I broke the silence first. “I don’t know what happened between you and your brother. I don’t have every piece. Probably never will.” I waited until I had the right words. “But in my eyes, Christopher, you’re better than Dominic in every single way. And every person in your life who looked at both brothers and chose his side must have had terrible, abysmal, genuinely embarrassing taste.”
He was still behind me. For a second I thought I’d pushed too far, said the wrong thing, stepped into a place he wasn’t ready to let me into.
Then I felt his chest shake. Once. Twice.
He was laughing.
He kissed my forehead. My eyelids. The tip of my nose. The corner of my mouth.
Christopher Vale kissed differently now. The hunger was still there underneath, I could feel it in the way his fingers tightened on my waist, but there was also something new.
Something careful, gentle, and true.
I lay in his arms and wondered if this meant as much to him as it did to me. If the tenderness was real or just the afterglow. If the man who’d saidmineagainst my skin with so much desperation meant it the way I wanted him to mean it or the way the contract required him to.
The rain eased. His breathing evened out. His arms didn’t loosen.
I closed my eyes and pressed my face against his chest and listened to his heart and thought:Iam so far over my head that the surface isn’t even visible anymore.
I wasn’t sinking. I was diving, on purpose, with my eyes wide open.
CHAPTER 21
Christopher
Fourteen days.
That’s what was left on the contract. Fourteen days until the ninety-day timeline expired, the papers dissolved, and Miley Torres walked out of my house and my life with a lump sum and a handshake. And I went back to being the man I was before her.
The man who ate alone. Who slept on closet floors. Who kept every person at arm’s length because that was the only distance that felt safe.
I didn’t want to be that man anymore.
The realization had been building for weeks, accumulating quietly the way rain fills a basin, one drop at a time, until one morning I was standing in the kitchen watching Miley argue with a sourdough starter that wasn’t cooperating and she turned to me with flour on her cheek and said “This bread is personally victimizing me” and I thought, very clearly and without any effort to stop it: Iam in love with this woman.
What I felt for Miley was solid, consuming. It was the feeling of standing in a kitchen that smelled like rosemary and watching a woman with flour on her face talk to bread like it was misbehaving, and knowing that this was where I wanted to be.
Here. With her. In the mess and the warmth and the sticky notes with angry faces.
I walked into the kitchen one morning while she was prepping Eleanor’s lunch and said I wanted to help. She turned around so fast she dropped a spatula. It clattered on the tile and she stared at me like I’d announced I was taking up skydiving.
“You want to help,” she said, flat and suspicious.
“I can chop things.”
“You can chop things.”
“I have hands. I have a knife. The physics aren’t complicated.”
She handed me an onion and a cutting board and watched me the way a surgeon watches an intern holding a scalpel for the first time. I chopped the onion. The pieces were uneven and too large and she took the knife from me without a word and re-diced everything in about fifteen seconds and I stood there thinking that watching Miley Torres handle a knife was unreasonably attractive.
I drove her to the Sazón construction site. Stood in the gutted dining room while she walked me through the new layout, pointing at empty spaces with so much conviction and energy that I could almost see what she was describing. The new kitchen would be larger. The bar would face the entrance. She wanted an open-concept design where guests could watch the cooking, because she believed food was a conversation between the chef and the person eating it, and conversations shouldn’t happen behind closed doors.
I watched her face while she talked. The way it lit up. The way her hands moved. The way she became something bigger than herself when she was inside this dream.
I was going to marry her. The real way. The kind where I mean the vows and keep them. I wanted to wake up everymorning choosing her because she was the only person who makes the noise in my head go quiet.
I let it slip to Trisha.
