The kiss was the other thing I couldn’t outrun.
Two days. It had been two days since the gallery and I could still feel it. Not the physical sensation, that was memory, neural pathways firing on repeat, easy to dismiss. What I couldn’t dismiss was the silence. The three seconds during the kiss when every noise in my head stopped.
The company, the board, Esmeralda, Dominic, Paul Hargrove’s silver-tongued campaign to remove me, all of it, gone. Like someone had found the master switch for the machine that had been running nonstop inside my skull since I was six years old and flipped it off.
Three seconds of quiet. That’s all it was. And I’d been chasing the echo of it for forty-eight hours like a man dying of thirst who’d been handed water and then had the glass taken away.
Damn it.
I’d kissed co-stars on camera a hundred times. It was mechanics. Angles, pressure, and duration calibrated to whatever the director wanted. I could kiss a woman and plan my dinner simultaneously. It meant nothing. It was part of the job.
But when my lips touched Miley’s, my brain didn’t plan dinner. My brain didn’t plan anything. She kissed me back and for three seconds I was just a man kissing a woman and nothing else existed.
Great. I was fucked. I was completely, absolutely, irreversibly fucked.
“Shit,” I said to nobody, sitting at my desk at Vale Industries, staring at a quarterly report I’d been pretending to read for the past twenty minutes.
The office door opened without a knock. Paul Hargrove walked in like he owned the building, which he did not, despite the way he carried himself.
“Christopher. A moment?”
I didn’t invite him to sit. He sat anyway.
“The board has concerns,” he said, folding his hands on his knee. “About the public incidents. The general… instability.”
“The board has concerns, or you have concerns?”
“The board, Christopher. I’m merely the messenger.”
“You’re the messenger who’s been having lunches with my stepmother for three weeks.” I set down my pen and lookedat him. “I know about the dinners, Paul. The phone calls. The quiet conversations in hallways after meetings. If you’re going to campaign against me, at least have the decency to do it openly instead of hiding behind Esmeralda’s skirt.”
Paul’s expression didn’t change but his posture did. The comfortable lean became something more rigid. “I’m not campaigning against you.”
“Then stop briefing my stepmother on internal board discussions. Stop feeding her information to use against me. And stop walking into my office without knocking, because this is my office, not yours, and the nameplate on the door says Vale.” I held his gaze. “Are we clear?”
Paul studied me for a long moment. Whatever he saw must have recalibrated something in his assessment, because when he stood, he buttoned his jacket and said, “Perfectly clear, Mr. Vale,” and left without the satisfied smile he’d walked in with.
I watched the door close, then turned back to the quarterly report. The numbers swam.
“Damn it,” I said again.
I couldn’t focus. Not when it came to her.
The data points accumulated without my permission.
She was awake before me every morning. The kitchen smelled different each day depending on what she was making, and I’d started identifying the dishes by scent before I reached the bottom of the stairs.
Tuesday was garlic and rosemary, which meant roasted something. Wednesday was cinnamon, which meant she was baking. Thursday smelled like coconut and lime. I stood on the landing for thirty seconds, just breathing it in—before I remembered I was a grown man on my own staircase, inhaling the cooking smells of a woman who had slapped me across the face a few weeks ago.
She talked to my grandmother with genuine warmth. The real kind that made my grandmother’s color come back and her appetite return. Her laughter rang through the house in a way it hadn’t since before Dominic’s accident.
She left foil-covered plates in the kitchen every night. The sticky notes were the newer development. They’d started appearing after the gallery kiss, the same week, like she’d decided that if she was going to feed me, she might as well make it entertaining. She’d written,This is for the food thiefon one of the sticky notes once.
I ate every plate. Every single one. And I kept the sticky notes in my desk drawer, stacked neatly in the order they arrived. I didn’t think about why I was keeping them because thinking aboutwhywould require admitting something I was not prepared to admit.
She was warm. That was the thing that undid me most. After everything I’d done to her, the kiwi, the lies, what I did in the hospital corridor that I still couldn’t believe I’d actually done, she was warm.
Not to me specifically. To the house. To Carlos, who she’d turned into her biggest fan by feeding him breakfast. To Diego, who now left fresh flowers on the kitchen counter every morning as a thank-you for the empanadas she’d made him. To everyone she encountered, Miley Torres radiated a kindness that wasn't strategic or performative or conditional. It was just who she was—the way cooking was who she was, fundamental and built in.
