The shower. The glass. The way the water ran down his spine.
Don't.
His face when he turned. That impassive mask while the rest of him was so completely, aggressively not impassive. The complete lack of apology. Like the entire situation was as natural as breathing.
I press the heel of my palm to my sternum and push.
The ache is still there. Muted now, a few hours later, but sitting right in the base of my stomach like something half-swallowed. I am not going to do anything about it. I made that decision in the bathroom with both hands gripping the vanity, and it was the correct decision, and I stand by it completely.
I look at the ceiling.
The length of him. The thickness.
"Oh my God," I whisper to the dark.
I throw the sheets back. Sleep is not happening. That's a fact. I can either lie here for the next five hours cataloguing every moment in that bathroom in excruciating detail, or I can do something useful with my insomnia.
I sit up carefully. The mattress is good — barely a sound when I shift my weight — but Rafael is six inches away and six inches is nothing. I let my eyes adjust to the low light and I stay still for a moment, just listening to his breathing. Slow. Even. The particular depth of it that means actual sleep and not the surface kind.
I look at him.
I let myself do it properly for once, without the self-editing, without the immediate redirection. He's on his back, arms loose at his sides, the sheet bunched at his waist. His face in sleep is different — the lines around his mouth softened, the jaw unclenched, the controlled surface of him gone quiet in a way it never is when he's awake. The scar on his side is visible in the low light, that pale slash of old damage against the dark mat of hair on his chest.
He looks almost like a person.
Stop it, Gia.
I look away. His jacket is on the chair on his side of the bed, folded over the back the way he always folds it, and his keys are in the inside pocket. I know this because I watched him at dinner three nights ago, the soft metallic clink when he pulled his phone out and set them briefly on the table before pocketing them again. Filed it automatically. The way I file everything now.
The chair is on his side.
I am going to have to cross him to get there.
I breathe for a moment and I think about being sixteen in my father's estate in the Campania hills, the long summer I spent learning every board, every step, every pressure point of the old house by feel, in the dark, in bare feet, because my father's curfew was ten o'clock and the kitchen had good wine and the garden had a gap in the wall and I was sixteen and stubborn and I got very, very good at moving through a house like I wasn't there.
That's what I call on now.
I ease out from under the covers one degree at a time. Left foot to the floor first, weight distributed, no single point of pressure. The carpet is thick. My feet are bare. I stand at the side of the bed and I wait, two full breaths, listening to his breathing.
Still even. Still deep.
I move around the foot of the bed to his side. Slow. Measured. Every step placed before the weight transfers, the way I learned it at sixteen — not tiptoeing, which is worse, but walking fully and deliberately and soundlessly. I reach the chair. My hand goes into the jacket's inside pocket with two fingers and I feel the ring of metal immediately, cool against my knuckles, heavier than I expected. Three keys. Two I recognize — the car, the front gate. The third is small and flat, the kind that opens a lock box or a desk drawer.
I close my fingers around them so they don't shift against each other.
Behind me, Rafael breathes.
In. Out. Steady.
I don't turn around. I just walk back around the foot of the bed, back to my side, out through the bedroom door and into the hallway, pulling it behind me with the same care I used at sixteen pulling the kitchen door closed at two in the morning while my father's guard dog slept in the corridor outside.
I look down at my hand.
Don't shake. There you go. See? Not shaking.
Technically a lie. The keys tremble the smallest amount, just enough that I can feel it. I move anyway, out into the hallway, past the library, to the second door on the left. His study. Thehallway is dark except for the low-placed safety lights near the floor, amber and dim. My feet are still bare. The carpet gives way to cool parquet outside the study door and the key goes in and the door swings open.
He doesn't lock things away the way I expected. That's the first thing I notice. I don't know what I thought — a room stripped bare, a surface with nothing on it, a man this controlled leaving nothing visible. But the desk is covered. Not messily, everything has a place, stacks aligned at exact right angles, a system underneath the surface. Maps pinned flat with paperweights. Folders tabbed and labelled. A legal pad with handwriting down the left margin, small and vertical and nothing like how I'd have guessed he writes.
