Mine.
My grip on the glass goes slack so suddenly, it almost slips. “Oh my God,” I choke out.
“You left this at the terminal,” he says.
“I…” My voice catches. I clear my throat. “You didn’t have to bring it all the way here.”
“I know.”
Silence stretches between us, dense and intimate. Not empty. Weighted. Full of the things he could say and doesn’t. Full of the things I want and refuse to admit.
I feel him in the space like heat. Like gravity. Like the line of his attention is a touch that stops just short of skin. His gazeflicks to the glass still in my hand and then back to my face, and there’s something in the way he looks at me that makes my pulse trip.
Not pity.
Not judgment.
Recognition.
As if he understands what it costs to open a door even an inch.
I should take the wallet and shut the chain again. I should thank him and let the hallway swallow him back into anonymity.
Instead, I step back. Not because he asked. Because I want him to come in. Because the suite behind me is too quiet, and the silence is shaped like Marco’s breath on my neck and the slam of doors and the sound of my own heart trying to outrun my body.
Because he’s here and my brain is already rewriting him into a threat my body refuses to believe.
He doesn’t move right away. He waits. Like he’s giving me one more chance to change my mind without losing face.
Then, slowly, he steps forward. The movement is unhurried, but it still makes my insides tighten. Not fear. Awareness.
The air shifts when he crosses the threshold, like the room takes him in and decides it belongs to him. Like the space recalibrates around his body without him ever raising a hand.
The door closes softly behind him. A quiet click. A sound that lands somewhere low in my chest. We stand a few feet apart, the space between us buzzing with everything we didn’t do earlier. Everything we both pretended didn’t exist.
The wallet is in his hand. I can see the way his fingers hold it. Careful, precise, like he’s practiced restraint so long that it’s become muscle. Scarred knuckles. Clean nails. A man who can break things and chooses not to.
I swallow. “Thank you,” I say, and it meansThank you for bringing itandThank you for not asking why I’m shakingandThank you for not looking at me like I’m brokenandThank you for existing in a way that doesn’t demand pieces of me as payment.
His eyes hold mine, steady, unreadable in the way dangerous things are unreadable. Not blank.
Contained.
“You’re welcome,” he says, yet the words don’t feel like politeness. They feel like a promise he isn’t supposed to make.
He extends the wallet. I reach for it. Our fingers brush. Just skin to skin. A glancing touch. An accident.
It feels like a spark. Something sharp lights under my skin and runs straight up my arm, straight into my throat, and suddenly I’m too aware of my own breath, too aware of how close he is, too aware of the fact that nobody is forcing this.
His gaze drops to our hands as if the contact matters to him, too.
I don’t pull away.
Neither does he.
The wallet hangs between us for a fraction of a second, forgotten, because the real exchange is happening in the tiny pause where neither of us moves. His thumb shifts, barely, against the side of my finger. My stomach flips, slow and hot, and I hate the softness that rushes through me at something that small.
His gaze lifts back to mine. The muscles in his jaw flex once, like he’s biting down on something he shouldn’t want.
