Page 40 of His Vow

"You're looking away from me. That's different."

Her fingers stopped tapping. She gave a quick glance in my direction, then back at the numbers above the elevator doors.

"Soleil. Please."

Her hand reached for the elevator button again when my fingers closed around her wrist. Not hard. Just enough to slow the momentum. She went rigid. Her pulse jumped against my thumb.

I pulled. Gently. She resisted for a beat — her arm stiff, her weight leaning toward the elevator — and then something gave. I opened the door to an empty office beside the elevator and guided her through it, closing the door behind us.

The room was dark except for the afternoon light coming through the blinds. A desk, two chairs, and a dry-erase board with last month's projections still written in blue marker. Her silhouette stood in the striped light, her arms crossed, her chin raised.

I leaned in and kissed her.

Her lips softened for a second. Instinct. Her hand found my chest — not gripping, just landing. The reflex of a body that had learned where to reach when his mouth found hers. I could taste the lavender from the café downstairs. Her fingers curled against my shirt.

She pushed me back.

"Are you going to apologize again?" Her palm stayed flat against my chest, holding the distance she'd created. Her eyes were bright, hot. "That's what you do, isn't it? Apologize, disappear, apologize. The cycle."

"That's not — "

"You went cold at the restaurant. You sat across from me, and I could feel you leave. And then you walked me home as if nothing happened. I closed my door, and I stood on the other side of it knowing something was wrong and not being able to name it." Her voice didn't waver. Her hand didn't move from my chest. "So what is it? What's the thing you keep not telling me?"

The words were forming. They were lined up behind my teeth, heavy, real, closer to the surface than they'd ever been. Her face in the striped light. The paint on her wrist — cerulean blue, the same stain she always carried, evidence of a life lived with her hands in beautiful things. Her eyes searched mine.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

The vibration traveled through my ribs. I pulled it out. The screen was bright in the dim room.

Transfer returned — Adira Reeves. $8,000.

The same amount. The same rhythm. Sent on the first, returned on the third. Twenty-four months of this silence that spoke louder than any conversation. My sister's hands adjusting a grocery bag on a Brooklyn street. Her short hair. Her careful eyes.

The openness that had been building shut. I could feel it happen. The air changed. The temperature dropped.

I locked the screen and put the phone in my pocket.

"What?" Soleil's hand dropped from my chest. She was searching my face, her eyes moving fast, tracking the shift. "What just happened? You were right there. I could see it. And then — " She gestured at my face. "This. The wall. The blank thing you do."

"It's nothing."

"It's not nothing. You change. In a second, you just change." She stepped closer. Her hand found my jaw, turning my face toward hers. "Nolan. Talk to me."

My jaw was locked. My shoulders were rigid. The notification sat in my pocket like a coal — hot, persistent, radiating a heat that reached into the parts of me I'd spent the last two months trying to quiet. Adira's face. The grocery bag. The twenty-two-year-old kid holding his sister in a hospital room. The vow.

"I can't," I said.

Her hand fell from my jaw. She stepped back. One step. The distance was small, and it was everything.

"I'm not doing this again." She pulled her arm free from where my hand still rested near her elbow. "I refuse. You don't get to keep pulling me close and then walking into some room in your head where I'm not allowed."

She turned toward the door. Her back to me. Her hand was reaching for the handle when the words started — fast, hot, spilling out in a rush that had been building for weeks.

"You make me crazy. Do you know that?" She was gripping the handle but not turning it. Her shoulders were tight under the camel coat. "I like everyone. I have nothing to complain about. I go through life, people are fine, everything is fine, and then you — " She turned her head. "You make me so insane that I can't even — I don't have the words for what you do to me. I had words before you. I had balance. I had a whole life that made sense, and you walked into my gallery looking like you wanted to fight a painting, and now I can't — "

I grabbed her.

My hands on her waist, spinning her, pulling her into me. My mouth found hers before she finished the sentence. Not the controlled kiss from the restaurant, not the tender one from my apartment where I'd laid her down on sheets that had never held another person. This was different. Desperate. Graceless.