And he made it feel like the best thing that has happened to me in months.
That's the problem.
That's the whole problem.
I straighten my dress.
I go upstairs and accept a champagne glass from a passing server and stand at the railing looking at Biscayne Bay and I understand, watching the paparazzi flashes strobe across the dark water, that I have never wanted anything more than the man who just walked away from me.
I'd be furious about it.
I am furious about it.
But the fury and the wanting have stopped feeling like opposites, and I'm not sure they ever were.
18
SOFIA
Three days.
That's how long I spend back at St. Gabriel pretending I don't know what his hands feel like.
I attend lectures. I eat in the dining hall with Mara, who asks no questions and shares her notes, which is the precise combination of qualities that makes her the only person I can currently tolerate. I sit through a seminar on syndicate law and write down words that don't penetrate past the surface of my brain. I sleep badly. I run in the morning because the track is the only place on campus without cameras in the gargoyles, and running is the closest thing to freedom this school offers.
He is here. In the same building. In the same suite that smells like cedar and cold air and something I have now permanently associated with the wordproblem.
He hasn't mentioned the yacht.
The first day, we operate in formal parallel.
He's in his study by seven AM. I'm in the kitchen. He comes out for coffee at eight, we exchange two sentences about the week's schedule, and then he goes back in and closes the door. I sit with my workbook and listen to his voice through the wall— Russian, precise, a phone call to Moscow, and the fact that I understand maybe forty percent of it is the only thing that morning that feels like I have any advantage in this building.
After lunch he leaves the Tower entirely. Meeting in the east wing, I assume, or one of the library conference rooms the Heirs use for the meetings that don't happen on paper. I don't know and he didn't say and I didn't ask.
The second day is worse because it's quieter.
He works. I study. We eat meals at offset times, which is almost certainly not an accident. I have breakfast before he emerges. He has dinner after I've already retreated to my room. The Tower has developed a specific temperature — not cold, not warm, the careful nothing of two people maintaining exactly the distance they need to pretend nothing is happening.
I've seen him use this technique on other people. I thought it was a form of control.
I didn't realize it would feel like this from the receiving end.
By the third morning I'm angry about it, which is better than the alternative. Anger has a shape. It gives me somewhere to put the energy that's been building since the yacht, since the corridor in Miami, since the specific weight of his forehead on my shoulder in the garage and the three words he said to the brake caliper before stepping back and pretending they hadn't happened.
I go to my seminar and take meticulous notes about a jurisdiction case I have no interest in. I eat with Mara and don't tell her about the yacht; she doesn't ask, and the not-asking is the most careful kindness I've received since October. On the way back to the Tower I detour through the east wing garden and sit on the stone bench by the dead fountain — dark, cold, the night air smelling of wet stone and November — and think:this is not sustainable.
I already knew it wasn't sustainable.
I'd been telling myself I was fine with not-sustainable.
I'm not.
It's past midnight on the third night when I hear him in the kitchen.
Not loud — just the specific quiet sounds of someone who grew up in a house with staff and never quite unlearned the art of moving like he doesn't want to be noticed. The soft click of the cabinet. Ice. The pour of something that costs more than my gap year.
I should go back to my room.
