My fingers brush the shelf. Not the chocolate. The shelf. The chocolate is behind it, pushed back, unreachable by at least four inches that might as well be four miles.
I stretch further, gripping the edge of the counter with my other hand for balance, and rise higher on my toes until my calves burn. My sweatshirt rides up. I’m aware of this. I’m aware that a strip of skin is now visible between the hem of thesweatshirt and the waistband of my shorts. I’m aware that he’s behind me. I’m aware of all of it.
I make a small jump. A tiny, pathetic hop that gains me approximately one inch of altitude and zero chocolate.
And then I feel him.
Not touching, but there behind me, close enough that the air between us changes composition. It becomes warmer, thicker, carrying a scent that reminds me of cold weather and woodsmoke.
His arm reaches past me easily. Without even fully extending. His forearm passes close enough to my shoulder that I feel the warmth of his skin through the rolled sleeve.
A suggestion of contact, which is somehow worse than the real thing.
His hand closes around the chocolate bar on the top shelf and brings it down. For a moment — one second, maybe two — his chest is inches from my back, and I feel the heat, the sheer physical mass of him.
A flush starts at the base of my spine and climbs. There’s a tightening low in my stomach. A sudden, vivid awareness of every place where his body is almost touching mine but isn’t.
He holds the chocolate out to me.
I take it. Our fingers don’t touch, but his eyes meet mine as I take it. Up close, his eyes are more than pale blue. They’re layered. Ice over water.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
He steps back and returns to his side of the island. He takes a sip of vodka and says nothing.
The whole interaction took less than five seconds. But it feels like my body will be processing it for a lifetime.
I face the stove and pour the milk into the pot. I turn the heat to low. My hands are trembling. Not in the way they trembled outside my apartment when Landon’s hand was on mythroat but with a sensation that starts in my chest and radiates outward.
Stop it,I tell myself.Stop it right now.He’s your employer. Your boss. He pays your salary. There can be no impure thoughts.
Too late for that.
I break the chocolate into pieces and add them slowly, the way Dad taught me. One piece at a time, letting it melt before adding the next. The rhythm helps. The familiarity of the motions, the click of the spoon against the pot, the smell of chocolate warming in milk. It brings me back to myself. Back to the reason I’m here.
Not for the man behind me. For the girl upstairs.
I add a pinch of sugar and a dash of salt, stirring until the color deepens to a rich, dark brown that Dad would have approved of.
I pour it into a mug, a simple white one I find in the lower cabinet, thank God, and turn around.
The space where Rolan was standing is empty.
His glass is on the counter, rinsed, and set upside down on a towel to dry. No mess. No trace. As if he’d never been there.
I exhale. It comes out shaky.
I take the chocolate and go upstairs.
Anya’s room is four doors down from mine on the same floor.
This struck me as strange when I first arrived. I expected to be housed in a staff wing or a separate corridor. Somewhere appropriately distant. Instead, Mikhail led me to a room in the main residential hallway. Close enough that I can hear Anya’s door if it opens. Close enough that tonight, a different noise bled through.
I wasn’t sleeping. I haven’t been sleeping well since I got here. Not because of the bed, which is obscenelycomfortable, but because my brain won’t turn off. It cycles through the same loop every night: the debt, Landon, the next payment, the one after that.
So, I was awake, staring at the ceiling, when I decided to take a walk. I padded into the hallway in my socks, and that’s when I heard it: a whimper, muffled by a pillow.
Anya’s door was open. The crescent moon nightlight painted the room in pale gold.
