Page 36 of Darkest Kiss

The honest answer is that I want to go home. But home is a boarded-up bookshop and an apartment full of rotting groceries and an aunt who probably hasn’t even noticed yet that I’m gone. So that's off the table.

The second honest answer surprises me. "I want to be somewhere that isn't these four walls," I say. "I love your, frankly ludicrous, apartment, but I've memorized every inch of the living room. I'm climbing the walls."

The corner of his mouth moves. He ducks his head, amused. "There's a restaurant on the roof on top of the building. It’s private, food is pretty good, and it has a view that'll ruin you for every other view." His eyes sparkle, an expression I’ve not seen before. "I could assemble a team of bodyguards to accompany us tonight, if you want to go."

“Of course I want to go. But…” I look down at myself. I’m wearing one of his shirts and a pair of his dark sweatpants. “I can’t go like this.”

He nods. “I’ll get you a dress.”

“Oh. Can you get some panties, too?” I nibble my lower lip. “Actually, can you get me more than that? I hate to keep borrowing your clothes…”

“I love seeing you in my shirts. It’s so fucking sexy.” He looks at me, dead serious. “But I’ll get you some things.”

Hearing Rian say I’m sexy makes me press my thighs together. I’m a captive here, and yeah, my sexual experience is almost nothing. An embarrassment. But I keep watching this guy who claims to be obsessed with me and wondering about why he hasn’t come onto me, not once.

He says I’m beautiful. I can’t figure out what he wants from me.

He nods as if we've struck a deal.

We go back to eating, and for a few minutes it's almost normal. I tell him about the salad, about how my mother fought with the deli owner for years and then wept at his funeral. He listens the way he does to everything, completely. No part of him anywhere but here. It's unnerving.

It's also the most anyone's listened to me in years.

As we talk, the bookshop comes up, because everything circles back to the bookshop. It's the one thing I have left of my parents.

"My uncle Marc inherited the building after my parents died," I explain. “About six months ago, he sold the building. The shop, the offices upstairs, the whole thing. He told me it was a tax move. My theory is that he just needed cash for whatever he got into with the Vitellis.” I pause, thinking. “I guess the shop was never really mine to begin with. I was too busy keeping the lights on to notice the ground was already gone."

Rian goes very still. “You grew up around the bookstore?”

I nod. "It was my parents' whole life. And now my dad's dead and my mom's dead, and my uncle's dead on the floor of it. The building isn't even ours anymore. I guess I keep thinking I should call my aunt because she's the last one, the only family I have left. But I can’t call her. Besides, she hates the shop. She always has. And I can't work out what I'm supposed to do… There's just nobody? Nobody left? I'm the last one. And I'm sitting in a stranger's kitchen because I've got nowhere else that's safe and no one left to go to, and– and–"

The room tilts a little.

I know this feeling in the same way you can know what song is playing from hearing the first note. My chest pulls tight, like a belt's cinched around it, and someone's drawing it in one notch at a time. The air in the penthouse, of which there is plenty, suddenly isn't enough. And my stupid brain helpfully reports that I'm not getting enough oxygen. Which is a lie. I know it’s a lie.

But it does nothing whatsoever to let enough oxygen into my lungs. “Oh, fuck.”

"Noemi." Rian is looking at me very carefully. “You okay?”

I press a hand to my sternum. The edges of my vision go grainy. I've spent enough years in this exact spot to narrate it even as it happens.

Like oh, here we go, this is the part where your body decides you're dying while you sit in a chair. Fantastic, love this for us.

"I'm fine,” I squeak. It’s about the least convincing thing I’ve ever said.

He doesn't argue. He doesn't tell me to calm down, or breathe, or ask what's wrong. The usual responses to panic attacks. He just takes my hand, firm and certain, and says, "Come with me."

I'm too busy not dying to do anything but get up and follow.

He walks me down the hall, past the bedrooms I've seen, to a door I haven't paid attention to. He opens it and guides me through, his big hands resting on my shoulders. I'm halfway into a sentence about how I really am fine when I actually look at the room.

The sentence dies in my mouth.

It's a bedroom, but it isn't. The walls are a soft blue, the exact shade of the calmest, most open sky. There is a bed sitting low to the ground, piled with knitted throws, warm and chunky and soft-looking.

And one of them is a near-perfect copy of the soft, blush pink blanket my grandmother made, the one folded over the back of my couch at home. It’s a simple enough pattern, knitted blocks of lighter and darker colors. But he must’ve had it made.

There's a reading nook by the window, with a single soft chair and a shelf of paperbacks. No, they’re my paperbacks. I see a couple of titles that I know. When would he have had time to bring these over?