It’s a complicated question, and right now I only have simple answers. “I’m supposed to be in Brussels. But I’ve got time.”
Ian takes a swig of beer. “How much time?”
“A little over a week.”
He nods, contemplating. “She’s going to want more than a week.”
“I know.”
He doesn’t push. He never does. That’s one of the things that makes us work well together—he reads the edges of what I can give and doesn’t try to yank me past them.
Ian finishes the beer in one long pull, sets the empty bottle on the coffee table, and stands. He shrugs on his jacket, checks his pockets out of habit, then lets his gaze drift once around the apartment. It’s the same casual inventory I’ve seen him do a thousand times.
He gives a small nod, like everything checks out. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
I frown. “Where you going?”
A familiar grin flashes across his face, dimples and all. “Met a girl at the bar earlier. French. Very French.” He pulls his jacket straight. “I've heard things about French girls. Specific things. Anatomical things.” He heads for the door. “I'm a curious man.”
“Ian—”
“You know what they say. When in Paris.” He pauses with his hand on the door, and when he looks back, there is something underneath the way he stares at me. “Are you clean?”
I lick my lips, wiping cold droplets off the beer bottle with my thumb. “Haven’t touched the stuff since Prague.”
Ian nods, his expression somewhere between something and nothing. “We'll catch up on everything. The whole mess.” He glances in the direction of Sophia’s room, then back at me. “Right now, you've got a girl who's been waiting three months for you.” He opens the door. “Don't waste it.” Then walks out.
The apartment falls silent, and I just sit with it, taking it all in. A beige throw blanket draped over the couch in that careless,lived-in fold that says she wrapped herself in it and forgot to straighten it. The two mugs on the kitchen counter, one with lipstick stains, the other without. Her scarf is slung over the back of a chair that was never meant for scarves.
A pack of Ian’s cigarettes on the side table by the door leading out to the balcony that says she’s making him smoke outside.
Every inch of this place carries the signs of a home lived in. Like it has a heartbeat I can feel under my skin even if I hadn’t been a part of it.
It’s because of her. She has this light that touches everything around her, makes it alive. I wonder sometimes if she knows that about herself—the way people gravitate toward her, as if her presence is a fire and they’re just trying to get warm.
This morning, instead of knocking on the apartment door like a man who had any right, I followed her four blocks to the bakery.
I told myself it was caution. Old instincts. Necessary distance. More bullshit.
The truth is vicious and simple; I had been starving for her for three fucking months. Three months of concrete rooms, Valeria’s leash around my neck like a blade at my throat, three months of waking up empty because the only thing that ever filled the void behind my ribs was her. I needed to watch her exist without the weight of my shadow on her. Needed to drink her in slow and greedy, like a man dying of thirst finally finds water he knows he’ll poison.
So I stayed two steps behind on that sun-drenched Paris sidewalk and let the city wrap around us both. I watched the way the breeze toyed with the hem of her dress, flirting with her thighs. The lazy sway of her hips as she moved throughthe crowd like she’d made peace with every step. Honey hair catching the light, loose strands clinging to the damp skin of her neck. Every small, unconscious motion carved itself deeper into me than any scar I’ve ever earned.
When she paused outside the bakery, I stood right behind her. She felt me. I know she felt me. That tiny hitch in her breath, the way her shoulders drew up just a fraction. But she didn’t turn. She simply breathed through it, tilted her face toward the sun like she could outrun the pull between us, and kept walking.
I let her.
Because watching her move through her day without knowing I was there was the closest thing I’ve had to peace in months. I got to be part of her world without ruining it. Got to pretend, for four stolen blocks, that I was just another ghost drifting through her summer instead of the man who carved fresh wounds under her skin.
So I stole the moments I could—silent, unseen, ravenous—because three months without her had hollowed me out worse than any knife ever could.
“Don’t waste it.” I murmur Ian’s words, then get up and go to her room.
I stop in the doorway for a moment. Not long. Just enough.
The room is hers in every way that matters—the blanket pulled to one side, the shoes she didn't put away, the particular quality of light she's managed to cultivate here. She has a way of making spaces her own without trying.
My pulse quickens when I see the diary on her nightstand, the one I sent her with the first bouquet of peonies.
