Behind us, Sable watched from the hallway. I could feel her gaze – fond, proud, probably tearful – boring into our backs like a spotlight.
“Good luck, Marlowe,” she whispered to the empty hallway. “You’ve got this.”
The evening air hit us like a confession – cool, sudden, carrying the scent of jasmine from the garden beds that lined the driveway and something else, something urban and alive, the exhale of a city settling into its night shift.
The car waiting for us was not the Rolls-Royce. This was a black Prado, sleeker and less ostentatious, and the fact that Caelum had chosen it – had chosen to drive himself instead of summoning Elliot and the silver chariot – registered as a detail I filed away without comment. He was trying to be normal. A billionaire in a Prado, driving his own date to dinner. The effort was endearing in a way I wasn’t ready to acknowledge out loud.
He moved ahead of me and opened the passenger door with a small, deliberate flourish – not showy, not ironic, just the gesture of a man who’d been raised to open doors and had never found a reason to stop.
“My lady,” he said. A half-smile. The hint of a bow.
“Don’t push it,” I said, but I was smiling as I slid into the seat.
He circled the car and settled behind the wheel, and the engine came to life with a low, confident purr. We pulled out of the driveway and into the street, and the apartment building shrank in the side mirror until it was just another tall, lit rectangle in a city full of them.
For the first few blocks, we drove in comfortable silence. The city scrolled past the windows – streetlights, storefronts, the blur of other people’s lives – and I found myself relaxing into the leather seat in a way that surprised me. Not because the seat was comfortable (it was), but because the silence between us felt different tonight. Less loaded. Less like two strangers trapped in a contract and more like two people who’d agreed, tentatively, to find out what existed on the other side of their mutual wariness.
Then I caught him looking at me.
Not a glance – a look. The kind that lingers half a second too long to be accidental, the kind that says more than the person intends.
“What?” I said.
“Hmm?” He snapped his eyes back to the road with the speed of a man caught reaching into a cookie jar. “Oh. You’re not wearing your seatbelt.”
“I’m-” I looked down. The seatbelt was, indeed, unbuckled. But the color rising in his neck told me that vehicular safety was not, in fact, the reason he’d been staring. “Right.”
I buckled it. The click was louder than it should have been. He kept his eyes on the road with the intensity of someone who’d just been reminded that roads existed.
“So,” I said, deciding to have mercy, “where are we going?”
“I can’t tell you. It would ruin the surprise.”
“I don’t love surprises.”
“You’ll love this one.”
I studied his profile – the clean line of his jaw, the way the streetlights played across his face in alternating gold and shadow, the small, private smile he was trying to suppress and failing. He looked happy. Not the performed confidence of a businessman or the calculated charm of a man pursuing a woman, but the simple, unguarded happiness of a person who was exactly where he wanted to be. And the realization that I was part of that – that my presence in this car was the cause of that smile – did something to me that I needed a moment to process.
“I want tonight to be real,” I said. The words surprised me; they’d come out before the committee in my brain had approved them.
He glanced at me. “Real?”
“I mean – I want us to actually talk. Not the polite, surface stuff. Not ‘what’s your favorite color’ and ‘where did you go to school.’ I want to know who you are, Caelum. The real version. The one underneath the suits and the money and the… roses.”
He was quiet for a moment. The car hummed. The city passed.
“That version is less impressive,” he said. “He has doubts. He misses people. He’s not always sure he’s doing the right thing.”
“Good,” I said. “The impressive version is exhausting.”
He laughed – a real one, short and startled, the kind that escapes before you can catch it. “Deal. Real it is.” He glanced at me again, and this time there was something warm in his eyes that made the air in the car feel thinner. “But fair warning: the real version is going to ask you real questions too.”
“I can handle it.”
“We’ll see.”
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.