My robe. She was wearing my robe. The white one, the one I kept for emergencies that had never been used, and it fell to her knees and the belt was tied at her waist. Her hair was loose around her shoulders in dark curls that were still messy from sleep and her feet were bare on my clean wood floor.
"Morning," she said. Her voice was raspy, rough from sleep. The sound of it went straight through me.
"Morning." I poured her coffee. Set the mug on the counter between us. Safe distance.
She picked up the mug and our fingers brushed on the ceramic. Brief. Incidental. My pulse responded anyway.
"The roads are flooded," I said stiffly. "Mudslides overnight. The mountain route is closed until further notice."
She took a sip. "So I’m stuck with you."
"It appears so."
"I guess there are worse prisons."
"This cabin costs more than most prisons."
"And the warden is better looking." She said it into her coffee, casual, like she hadn’t just made my ears burn. I turned back to the counter and started breakfast. She sat at the table in the robe that kept shifting and every time she moved, a different part of her was briefly visible.
The curve of her shoulder when she leaned forward. The inside of her knee when she crossed her legs. The shadow of her collarbone when she tilted her head to push her hair back. She was doing none of this on purpose but my brain was treating it like a full sensory assault.
We ate. We talked about the rain and a book she'd noticed on my shelf. The conversation came without effort, which never happened to me, and I kept forgetting to be careful because her laugh did something to the air in the room that made walls feel pointless.
The day unfolded. She read on the couch, legs tucked under her, one of my books in her lap. I worked at my desk, the Ethereal Vanguard modifications I’d been neglecting, code reviews and narrative feedback that Miles had been forwarding for days. We existed in the same space without needing to fill it with noise.
By afternoon the proximity had done its work.
She kept being close. Sitting beside me on the couch when every other seat was empty. Standing next to me at the window when there were six in the cabin. Reaching past me in the kitchen for a glass, her body angling toward mine, the robe brushing my arm, her breath warm on my neck for half a second before she pulled away.
I was going to break. I could feel the fracture spreading through the control I’d spent the entire day maintaining and the question wasn’t if but when.
"What do you want, Anna?"
I asked it at the kitchen counter. Late afternoon. The under-cabinet lights were on and she was leaning against the counter with a glass of wine, her hair pulled up, the back of her neck exposed.
She looked at me and set the wine down. Her eyes searched my face. "I want to learn all of you, Jace. Please stop pushing me away."
My throat closed, and it had nothing to do with allergies. Dr. Adler had a name for this, my body's way of processing feelings too large for language. She was standing in my kitchen, in my robe, asking me to let her in, and the request was so simple and so terrifying that I couldn't speak.
"I didn’t come here out of sympathy," she said, taking a step toward me. "I didn’t come because I felt sorry for you or because Miles asked me to check on you or because it’s my job."
Another step. Closer.
"I came here for you, Jace. Because I miss you. Because that office is wrong without you in it and my week was wrong without you in it and I drove herebecause being far from you felt worse than anything I was afraid of."
She was right in front of me. "I want you. All of you. The man who plays piano at midnight and draws my face from memoryand can’t touch a doorknob without gloves. I want that man. All of him."
I swallowed. My hands were shaking. My pulse was so loud in my ears that I could barely hear the rain. I was afraid to hope because hope was the most dangerous thing in the world for a man like me. Worse than the basement. Worse than the panic attacks. Because hope meant believing this could last, and I had never survived the moment when something I believed in was taken away.
But she was standing in my kitchen, her voice steady as her eyes.
She wanted me. All of me.
The space between us closed.
I kissed her.
Her lips were soft, warm, and everything else fell away.
