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Only Rory wouldn’t make eye contact with me.
She was usually soft, sweet smiles in the morning, blushing when I gave her a cup of chai or cooked her breakfast. Her eyes usually tracked me as I moved around the kitchen, her gaze quickly dropping if our eyes caught, pretending she wasn’t watching.
But this morning was different. She wasn’t being shy or coy. She was holding back, eyes rooted firmly in the space above my head to avoid catching my gaze. She didn’t move from her spot as I placed her drink and breakfast on the dresser, only jumping up when I moved closer to stand at her side.
It didn’t take a deductive genius to figure out something was wrong, though I couldn’t quite place my finger on what had her pulling away.Was I too rough the night before?
“We should probably talk about last night,” I said in a resigned voice, directing my eyes to the ceiling so I didn’t have to look at the regret written all over her face. “If I did something you didn’t like, or I hurt you…”
“No!” she quickly interjected, eyes finally meeting mine, and I felt a small measure of relief at the sincerity in her expressionas she told me, “I liked everything you did to me last night.” She blushed at the words, and I watched as her thighs rubbed together, as if she still felt me between her legs.
“If it’s about what I said…What I asked you to say…” I hedged, a small, irrational part of me hoping this awkwardness was simply the prelude to Rory finishing the words she’d started to say the night before. Or at least, the words I’d hoped she was starting to say.
“It was just sex talk,” she said with a wave of her hand, as if my words meant nothing to her. But her lips pursed as she said it, as if she didn’t like the way the words tasted on her tongue. Either way, the brush-off gutted me, made me bitter and sarcastic as I responded.
“Right, and meri jaan is just a nickname,” I said, my feelings clear in the words I spoke to her daily.
“I don’t even know what that means!” She burst out, throwing her hands out as her cheeks flushed a deeper red in anger, as if not knowing the nickname I’d been calling her for the past week had grated at her. “I tried Googling it, but I can’t get the spelling right.”
“So you honestly think all this - the sex, the marriage, my words last night - is just talk.”
“I think you’re a kind person who’s trying his best to play a role he was forced into.”
I wished I could cut out my heart and hand it to her on a platter, if only so she could see how much her belief in my indifference toward her was crushing it.
“Rory,” I laughed, the sound bitter and acrid on my tongue, “I’m fuckingobsessedwith you. All of this,” I waved my hands around, as if the gesture could encompass this house, the SUV sitting in the garage, the ring on her finger. “It’s all for you.”
“Because my father struck a deal with you,” she insisted, but her voice was quieter now, less sure, as if the vehemence in mytone was making her second-guess the assumptions that had apparently been running rampant through her brain these past few weeks.
“Sure, your father struck a deal with me. ButIwas the one to come up with it.”
“To protect your family. To protect Wren and Ames -”
I cut her off, stepping closer and making sure her eyes were on mine as I told her, “To protectyou.”
“I don't understand,” she said, legs giving out so suddenly she crumpled onto the chair behind her, the one I’d insisted Bex give back if only so I could watch Rory curled up in it. To see her reading books in our bedroom, silhouetted by the view I’d chosen because I knew Rory would like it.
“I saw you that first night at your apartment building, and all I wanted to do was protect you, take care of you, make you laugh.”
It was the same story I’d told her that first morning we met, except that time I’d been leaving out the truth behind the job I’d taken on. I wasn’t lying about the facts: I followed leads for a week, breaking into businesses and buildings owned by Cillian and Cormac and any of his associates he’d trust to own his property, finding nothing worthwhile. Well, nothing relevant to what I had actually been looking for.
Eventually I’d made my way to her apartment, hanging out in an empty unit before I finally saw her, the sight of her similar enough to Cillian that I knew we’d found who we were looking for. She wasn’t doing much, just listening as her bodyguards joked around, the serious expression on her face only barely broken by the edge of a laugh, a small half-giggle escaping her lips.
And suddenly, I wanted to make her laugh for real, make her smile wide, break out of the quiet anonymity she’d clearly beenliving in. But I’d brushed that thought off just as quickly, unsure what exactly had come over me.
“And then the next day, Wren’s shop is broken into. Suddenly, my best friend, my family, is being targeted because of the work we do. Her life is in danger because of me. And she needs a bodyguard, someone to protect her, andthat’s my job.That’s what I do, but I can’t, because I’ve found you, and we need to keep you safe, too.”
I took a deep breath, thinking back to that moment. How Alex and I burst intoIn Bloom, how Bex laid out the danger Wren was in, how we had to go over how best to divvy up our responsibilities.
“But that’s not even the worst part. The worst part is that Alex gave me the out. He asked if I wanted to stop following you, if I wanted to protect Wren instead. Bex and I could’ve switched; she could’ve easily stepped into the job I’d just barely started.”
I looked at her, jaw tight as I admitted, “It should’ve been easy to write off some woman I didn’t know, to abandon the job to someone else in favor of protecting my best friend, someone I saw as a sister. But I couldn’t do it.”
“Dev-” Rory took a step forward but then rocked back on her heels, as if unsure how to respond to my confessions. Both the words and the context between them, the truth of how much she mattered to me.
And I wondered if it mattered, what I said, what I did. Whether I had caused the distrust in her eyes by not being straightforward about how I felt from the start, or if there was something deeper. Something else that had carved the disbelief in her heart, made her think that nobody could love her as deeply as I had for months now. If she had any idea - if she ever would - just how far I would’ve gone to keep her.
If admitting that I’d - unsuccessfully - tried to convince myself she was boring, only to find myself obsessed withevery inch of her, from her constant ponytail to her oversized sweaters, would be enough to convince her. How I wondered what was underneath them for months, if I’d ever get to find out. How every time she stumbled I had to hold myself back, wishing I could emerge from the shadows just to help her back up. How I bought this house with her in the back of my mind, even if I didn’t admit it to myself until recently.
