory with a thoroughness that would have concerned a licensed professional. At one point she ran her finger over a vein on the inside of my wrist and said, “You have architect hands,” and I said, “What does that mean,” and she said, “I don’t know, but it’s working for me,” and I filed that under information I would absolutely be using later.
She shivered — the night had cooled, and the slate-blue sweater was too thin for two AM outdoors — and I pulled her closer without thinking, my arm going around her shoulders with an ease that should have startled me but didn’t. Holding Sloane turned out to be the one thing my body knew how to do without instructions. She tucked her face into the curve of my neck, and her breath against my collarbone sent a cascade downmy spine that I chose to classify as peace rather than desire because desire would have required me to move and I had no intention of moving, possibly ever.
She told me about the tweet that started the show — the rage, the wine, the pad thai she’d eaten standing over the sink like a character in a Nora Ephron screenplay. And she told it laughing at herself with a generosity most people never learn to apply to their own worst days, and made me understand what I’d been circling for weeks. She was not sunshine. She was fire. The kind that burned away the useless and preserved the essential, and she called herself too much because the people in her life hadn’t had the sense to stand still.
I could stand still. I’d been doing it my whole life. Might as well finally do it somewhere worth staying.
“I should go in,” she murmured eventually, mouth close to my ear, her reluctance so visible it was practically a third person on the bench. “The cameras at the back entrance are on a sweep cycle. If I time it right, Tessa won’t have footage of me sneaking back in at two AM looking like I’ve been—”
“Thoroughly kissed?”
“I was going to say ’emotionally compromised,’ but sure.” She pulled back and looked at me, and her expression — open, unguarded, bright with a happiness she wasn’t even trying to contain — rearranged several things inside me I’d considered permanent fixtures. “Come find me tomorrow.”
“I find you every day. That’s the problem.”
“That’s the solution.” She kissed me one more time — brief, her hand flat on my chest where my heart was doing its level best to embarrass me — then stood, barefoot on the gravel, sweater sliding off one shoulder. “Goodnight, Callahan.”
“Goodnight, Mitchell.”
She walked back up the path. I watched her go — the confidence in her stride even barefoot, how she paused at the gate and looked back and caught me watching and smiled. The private one. The one that existed at coordinates only I could access.
She disappeared inside. The garden went quiet. I sat on the bench for another five minutes because my legs genuinely could not be trusted to support my weight after what had just happened to the rest of me. My lips tasted like chamomile and something I’d been missing without knowing its name, and when I closed my eyes, I replayed that first sound she’d made — the small oh against my mouth, the involuntary concession — and it resonated through me with the same frequency as the night she’d said good boy. The same recognition. The same annihilating sense that the life I’d been so carefully arranging had been careful and solitary and missing the one thing that makes any of it matter.
When I finally stood and walked toward the mansion’s back entrance, I was three steps past the old oak at the garden’s eastern edge when I heard it — a small, mechanical sound. Barely audible. A sound you dismiss in the moment and remember later, when it matters: a soft electronic click, like a phone camera in the dark.
I turned. The garden was empty. Oak branches swayed in the wind, casting moving patterns on the stone wall. Nothing out of place.
I stood there for ten seconds, scanning the shadows. The darkness offered nothing back.
I went inside.
* * *
