It’s on the little table by the door, next to a bowl where he keeps his keys, and my whole body does a small stupid thing before my brain catches up to why. Cream. Heavier than normal paper. The kind with a little tooth to it, the kind that holds ink so it presses through to the back.
The kind my notes are written on.
My stomach drops about an inch and then catches itself, because — okay. No. Let’s all calm down. Paper is paper. They make that paper by the truckload. It’s in every store that sells stationery in America. It’s probably in a drawer in my own apartment, it means exactly nothing that a grown man owns a notepad. Men own notepads, that’s allowed.
And anyway it would never be Erik.
I mean.Lookat him.
He’s crouched at a low drawer across the room, sleeves shoved up, the muscle in his forearm shifting as he digs for whatever he’s after, jaw doing the thing it does — and the thought I was having, whatever responsible thought I was building about notepads and evidence, just sort of wanders off mid-sentence and doesn’t come back. A man who looks like that does not spend his evenings handwriting affirmations and sliding them under a woman’s door and running off at speeds that violate physics. He has better things to do. He has, presumably, an entire calendar of better things, full of people-shaped —
No. We’re not doing the calendar thing again.
But the paper does something to me anyway, some side door it opens, because thinking about the notes makes me think about last night, and thinking about last night makes me think about —
Blue.
Not blue like a color you pick. Blue like something looking back. Pale, almost silver where the dark should be, fixed on me and not letting go, and the rest of the face won’t hold still but the eyes do, the eyes stay, and there’s a body pressed against my back and a mouth at my ear saying a word I can’t quite —
Starlight.
He called me Starlight.
Nobody calls me Starlight. Nobody has ever called me Starlight, it’s not a me thing, it’s not a thing anyone has said to my face in twenty-nine years. I’d remember, you don’t get calledStarlightand forget it. But there it is, sitting in my head in a voice I’ve never heard, attached to a face I can’t hold and a pair of hands that — okay. The hands I remember. The hands werethorough.It was, in fairness, an extremely good dream.
It just wasn’tmydream. That’s the part. I didn’t build him. I build all of them, the men from my books, that’s the whole point of them, and I did not build a silver-eyed stranger who —
“Ella.”
I am underwater and someone says my name from the surface.
“Hey.” Closer now. “You okay?”
I blink, and the room comes back — Erik’s apartment, Erik standing right in front of me with whatever he was grabbing forgotten in one hand, watching me with a small line between his brows. I have no ideahow long I was gone. Long enough. Long enough that he crossed the whole apartment and I didn’t notice a single step of it.
My face goes hot. Instantly. Catastrophically.
Because I know what my face was doing. I could feel it doing it. I was standing in this man’s home with my whole expression somewhere very far away and veryspecific, and he watched it happen, and there is no version of the last thirty seconds where I looked like a woman thinking about taxes.
“Fine,” I say. “I’m fine. I was — thinking. About the article. The oolong. Riveting stuff, the oolong, you really get lost in it.”
He does not believe me. I can see him not believing me. But it’s worse than that, because he’s not just catching me in a lie — he’s looking at me like he knowsexactlywhat I was actually thinking. Like he can read the heat on my face, and the corner of his mouth has gone up, just slightly.
Oh. My…
He isenjoying this.
“The oolong,” he says.
“It’s a very rich topic.”
“You looked pretty lost in it.”
“It’s complex. There are antioxidants. There are — notes. Tasting notes.” I am making it worse. I can hear myself making it worse and I cannot stop. This is just who I am now, a woman who saystasting notesto a man who watched her have an entire private moment in his living room. “It’s a whole world. The tea world.”
“Mm.” He’s still got that look. He looks at me just a little longer than I can survive and then takes pity on me, or pretends to. “I’ve got a couple more things in the back.”
“Great. Yes. Go. I’ll be here, being normal.”
