Page 25 of Her Player

But he didn’t move.

“Rhett?” I asked.

He stared at me with a dumbfounded expression. His eyes moved between mine with a look I couldn’t place.

“Rhett? You okay?” I asked as I waved my hand a bit in front of him. “Is there something on my face?”

But all he said when he parted his lips was…

“You wear glasses outside of reading?”

Something about the way he said it made my chest do a thing I was not prepared for.

It wasn't the question. It was the way he was looking at me when he asked it. Like he'd just seen something he'd been waiting to see. Like the glasses and the nightgown and the bare feet and the hair down past my shoulders had rearranged the picture of me he'd been carrying around, and this version was the one he'd been looking for the whole damn time.

I took the tray out of his hands before my brain could talk me out of it.

"It's root beer," he said quietly.

"Good night, Rhett."

I closed the door with my hip and stood there on the other side of it, holding a dinner tray and staring at the wood grain and breathing like I'd just sprinted a hallway instead of closing a door.

That look on his face.

The one I didn’t have a name for yet, even though I’d been cataloguing it for three years. Not hunger, exactly. Something quieter than that. Something that had patience built into it, like a man who had already decided the outcome and was simply waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

I closed the door behind me and stood in the dark of the hallway for a moment, pressing my back against the wood.

I wasn’t doing anything. I was standing in a hallway in my own estate in my nightgown and my glasses, running from a man who had done nothing more than look at me like I was worth looking at. That was all. That was the whole of it.

I pushed off the wall and made my way toward the kitchen.

The estate was quiet. I could hear the low murmur of Brynn and Coach from somewhere on the other side of the house, soft voices and the occasional sound of her laughter, and it settled something in me even as it tugged at something else. She was all right. She was more than all right. She had someone who looked at her the same way Rhett looked at me, and she had the good sense to let him.

I filled a glass of water at the kitchen sink and stood there drinking it in the dark.

Ryan had loved this kitchen. That was the thought that came in, the way thoughts about Ryan always came in. Sideways, without warning, arriving on the back of something as ordinary as running water. We’d stood in the kitchen of our first apartment for an hour once, arguing about where to put the coffee maker, and he’d been so unreasonably committed to his position that I’d finally just let him win. He was wrong. The coffee maker had been in the wrong spot for the entire two years we lived there. He knew it and I knew it and neither of us ever said so.

I set my glass down.

I was smiling.

That surprised me enough that I stood there for a moment and just let it happen. Stood in the dark kitchen of the estate I bought for a man who never got to see it and smiled at the memory of a coffee maker argument, and it didn’t hurt the way it usually did. It was just him. Just Ryan, the way he lived in all the small things. The way he always would.

You’re allowed to be happy, Vee.

That was what he used to say whenever I got too deep in my own head. Not an instruction. Just a reminder. Like happiness was a thing I kept forgetting I had permission for.

I heard footsteps behind me.

I didn’t turn around. I didn’t have to.

Rhett moved through a room differently than anyone else I’d ever known. All that size, and yet he never announced himself with it. He just arrived. Filled up the space without demanding anything from it.

He stopped somewhere behind me. Close enough that I could feel the warmth of him in the cool of the kitchen, but far enough that there was still a decision to be made.

Neither of us said anything for a moment.