"I know the name." I look at the window.
He's quiet for a moment. "Her sister Eleanor married Leonardo Rosetti. The New York family." A beat. "That makes Juliet legible to Isa in a way that has nothing to do with who she actually is. There's a system, and Juliet arrived already inside it. Isa recognizes that on sight."
"And I didn't arrive inside anything."
He holds my eyes. "You came through me." Not an apology in it. Not a softening. Just the fact, stated clean.
“Okay.”
"Isa reads institutional backing because that's how she reads safety. You didn't come with any. Just mine."
Just mine.
The words land in the center of my chest. Not as consolation. As a fact that is simply true — flat, certain, requiring no defense.
Neither of us moves for a moment.
Then I stand, and he pushes back from the desk, and we close the distance simultaneously. He catches my face in both hands. My left hand reaches for the lapel of his jacket; my right arm, braced and careful, settles against his chest. Neither of us hesitated, and that almost undoes me.
He kisses me slowly.
Not the consuming urgency of the forest — that was hunger given permission after weeks of containment. Not the drowning quality of the shower at dawn. This is something else, something that is choosing to take its time. His mouth is warm and deliberate, and I feel my eyes close and my left hand tightens on his lapel, and the pencil stub is somewhere on the daybed,and the world has contracted to this room and this man and his mouth against mine.
He pulls back, just far enough.
"Lock the door," he says.
I go lock the door.
He undresses me slowly, starting with the jacket — lifting it off my shoulders with careful attention to the brace on my arm, working around it without making a thing of it. The jacket goes over the desk chair. His hands move to the hem of my shirt.
"Here?" The slightest question in it.
"Yes."
The shirt comes off. He looks at me in the afternoon light.
The bruising at my ribs has yellowed but it's still visible, still there, the map of the blast's reach across my body. He raises his hand and traces the edge of the bruising with two fingers — light, unhurried. Not a clinical inspection. A reckoning. The touch lasts two full seconds, maybe three. He doesn't say anything. I place my hand over his and hold it there, and for a moment neither of us breathes.
Then his hand turns under mine and he's reaching for the clasp of my bra.
I reach for his shirt buttons in return. He goes still and lets me work through them, down the line of them, my left hand managing the buttons while my braced right arm rests against his chest. The suit shirt falls open to reveal the swimmer's chest I've been drawing from memory, the scars I know now by touch and by sight and by the story behind each one. I push the shirt off his shoulders. He lets it drop to the floor, which is unlike him — he has opinions about floors.
He unclasps my bra and slides it off my arms, careful of the brace.
I unhook his belt. My left hand makes a clumsy pass at the buckle and he covers my hand with his, helps without comment,and then the rest follows and we're standing here in the afternoon light in his locked office and I can see all of him. I've drawn all of it. I know it like a map.
I run my palm over his chest, slow, and he stays still for it.
Then he reaches for me — both hands at my waist, lifting me, walking me back to the daybed, settling me on it. He kneels in front of me on the rug. The deliberateness of it. The afternoon light through the high office window. He pulls my jeans off slowly, the brace not an obstacle in his careful hands, and then my underwear, and then he is between my knees and I am the only thing in the room.
He spreads my knees apart with his palms and settles between my thighs.
The first stroke of his tongue pulls a sound out of me that the office walls barely contain.
He's not searching. That's what registers first, underneath the immediate rush of sensation — he'sknowing, attentive, applying what he's already learned. Slow, deliberate strokes that build rather than rush. Reading every shift in my breathing, every involuntary press of my hips toward him. My left hand finds his hair and grips, not guiding, just needing something to hold onto.
"God—" The word comes out ragged.
