When she moved back to Spain after my father died, the apartment felt twice as big and half as warm. She said she needed sun. Needed her sisters to heal. Needed home. I told her I understood. I did. Ido.
Doesn’t mean I don’t feel like I was being left behind, even though it’s my choice to stay here in Amsterdam.
I try to visit her as much as I can, it’s only a fifteen hour ride after all, but it’s mostly just video calls and her asking if I’m eating enough, if I’m sleeping, if I’m working too much…
If I’ve met someonenice.
Always that last one, slipped in so casually.
I swallow and drop my sleeves back down. “Yeah,” I say lightly, like none of that just hit me out of nowhere. “Pretty much covered.”
She claps her hands before conjuring up a blindfold and pushing it in my hands. “Put that on! This is perfect! And we’re going outside if you’re okay with that?”
Wait. What? I take in the set I just spent the entire morning building, all the equipment I hauled from the van to this location. “Outside?”
“Yes!” She ushers me toward the door and points up at the roof windows, frosted and heavy with snow. “It’s lighter outside. I think the worstof it is over. And there’s this beautiful mural just outside that would match your and Milos’s art perfectly.”
Milos?
Before I can ask her anything more about this Milos, we’re outside and the cold hits me like a damn wall—sharp, immediate, stealing the air straight from my lungs.
Yeah, it stopped snowing hard all right. Now it’s just flakes drifting down in an easy, lazy flutter. Almost peaceful. But holy shit, it’s not pleasant. Beautiful, sure—cinematic even—but cold enough to bite through denim and ink and straight into my fucking bones.
She veers around the front of the industrial building. An old tram-turned-bistro sits beside the wall, closed for winter, its windows dark and fogged, the tables and chairs covered under tarp. Right next to it stretches a massive mural of bold strokes in neon pink and electric blue, abstract faces layered over spray-painted typography, streaks of orange slashing through like light trails. The kind of art that looks alive against the steel-gray metal. A violent splash of color against the whitewashed world.
“Over there, okay? Right next to the wall. Yes, like that.” She positions me with quick, decisive movements. “I’m going to fetch him. I’ll be quick, promise. Please pull up your blindfold and stay just like that so you can stand back to back.”
She hurries off, arms wrapped around herself to keep warm, boots crunching over frozen gravel.
I watch her go, a shiver running through me when a snowflake melts against the trees inked around my neck.
Right.
We’re doing this.
Doing as she told me, I pull the black cloth up over my eyes, tying it snug. The world goes dark. The cold feels sharper without sight, louder somehow. I square my shoulders and stand still, back straight, palms loose at my sides, my shoulder against the cold mural.
Waiting.
For Milos.
CHAPTER 03: MILOS
“Ready?” Sadie asks as the first clicks from her Nikon start firing. “I just need a couple of shots like this first, with the blindfolds, okay? You’re doing great! Could you, if you want to, lean a bit more against one another?”
We shift, careful at first, until the warm back of this stranger settles fully against mine. The curve of his ass sits just above mine—my blind date’s taller than me, big surprise there—and my heart bounces just a fraction too fast at the sudden closeness. Even through layers of fabric, I can feel the heat of him, solid and real, ramping my nerves up in a way I didn’t expect.
God, this is so weird.
Standing half-frozen against a stranger in the middle of the NDSM, blindfolded, snow drifting down, while a photographer circles us like this is the most normal thing in the world.
“Oh, perfect. Just like that!” More clicking, Sadie shifts angles, boots crunching in the snow. “Maybe… hold hands? Is that okay?”
A soft, amused chuckle from behind me is all the answer tall dude gives before a miraculously warm palm slides into my cold one, fingers slipping easily between my own.
His hand feels broad, firm, a little callused, like he’s used to working with his hands. Not office-soft. Not delicate. Solid.
Which, apparently, is an instant turn-on for me, if the quick flash of heat curling low in my stomach is any sign.
