Page 1

Chapter 1

The Walk-Up

PRESTON

The radiator wakes up before we do.

It starts at 05:47 – thirteen minutes before the alarm – with a metallic groan, then the clanking. D minor, as always. Luke identified the key two years ago, back when this was his apartment and I was just the idiot who’d ordered him an espresso machine at 02:00 after our first night together. Luke says this like it’s a neutral fact. “It clanks. That’s what radiators do.” As if the D minor concerto at dawn is just physics, and I’m the unreasonable one for having an opinion about it.

I pull the pillow over my face.

“Your radiator is performing,” I mumble into the cotton.

“Our radiator.” Luke’s voice comes from somewhere near the bathroom. He’s already up. He’s always already up. “And it’s not performing. It’s distributing heat.”

“It’s distributing misery. It’s the municipal infrastructure equivalent of my mother at a dinner party.”

The bathroom door opens. Luke walks out in his scrubs – emerald green, ID badge clipped to the pocket, hair damp. He looks like what you’d get if you asked a sculptor to carve “competence” out of warm bronze. He achieves this on four hours of sleep and a four-dollar shampoo, which I consider a personal insult.

“You’re not dressed,” he says.

“I’m in mourning. The pillow gets it.”

“Your shift starts at 08:00.”

“My shift starts when the Breville has completed its sacred duty, and not a moment before.”

“So get up and make coffee.”

“You were up first. The first-to-rise protocol clearly states–”

“Bullshit, there is no protocol.”

“There’s an implied social contract. You stood on a stage next to a drunk Archbishop and promised to love me unconditionally. That’s espresso-adjacent, Luke. Read between the vows.”

He gives me the look. The one where his mouth stays flat but something behind his eyes is either laughing or loading a weapon. After a year of marriage, the ambiguity still thrills me.

“Get up, Preston.”

“Make me.”

He crosses the room in two strides, hooks his hand around the back of my neck, and kisses me. Not the running-late, married-people peck. A real kiss – firm, deliberate, highly possessive. The kind that says you’re mine and the radiator can wait. His thumb presses into the hinge of my jaw, tilting my face exactly where he wants it. He tastes like toothpaste and decisiveness and it makes my head spin. In the best way.

When he pulls back, I’m vertical. Somehow. My feet are on the cold floor and I have no memory of the transition – thoroughly distracted and bamboozled by my siren of a husband.

“There, now you’re up,” he says.

“That’s cheating.”

“That’s efficiency.” He picks up his bag from the chair by the door. “I’m in the ER until 20:00.”

“Psych ward. 08:00 to whenever the human brain decides to cooperate, which – historically – is never. Dinner?”

“Thai place on Ditmars?”

“The one that gave me food poisoning in October?”

“That’s the one.”