Chapter 13 Clara
THIRTEEN
CLARA
Morning came in thin and gray, the kind of winter light that made everything in Wes Vaughn’s house look a little softer and a lot more haunted.
I lay there for a beat with my eyes open, letting my brain catch up to the fact that I lived here now—across the hall from Wes Vaughn—and no amount of pretending otherwise was going to change that.
Unfortunately, neither was pretending I hadn’t seen him naked.
Across the hall, there was a door that should have belonged to a man sleeping in his own bed. A man who brushed his teeth in the bathroom attached to that bedroom. A man who had a glass shower door and a talent for turning my brain into soup.
I stared at the ceiling and waited for the house to make sense.
The upstairs was dead quiet.
Not the peaceful kind of quiet either. The kind that felt like a decision.
His door across the hall never opened. It sat there like a sealed-off part of the house—like the upstairs belonged to the man he used to be, and the man who lived here now had been exiled downstairs with the couch and the ghosts of his former life.
I swallowed and rolled onto my side, blinking hard until the memory of steam and tile and oh my god, that is his actual penis stopped flashing behind my eyelids.
It didn’t help. Not really.
It’s fine. I’m a grown woman. I could be an adult about this. I could exist in a house with a man I’d accidentally seen naked without combusting.
All I needed was coffee.
I slid out of bed as quietly as possible, tugging at the hem of my pajama shorts and straightening my mismatched top. It was chilly so I tugged a tossed-aside zip-up sweatshirt from the chair and pulled it on. I walked to the doorway and cracked it open, peeking into the hallway.
Still silent.
I took one step out, then another, moving with the careful precision of someone attempting a museum heist—except my prize was caffeine and my security system was a grumpy, traumatized construction god with a bad attitude and an even worse talent for making me feel twelve kinds of flustered.
Halfway to the stairs, the house gave a faint creak beneath my foot.
I froze.
Held my breath.
Waited for any sign of Wes.
Nothing.
Okay. Great. Good job, Clara. Stealthy. Professional. Totally not losing your mind in your brother’s best friend’s hallway.
I made it down the stairs and slipped into the kitchen, where the cold morning light streamed through the big windows at the back of the house.
Beyond them, the pines stood shoulder to shoulder like a wall, dark and dense, the property line hugged by forest. In the distance there was a sliver of sandy path cutting between the trees toward the dunes—barely visible unless you knew to look for it.
It was so peaceful out there it made my chest ache.
I turned toward the fridge—and stopped.
The House Rules page was still smack in the middle of it.
Not ripped down.
Not balled up.
Not set on fire.
If anything, it looked . . . slightly repositioned. Straighter. Like some part of Wes couldn’t help himself.
My eyes tracked down the list, already knowing what I’d written, until they snagged on two new lines at the bottom in harsh, masculine handwriting.
Rule #6: Knock like you mean it.
Rule #7: No hostile workplace signage.
Heat rushed up my neck so fast I felt it behind my ears.
“Oh my god,” I whispered, even though nobody was there to hear me.
He didn’t tear it down.
He’d answered.
A laugh bubbled in my throat before I could stop it. I clamped my lips together, but it still escaped as a quiet huff as I leaned closer to read it again.
No hostile workplace signage was so petty it bordered on charming, which was unacceptable for early-morning hours.
I smiled, then wiped it off my face like it was evidence.
Get coffee. Leave. Pretend you never saw it. Pretend you didn’t just feel a weird, stupid spark of triumph because Wes Vaughn had engaged in stationery warfare with you.
I turned toward the counter, moving too quickly, too eager, as if the coffee maker was a getaway car. I reached for a mug, fumbled it, caught it at the last second, and let out a silent curse that would have earned me a lecture from my mother and a high five from Kit.
The coffee was already made, which prompted something in my chest to tilt—annoying and soft all at once. Even in his misery, Wes Vaughn wasn’t the kind of man who skipped caffeine.
I poured myself a mug and took a cautious sip.
A soft sound came from behind me.
Heavy, measured footsteps.
My spine went straight.
Wes walked into the kitchen in gray sweatpants and a dark T-shirt, hair damp like he’d washed his face and run a hand through it without looking in a mirror. His eyes were tired. His jaw was shadowed in a way that made him look rough around the edges, like sleep had fought him and won.
His gaze dropped.
Not to my face, but to me.
