She went back to her sketch and told herself the weird feeling in her stomach was just hunger.
Later that afternoon she found him studying the drawings. She'd taken a break to stretch her legs and was wandering towards the kitchen for more tea when she heard the rustle of paper coming from the dining area. She pressed herself against the hallway wall and peeked around the corner.
He was standing at the table, but he wasn't staring at the chaos in horror, like she would have expected. Instead, he was studying it. His massive frame bent slightly as he examined one of her larger sketches—the concept for the main focal wall, with the Emerald Enforcers crest exploding into a dynamic scene of players in motion, the lines radiating outward to create a sense of energy and movement.
He picked up another sketch—one of the individual player portraits, stylized and bold, designed to line the corridor leading to the locker room. His huge fingers were surprisingly gentle with the paper, careful not to smudge the charcoal.
His expression was... soft. That was the only word for it. The rigid control was gone, replaced by something almost tender. He traced the lines of a figure with his eyes, following the movement she'd captured, the dynamism she'd tried to convey.
He looked like someone seeing art for the first time, really seeing it, and her chest ached as if something was pressed against it.
She must have made a sound because his head snapped up, and he caught her watching. For a moment they just stared at each other across the chaos-strewn table. Then his face closed off. The mask snapped back into place. He set down the sketchhe'd been holding, positioning it exactly where it had been, and straightened to his full terrifying height.
"I was checking for damage," he said. "To the table."
"Uh-huh."
"The charcoal. It smudges."
"It does."
"I wasn't—" He stopped. Swallowed. Started again. "The drawings are. Adequate."
Adequate.Coming from Tarmek, that was practically a standing ovation.
"Thank you," she said sincerely.
He gave a sharp nod and walked past her towards the kitchen. She watched him go—watched the tension in his shoulders and the way he very deliberately did not look at her as he passed.
The box in her mind, the one where she'd been trying to keep him safely contained, developed another crack. Then another. Then it started to fall apart entirely, and she realized she might be in very serious trouble.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The storm had lasted for three days. Seventy-two hours. Four thousand three hundred and twenty minutes.
Tarmek had counted every single one.
He stood in his kitchen at 4:47 AM—thirteen minutes ahead of his normal schedule, because he'd given up on trying to sleep—and stared at the mug on the counter. The blue one with the white stripe. His favorite mug. The one she'd used last night to drink hot chocolate while watching some reality show about competitive flower arranging, laughing so hard she'd snorted milk out of her nose.
She'd left it next to the sink. Not in the sink. Not in the dishwasher. Next to it. Like the dishwasher was too far away. Like the extra four inches of movement was simply beyond human—or in her case, delightfully chaotic human—capacity.
He picked up the mug. He washed it by hand because the dishwasher wouldn't run until evening, and he couldn't look at the evidence of her for another twelve hours. He dried it with thedesignated mug towel and put it back on the second shelf in the cabinet in the striped mug section.
Order restored.
He turned around and found her sweater draped over one of the kitchen chairs. The purple sweater that was too big for her and kept slipping off one shoulder and had a small hole near the hem that she'd patched with embroidery thread in a completely different color, some kind of orange that clashed beautifully and made his eye twitch every time he looked at it.
He picked up the sweater. It smelled like her—paint and chai and something warm he couldn't identify but had started dreaming about. He folded it and set it on the chair properly, adjusted the angle twice.
This is fine,he told himself.This is manageable. This is?—
A sound drifted from somewhere in the condo. Soft, melodic, utterly devastating. She was singing again. Edie sang constantly. While cooking. While sketching. Even while brushing her teeth, which he only knew because he'd walked past the bathroom yesterday and heard her humming through a mouthful of toothpaste.
She didn't have a great voice, but she sang with complete, unselfconscious joy. She sang like music was just something her body did naturally, the same way it breathed or left catastrophic messes everywhere she went.
Right now she was singing something about yellow submarines. The melody floated through the cabin, punctuated by the sound of running water and the clatter of what was probably his organized bathroom cabinet being systematically reorganized.
He gripped the edge of the counter and forced himself to breathe.
