Outside, the rain doubles its intensity, a sudden escalating roar against the window, and she turns toward it, instinctive, and the movement pulls the throw from her shoulders and she reaches to reclaim it, and her gaze passes over me and stops, and she is looking at my shirt.
My shirt is, I become aware in this moment with new clarity, profoundly soaked. It has been soaked for the entire duration of our time in this flat and I had been aware of it as a physical fact, the cold, the cling of the wet fabric, the slight discomfort, without it occurring to me to do anything about it, because doing anything about it would require me to address it, which would require drawing attention to my own physical situation, which is not something I am in the habit of doing in any space, let alone a small warm room with a woman I have been trying not to look at too directly for the last twenty minutes.
She stands up.
She steps forward.
She stops directly in front of me, and the geometry of this , me sitting, her standing, the reduced differential of our heights in this arrangement, brings her face level with the height of my chest, close enough that I can see the individual drops of water still caught in her hair where the towel didn't reach, close enough that her warmth is immediately distinct from the ambient temperature of the room.
Her hands come up, hovering just over my chest.
Not touching. Hovering.
"Take the vest off, Narod," she says. Her voice is quiet and completely steady, and her eyes are on mine, and she is close enough that I smell the vanilla beneath the rain. "You're freezing."
CHAPTER 7
LIVIA
He doesn't move for a moment. His eyes are fixed on mine, and I can see him running calculations behind them, the same rapid internal processing I've been watching him do all evening, weighing outcomes, assessing probabilities, looking for the version of this situation that ends with me frightened or uncomfortable or retreating.
I keep my hands exactly where they are, hovering an inch from his chest, and I hold his gaze and don't move, because I understand, suddenly and with complete clarity, that what this requires is patience. Not the performative patience of someone waiting politely for a situation to resolve itself, but the real kind, the kind that saysI am here, I am not going anywhere, and I will wait until you believe me.
He reaches up.
His hands are enormous, each one broad enough to span the entire width of my ribcage, and his fingers find the bottom of the vest and he pulls it up and over his head in a single motion, and then his hands find the hem of his soaked shirt, and he pauses again, and I think he's going to apologise again, going to offer some mathematically precise disclaimer about managingmy expectations regarding his physiological presentation, but he doesn't. He just pulls the shirt off.
The sound I don't make takes genuine effort.
He is vast. Not in the way that word usually suggests excess or carelessness, but vast the way a landscape is vast, the way something geological is vast, something that exists at a scale that makes the ordinary categories of measurement feel insufficient. His chest is a broad, pale green expanse of dense muscle, and the scars are everywhere, a mapped geography of old damage, pale lines and ridged seams crossing his shoulders, his sternum, a long curved mark that sweeps from his left ribs almost to his hip. Some of them are clearly old, healed to the smoothest silver. Some are less old. All of them are, I note with the precision of a woman who has not touched another human being in seven months, extremely present.
My hands make the decision before I have finished making it.
I press my palm flat against his chest, just below his collarbone, and I feel him go absolutely still beneath the contact. His breath stops. Not the sharp intake of surprise, but the held breath of someone who has been braced for impact and received something else entirely, something they don't quite have the framework to process. His skin is cool from the rain but warming rapidly, and beneath my hand I can feel his heartbeat, fast and dense, a deep percussion that vibrates right up through my fingers.
"These," I say, and I trace one of the longer scars with my fingertips, following its path from his shoulder across the swell of his pectoral, and I feel the muscle jump under the contact. "How old?"
"Seven years." His voice has changed. It's lower, stripped of the careful precise diction, the polite full sentences. Just the word, just the number, landing like something dropped froma height. "Training. I miscalculated a structural—" He stops. Exhales, slow and controlled. "I was careless."
"You weren't careless," I say. I don't know why I'm certain of this but I am. "I've met you for three hours and I'm already certain you've never been careless about anything in your life."
Something breaks open in his expression, something behind the amber of his eyes that has been held very carefully in place all evening, and his hand comes up, slow and telegraphed, giving me every opportunity in the world to see it coming, and his fingers settle against the side of my face with a gentleness that is genuinely startling. His thumb brushes my cheekbone.
"Livia." Just my name. No follow-up. No clause, no qualifier, no mathematically precise subordinate phrase. Just my name, in that new register of his voice, and it does something to my spine that I would not, in any professional context, be able to justify.
"Yes," I say, which isn't a response to anything he's said but is somehow the correct answer anyway.
He leans down, and I tilt my face up, and there is a brief, breathless moment of cartography, both of us calculating the geometry of this, the significant vertical distance to be bridged, and then his mouth finds mine and the math becomes irrelevant.
He kisses me with extreme caution, I can feel it, the deliberate measured pressure of someone who is very aware of what they are capable of and is working very hard to keep it dialled back. His lips are full and warm and slightly hesitant, and I can feel his jaw tight with the effort of restraint, and something about that, the knowledge of what is being contained, makes my hands spread flat against him, and I kiss him back with zero caution whatsoever.
He makes a sound against my mouth. Not a word. Something lower, more fundamental, something that resonates through the contact between us, and his hand slides from my cheek into mywet hair, cupping the back of my skull with a grip that is careful and certain at once, and the tension in his jaw releases.
The difference is immediate.
He doesn't lunge. It's not reckless or violent or any of the things that the anxious part of my brain has been quietly running worst-case-scenario models on for the past several minutes. But the restraint that was governing the first kiss is gone, and what replaces it is something considerably more thorough. He tilts my head back, finding the angle he wants with a focus that is almost professional, and he kisses me until I lose track of whether I'm still standing or whether something else has happened to the structural arrangement of my body, and when I come up for air my glasses are askew and his hand is still cradling the back of my head like he's concerned about the integrity of my neck.
"Your sofa," he says. Still that low register, but there's a roughness in it now, a friction. "Is it?—"