My pajama shorts. My bare legs. Beneath the sweatshirt my oversize tee that—oh, god—probably clung in all the wrong places. I suddenly remembered with a hot, sick swoop that I wasn’t wearing a bra.
I crossed my arms over my chest so fast I nearly sloshed coffee down my front.
Wes’s eyes flicked up for half a second—caught mine—then moved away like he’d burned his hand.
The air between us felt too warm. I couldn’t tell if it was the heater or my shame.
“Good morning,” I said, and it came out wrong. Too bright. Too careful.
“Morning.” One word. Flat. Gravelly.
I lifted my mug like it explained why I was standing in his kitchen in basically nothing. “Coffee’s good.”
“Okay.”
I nodded like that was a complete exchange and not two robots trying to pass as humans. “Okay.”
My gaze betrayed me with one quick, stupid dip—because my brain had apparently decided to torture me—catching the line of his sweatpants before I yanked my attention away.
His eyes narrowed slightly, like he’d clocked the movement even if he didn’t know why.
Both of us looked away too fast.
I turned toward the counter and grabbed a paper towel, wiping the already-clean surface because my hands needed a job. My heart hammered like I’d done something worse than exist in pajamas.
Behind me, Wes poured himself a mug without a word. A beat passed where it felt like he might say something—anything—and then he didn’t.
He left the kitchen like it was hostile territory and disappeared toward the living room.
The quiet that followed was somehow louder than the quiet before.
I stared at the fridge again—at my loud, obnoxious list and his controlled, cutting add-ons—feeling that ridiculous, reluctant spark of amusement flicker again.
Proof of life, whether he wanted it to be or not.
Back upstairs I busied myself by getting ready for the day.
I took another sip of coffee and tried not to wonder why he kept choosing that couch—why he kept choosing discomfort—over the bed he should have been sleeping in.
I didn’t want to wonder what he was afraid of up there . . . or what he thought would happen if he let anyone see him live like a person again.
Instead, I chose to get lost in my work.
My coffee went cold on the bedside table an hour ago, but I kept sipping it anyway.
In my room, the house felt far away and too close at the same time.
The upstairs remained quiet in that loaded way it had been all morning, and I could still hear Wes moving downstairs if I listened hard enough—the soft creak of the couch, the muted clink of a mug, the occasional thud like he was setting something down with more force than necessary.
We hadn’t spoken since the kitchen. If you could even call that speaking.
In reality it was two robots, one awkward note on the fridge, and a whole lot of pretending our living situation wasn’t completely messed up.
I sat cross-legged on the bed with my laptop open, phone in hand, and made myself do the only thing that ever steadied me when my life felt like it was slipping out from under my feet.
Work.
I’d spent the morning reaching out to designers whom I’d worked with in the past, a couple of photographers who actually delivered on what they promised, and one florist who understood that “winter bridal” did not mean sad white roses and baby’s breath.
My Sent folder was a graveyard of carefully worded professionalism.
Outside the snow fell in fat flakes that almost looked fake. I smiled to myself and let the image of a winter bridal shoot consume me. Using Wes’s secluded backyard as inspiration, I wrote down my ideas, saved images to mood boards, and considered price ranges.
Every message I sent felt like tossing a little line into the dark and waiting for something to tug back.
It didn’t take long for my producer brain to snap online, and I found my groove. Timelines, a photo shot list, deliverables, pricing—things you could measure and control.
Things that didn’t involve standing in a hallway trying not to picture Wes Vaughn naked.
I opened a blank doc and started listing what I needed like it was survival:
Location: accessible, visually striking, winter friendly
Wardrobe: 3–5 gowns, 2 “styled looks,” 1 statement veil
Hair and makeup: 1 artist, travel fee included
Video: 15 seconds per dress for socials
Lighting: natural + supplemental, bring battery packs
Backup plan: indoor options if the snow turned into freezing rain
My fingers moved faster once I got going, the familiar rush of building something from nothing. It didn’t erase the awkwardness downstairs, but it gave me something else to obsess over.
A notification popped up.
Kit
Whatcha doing??
Oh you know, hitting roadblocks at every turn and trying not to obsess over the fact that I saw the hottest man alive without any clothes on.
I stared at my phone, thumb hovering over Kit’s name.
I could already hear her voice in my head, big and gleeful and incapable of subtlety. I dropped my hand.