“Coincidence.”
“Lysander.”
A grin broke through the performance – wide, guilty, unrepentant. “Fine. Guilty. It was beautiful and I regret nothing.”
“Delete it,” Caelum said, without conviction.
“Don’t you dare,” I interjected. Both men looked at me. “Send it to Caelum. He’ll send it to me.”
“Done,” Lysander said, already tapping his screen.
“I didn’t agree to this,” Caelum protested.
“You don’t have to agree. It’s already sent.” Lysander pocketed his phone with the satisfaction of a man who’d completed a mission. Then his expression shifted – the humor settling into something quieter, something real. He looked at Caelum, and for a moment, the friendship between them was visible, tangible, twenty-plus years compressed into a single glance.
“I’m glad, Caelum,” he said. Simply. No performance. “I’m really glad.”
Caelum nodded. The two men embraced – brief, tight, the kind of hug that says more than either of them would ever articulate – and then Lysander turned to me.
“Take care of him,” he said. “He’s an idiot, but he’s my idiot.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said.
“That’s all anyone can do.” He smiled, squeezed Caelum’s shoulder one final time, and disappeared back into the golden interior of his restaurant.
The night air received us like a held breath released.
Cool. Clean. Carrying the faint sweetness of jasmine from somewhere I couldn’t see and the metallic hum of a city that was still awake and would be for hours. I took a deep breath and felt the evening settle into my body – the wine, the music, the warmth, the slow unspooling of two people learning to be honest with each other.
We walked to the car in silence. Not the awkward kind. The kind that comes after something full – a good meal, a long conversation, a dance that said things words couldn’t. Our fingers were still loosely linked, and neither of us tightened or released, and the casualness of that contact felt, paradoxically, like the most intimate thing that had happened all night.
Caelum opened my door. I got in. He circled to his side, started the engine, and we pulled away from Lysander’s, the restaurant shrinking in the mirror until it was just another warm rectangle in a city full of them.
The drive was long and quiet, and I let myself sink into it. I watched Caelum in profile – the way his hands held the wheel, relaxed now in a way they hadn’t been on the drive over. The way the streetlights painted his face in alternating gold and shadow, like a time-lapse of a man moving between versions of himself. There was a quiet strength in him, something beneath the suits and the money, something that had survived loss and loneliness and the kind of grief that makes lesser men bitter. He wasn’t bitter. He was bruised. And the difference mattered.
I realized I was memorizing him. Not just looking – memorizing. The line of his jaw. The way his eyes narrowed slightly when he was thinking. The small, unconscious movements of his fingers on the wheel. I was building an archive, and the realization that I wanted to remember these details – that they mattered to me, that he mattered to me – was both wonderful and frightening in equal measure.
We arrived home. The apartment building rose against the night sky like a monument to the kind of life I was still learning to inhabit. We got out of the car – slowly, reluctantly, the way you leave a theater after a film that moved you. The cool air touched my bare arms and I shivered, though the shiver had nothing to do with cold.
We walked toward the front door, side by side, and the silence between us had shifted again. It was charged now. Expectant. Like the air before a thunderstorm – still and electric and waiting.
He stopped.
I stopped.
We turned to face each other in the muted glow of the entrance lights. His expression was – I don’t know how to describe it except to say it was the most honest face I’d ever seen on another human being. No mask. No strategy. No calculation. Just a man standing in front of a woman with everything he felt written across his features in a language that required no translation.
He stepped closer. Close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating from his body, smell the wine on his breath, see the precise moment his eyes dropped to my lips.
My heart stopped.
Not figuratively. I mean there was a moment – one full, crystallized second – where the muscle in my chest forgot its job, forgot the rhythm it had been keeping since before I was born, and just… paused. As if it, too, needed a moment to understand what was about to happen.
And then he kissed me.
Not the way Sterling used to kiss me – performative, demanding, a stamp of ownership disguised as affection. This was different. This was a question asked with his lips against mine, tentative and fierce at the same time, gentle enough to give me room to leave and urgent enough to make me want to stay. His hand found the back of my neck – fingers in my hair, thumb against my jaw – and the touch was so careful it almost undid me. As if I were something precious. As if he was afraid that pressing too hard would make me disappear.
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.