Page 27 of Suite 7

Wrapped in his arms in the amber-lit quiet, for the first time in a long time, I almost believe it.

Kane

* * *

She’s sleeping against my chest.

I don’t move.

I should feel satisfied. That’s what I know how to feel after a scene — the quiet of it, clean and grounded, the work done well. I’ve felt it a hundred times. I know its shape.

This isn’t that.

I don’t have a name for what this is. That’s the problem. I deal in precise language and right now I have nothing precise. Just her weight against my ribs and the specific way her hand has gone slack against my sternum and the fact that I am holding my breath slightly, like a sudden movement might break something I don’t have a word for yet.

My cock is still hard. I didn’t touch myself. Couldn’t.

Not discipline. Not methodology. Something simpler and more inconvenient than either: The moment her voice cracked and she said, in pieces, that she didn’t know how to just be. After that, there was simply no space in me for anything except her. Years of wanting this woman and when I finally had her, all I could do was pay attention. Complete, undivided, absolute attention to every sound she made and every way her body answered and the moment her walls came down.

Taking anything for myself would have meant looking away.

I couldn’t look away.

I’m still not looking away. She’s asleep and I’m watching her like she’s a load-bearing problem I haven’t solved yet, which is not a thought I’m going to examine.

My hand is moving through her hair. I didn’t decide to do that. She shifts in her sleep and presses her face harder against my chest and makes a sound — small, unconscious, nothing to do with me — and something in my sternum does what it does when a structure settles. That specific internal click of a thing finding where it belongs.

I don’t examine that either.

One night. That was the agreement. Hers and mine both, said out loud in this room two hours ago when we were both still pretending we had any idea what we were doing. One night, contained. Professional. And then back to the arguments and the six inches of charged air we pretend isn’t there.

The thought arrives and I let it, the way I let structural problems arrive — without flinching, just looking at the full scope of the damage.

She came here for herself. For the thing she’d been afraid to name. I was the mechanism. Not the point. Whether she wants to continue this, wants to build something, wants to choose me beyond tonight — that belongs to her entirely. I don’t get to factor my own wants into her decision.

I know this. I’ve been in this lifestyle long enough to know this in my sleep.

The fact that I’m holding her slightly tighter than strictly necessary is irrelevant.

I should move. Create distance before she wakes and finds me like this — still here, still watching, every careful professional boundary I have maintained for fourteen months of waiting quietly and completely dismantled by a woman who doesn’t know she’s done it. Who would be furious if she knew. Who would call it another thing to argue about across a dinner table.

Instead I press my face against her hair.

She smells like the perfume I’ve been training myself to ignore at Sloane’s for years. I’ve been very disciplined about that. Extremely disciplined. Fourteen months of profiles and patience and knowing what I was looking for and telling myself the Vera problem was a separate category, filed under impossible. Not relevant.

The Vera problem is sleeping on my chest. Tomorrow there's Sloane. Reality.

Every reason I catalogued a hundred times in cold showers and gym sessions and the fourteen months since I sat in Dominic's office and said I want someone I have to earn.

I told Dominic I wanted someone with fire. Someone who didn't arrive already open. I said it without a face attached to it — I'm not a man who lets himself want what he can't have.

I know now I was describing her the entire time. I just never let the thought finish.

I didn't know it was her when I opened that email. I know that. But some part of me built the whole shape of what I was asking for out of a woman I'd been failing not to notice for years, and called it a type instead of a name.

I've been lying to myself for so long I should be better at it than this.

Her breathing is deep and even. Her hand is still flat against my chest, fingers slightly curled. Unguarded. She doesn't do that — the unguarded thing. I've watched her for years hold the guard in place at every dinner table, every argument, every room. It's extraordinary, actually, the consistency of it. The discipline it requires.