“All guest quarters are full for the festival.” He said the words before he’d fully considered what they’d cost him. “You will stay at my apartment.”
She looked at him.
The look lasted long enough that he noticed his own breathing, his own hands, and the frost still following in fractals on the floor behind him. Whatever she found in his face was enough. She nodded and said, “I’m ready.”
The walkto his apartment was silent. Close. The air was simultaneously sharp and sweet between them. He offered his arm, and Phoebe looped her elbow through his. They walked this way through the village, closer than they had ever been, and Thorne was conscious of the press of her body against his with every step.
His building was quiet. He keyed the lock and stepped aside, allowing her into the apartment first. He watched her see his home for the first time and imagined what she saw through her eyes.
Clean lines. Spare. Everything in its place with tactical precision. An external world organized against his internal chaos. But the living showed through the order. The reading chair by the window held a wool blanket worn soft from years of use, the nap rubbed thin at the edges where his hands rested. Plants occupied every surface that could hold them with frost-tolerant varieties from six different Alliance worlds, their leaves dark green and silver, their soil carefully tended. The small act of cultivation that contradicted every assumption people made about him.
The fireplace stood empty. No heat source was needed for him, but the stone was soot-darkened from the previous tenant's use, and he'd never cleaned it. He liked the evidence of warmth, even inherited warmth. The bookshelves held scores of books, their spines cracked and pages dog-eared, stacked horizontally where the vertical space ran out.
The wide window by his reading chair faced the Eternal Pine's distant glow, and the bioluminescence from the tree painted a slow-moving pattern across his ceiling.
On his desk sat a small collection of handwritten pages.
A spike of alarm rang through him, sharp and immediate. He crossed the room in three strides and swept the pages into the desk drawer, closing it with more force than the action required. His hand stayed on the drawer for a half-second too long.
When he turned, she was taking a deep breath in.
He watched her chest expand on the inhale, her eyes half-closing, her head tilting back a fraction the way it did when she found a note she liked. He assumed his apartment smelled like him. Peppermint, frost, and something mineral-clean that he could not smell himself but that she'd described once, absently, on a walk home, as winter morning. She breathed it in, and her shoulders dropped a fraction. It was the first time her body had loosened since he arrived at her apartment.
He'd given a hundred security briefings. Cleared a thousand rooms. None of it had prepared him for Phoebe Calloway standing in his living room.
He cleared his throat, which had suddenly become stuck.
"The bedroom is through there." He opened the door to his bedroom. "There are clean sheets on the bed. Extra blankets in the trunk."
She walked to the doorway and stopped. Then she turned back toward him.
The distance between them was the width of a hallway and nothing at all. The Eternal Pine's glow through the window caught the gold in her earrings, the line of her jaw, the dark shine of her eyes. She was still shaken. He could see it in the set of her mouth, the careful control of her breathing, but something else was moving through her now, something his truth-sense was picking up as a low, steady signal beneath the fear.
She reached out, and her fingers closed around his wrist. Warm. Not pulling, just holding. His whole body went still.
His truth-sense opened on the contact before he could stop it. Fear. Gratitude.Want. All three at once, layered and tangled, and he could not tell which one was driving her toward him.
That was the problem.
She was frightened. She was reaching for the nearest solid thing. He had been the nearest solid thing for someone else once, and he knew how that ended.
He caught her hand and held it for one breath. Then he moved it away from his wrist and let go.
He stepped back.
"Get some sleep."
Her lips parted. Closed. She nodded once and turned into the bedroom.
He closed the door between them.
The couch was tooshort for him by six inches.
He lay on his back with his feet hanging over the arm and listened to her move through his bedroom on the other side of the wall. The creak of the bed frame when she sat. The soft thud of her boots, one then the other. The small sound of her security comm placed on the nightstand within arm's reach the way he'd told her to. The rustle of sheets. The slow evening of her breath.
His apartment smelled like her now.
He pressed his thumb against the spot on his wrist where her fingers had been. It was still warm.
