I picked the suit. Black. Classic. And then I reached for a tie without thinking, pulled it off the rack, and held it up against the jacket. Gray. The exact gray of his eyes behind those rectangular glasses. I didn’t realize what I’d done until I was holding it and by then it was too late to put it back without making it obvious.
"That one," I said, like I’d made a calculated professional decision and not an instinctive, deeply personal one.
He took the suit into the fitting room. I stood outside and studied the ceiling tiles, the fire exit sign, the pattern on the carpet—anything that wasn’t the fitting room door, because I needed to get my face under control before he came back out.
The door opened.
Two seconds. That’s how long I held it together.
He stepped out in the black suit, and everything I knew about maintaining professional distance and appropriate workplace behavior went quiet inside my head. The jacket sat flush against his shoulders, sharp and clean, then followed the line of his frame down to a waist I hadn't realized was that narrow.
The collar pressed close against his neck, and above it his jaw caught the fitting room light in a way that made my breath stall somewhere between my lungs and my mouth. He turned toward the mirror, adjusting one cuff with his gloved fingers, and I saw the full line of his back through the jacket, the fabric pulling gently across his shoulders, tapering at his hips. I'd had something to say. I was sure of it. It was gone.
"It looks fine," I managed.
He looked at me through the mirror. One eyebrow up. "Fine sounds underwhelming."
"It looks adequate."
"Now you’re being cruel."
"The suit is acceptable," I said, and my voice was steady even though the rest of me was not.
He turned away from the mirror and walked toward me. Stopped. Close. Closer than he’d ever voluntarily stood near me. The fitting room mirror behind him, the empty store around us, the silence so complete I could hear both of us breathing.
He held up the gray tie. "I can manage everything except this," he said. His voice was quieter than before. Those gray eyes on mine. "Would you help me?"
CHAPTER 11
Jace
She was knotting my tie and she was too close.
I could count the distance between our mouths. I did count it, because my brain doesn’t know how to exist in a moment without quantifying it. Four inches. Maybe less. She was standing right there, her fingers working the fabric at my collar, her eyes focused on the knot, her lower lip caught between her teeth while she concentrated.
I looked at that lip. At her teeth pressing into it. And I thought, with a clarity that should’ve horrified and surprised me, that I wanted to replace her teeth with mine.
With other women, the thought of this kind of proximity would have shut me down entirely. Shared breath. Shared moisture. The biological reality of what happens when two mouths meet, the bacteria, the exchange, the absolute absence of anything sterile. My brain had run that calculation a hundred times before and the answer was always the same.
Revulsion. Complete, non-negotiable, conversation over.
But this time, my brain was not producing revulsion.
It was producing something that bypassed the germaphobia and the conditioned recoil and went somewhere animal and hungry and completely without hygiene standards. I wanted totasteher. The thought arrived without apology, fully formed, and my body didn’t flag it as contamination. My body flagged it as desire. A need I wasn't familiar with.
Dr. Adler’s voice from our last session rang in my head:Don’t act on it yet. Don’t push it away either. Just notice it. If an impulse arrives that isn’t rooted in fear, follow it.
I’d followed it in the car. I’d held out my hand in the parking garage, gloved, careful, and she’d taken it. Her fingers against the leather and the warmth of her skin bleeding through to mine. My pulse had gone sideways but not because of panic. For the first time in my adult life, my heart rate spiked because a woman touched me and I liked it.
The revulsion never came.
And now she was four inches from my face with her lip between her teeth and smell of vanilla was everywhere. Dr. Adler could take his "don’t act on it" advice and send me the bill because I was leaning so far toward this woman I was about to fall.
"Almost done," she said. Her breath was warm against my chin. I swallowed. The sound was louder than it should have been in the empty store.
She pulled the knot tight, smoothed the tie flat against my chest, and then her fingers stopped moving. They just rested there, on the knot, on my chest, and she looked up.
Her eyes were dark brown, and up close there was amber near the iris, like light learning her shape and forgetting how to leave.
