I realize I’m still sprawled half on top of him, my cheek over his heart, one bare leg tangled with his. The T-shirt I pulled on before sleep has ridden up to my ribs, exposing a strip of skin along my waist. His shirt is twisted halfway up his chest, my hand still fisted in the fabric, but it feels intimate all the same.
My brain does a small, panicked stutter.
“Hi,” I manage, then push myself up, pulling the quilt higher. I’m acutely aware that I’m braless under this thin T-shirt, and the cool morning air makes that fact rather obvious.
He doesn’t grab or leer or make it weird. He just watches me with that soft, intent gaze, as if he’s cataloging every micro-expression for later.
“No need to be sorry for anything,” he says quietly, as if he can already sense the apology forming. “Not for last night. Not for wanting clothes now.”
I tug the shirt down properly and step into clean jeans, grateful to have my body back under my own control. The cool denim helps re-orient me in my own skin. By the time I turn back, he’ssitting up in bed, the sheet riding low over his hips, red hair sexily mussed, green eyes steady.
Good Lord.
He’s objectively ridiculous—like some artist mashed together every “dangerous and gorgeous” archetype and then accidentally added “soft” as a final layer.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
I do a quick internal scan. Yesterday was a mess—vomiting in the bathroom, Blackwell’s paper, my mother’s gaslighting, the frantic dash to the conference room, the whiteboard, the walk, the way my whole world felt like it was cracking down the middle.
This morning… doesn’t.
“I’m… okay,” I say slowly. “I don’t regret any of it. Last night, I mean.” I swallow. “Do you?”
Something fierce and tender gathers in his eyes.
“No,” he says, with that simple honesty that always disarms me. “I do not regret touching you. Or stopping with you.” A small smile curves his mouth. “I will think about your sounds for a long time, though.”
Heat slams into my face. “Flavius.”
“What?” he says, not remotely sorry. “You were beautiful.”
I make a strangled noise and retreat to the tiny kitchenette, because that is as far as I can go in this one-room cabin without leaving it entirely.
My laptop is still on the table, closed but looming. The memory of Blackwell’s paper—the way my stomach dropped, the way the framework of my work was written under her name—presses at the edges of my mind.
Reality reasserts itself.
“I can make tea,” he says, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and standing. He doesn’t reach for his shirt. I catch a flicker of internal debate in his face—like he’s wondering if he should—but then he leaves it. There’s something oddly reassuring about that. Not performance-reassuring. Just… him, comfortable in his own skin, trusting me to say something if it’s too much.
“Tea is good,” I say.
He moves around my kitchenette easily. Kettle, mugs, finding the tea without asking. It’s domestic and gentle and almost enough to make me forget why I texted him yesterday with shaking hands.
Almost.
I open my laptop.
The paper is still in my browser history. It would take one click to put it back on the screen, to let the wound gape open again.
Instead, I open the folder with the photos we took of the whiteboard. Our timeline. Our proof.
Date after date. Arrows. Phrases. The evolution of the work as it actually happened.
My framework. My becoming.
I stare at the pictures, at the messy red circles and cramped notes, at the map of my own mind laid out in dry-erase marker.
“What do you see?” he asks quietly, setting a steaming mug by my elbow.
