He looked at me for a long time. Whatever was running under the surface of him—that coiled, contained, enormous thing—pressed against the inside of him and I watched him hold it.
"Noted," he said finally.
It wasn't enough. It was also, somehow, exactly enough for tonight. The door wasn't closed. It was just—held. Deliberately, carefully, by a man who was trying to be decent to me in a way I hadn't asked for and didn't entirely want and was also, inexplicably, the most attractive thing he'd done all day.
I finished my whiskey.
The noise of Liquid Courage moved around us, cheerful and indifferent, and I looked at him across the small table and thought about the studio on Wentworth Street—the sofa, the canvases, the particular hush of a space that was entirely mine—and thought about how I had told him about it. How he was possibly the second person on earth who knew it existed.
"I should get back," I said. But I didn't move.
He looked at me. He knew I wasn't moving. He was very good at knowing things without being told them.
"The studio," I said. "On Wentworth. It has a sofa and bad lighting and paint on everything. It's the only place in this city right now that feels like mine." I held his gaze. "I was going to Uber back."
"Okay," he said. Not moving either.
"Or," I said, carefully, like I was setting something down on a table between us and leaving it there for him to pick up or not, "you could drive me."
The space between us had changed over the course of a whiskey and an honest conversation. It was the same table, the same two people, and yet the distance had gone from respectful to something else—something that was aware of itself, that had been building since cold Atlantic water and a forearm and a hand held one second too long.
He looked at me for a long time. That dark, steady, full-attention look.
"I could do that," he said. Quiet. Deliberate. The tone of a man who understood exactly what he was saying yes to and had made his decision.
I had been managing my awareness of him all evening the way you managed a fire you weren't sure you were supposed to have lit—carefully, at a distance, not letting it get any larger than it already was. But sitting across from him in the noise andwarmth of Liquid Courage with the whiskey in my blood and the whole impossible day finally behind me, I let myself look. Really look, the way I'd been not-quite-looking since the Atlantic.
He was so handsome it was almost inconvenient. Not in the polished way of men who knew it and used it. It was structural. The jaw and the dark eyes and the way the light caught the line of his shoulders and the quality of his stillness, which up close and across a small table felt less like restraint and more like gravity. Like something you'd have to actively resist rather than simply ignore.
I was not actively resisting it.
I was, in fact, thinking about the studio and the sofa and the fact that my entire life had been turned inside out today and somehow the thing sitting most insistently in the front of my mind was him.
Twenty-nine years of good Catholic sensibility looked at all of that and had genuinely nothing useful to offer.
I stood up. He stood up. He helped me with my jacket without making a production of it, his hands at my shoulders, and I felt both of them through the fabric and did not pretend otherwise to myself.
Outside, the Charleston night was cool and soft and the stars were still up. I stood on the East Bay sidewalk and looked up at him in the dark and thought:this is the first thing I have chosen. Entirely. For no reason except that I want it.
"Ready?" he said.
"Yes," I said.
And I meant it the way I hadn't meant anything in a very long time.
He opened the car door.
I got in.
12
BROCK
We drove to the studio in a quiet that had weight to it now, a different quiet than the causeway. That one had been two strangers letting the road do the talking. This one was two people who'd said a few true things in a loud bar and were sitting with them in the dark of a car.
Wentworth Street. She pointed me to a narrow door beside a shuttered frame shop, a flight of stairs that smelled like old building, and then a single room under the roofline with windows on two sides and the whole city going quiet below.
It wasn't much. A sofa that had clearly been hauled up those stairs by people who'd regretted it. A hot plate. A sink with a ring around it. Bad overhead light that did nobody favors. And everywhere, on every wall and propped against every surface, the work—canvases stacked three deep, paint laid on in a way I didn't have the words for, dark and alive and nothing like the careful, curated woman who'd assembled a wedding for two hundred people. This was the part of her nobody got to see. I knew it the second I walked in. You don't keep a thing in ahidden room over a frame shop unless it's the truest thing you've got.
