Chapter 41
Nora
“How do I honestly look?” I ask, tucking my hair close to cover the mark on my neck.
David studies me with amused delight. “Like a woman who was recently devastated in the back of a car.”
“That’s not helpful.” The driver opens the door, and the noise of the club seems tinny and far away even though we’re right in front of it.
“You asked for honesty, my love.”
“I asked for reassurance disguised as honesty.”
“You look beautiful.” He takes my hand as I step onto the curb. “And slightly flushed. And if anyone asks, we hit traffic.”
“We hit traffic.”
“Terrible traffic. Gridlock. Nothing to be done.”
“Did that traffic have teeth that bite necks?”
“Unclear,” David says gravely, guiding me toward the entrance with one hand at my back. “Chicago traffic is notoriously aggressive.”
I snort despite myself, and that tiny release of laughter is enough to settle me by half an inch.
The venue is called Aurum. It opened last week to the kind of press coverage that uses words like “experiential” and “curated atmosphere,” which as far as I can tell means the drinks cost more than education and the lighting exists to make questionable decisions look cinematic.
The hostess at the velvet rope to the VIP section takes one look at David, then at me, then at whatever note one of the billionaires who invited us left under our reservation, and her expression shifts into immediate deference.
“Right this way.”
Of course.
David leans closer as we follow her through a corridor lit in gold and shadow. “You seem surprised.”
“I’m not surprised,” I murmur. “I’m adjusting to the fact that your friends appear to move through the city like a private monarchy.”
“That’s not true.”
“It isn’t?”
He considers. “OK. Slightly.”
The club opens around us all at once—music rolling through my bones, amber light slicking over glass and bare shoulders, the whole place humming with expensive chaos.
It’s beautiful in a way that feels intentional down to the molecular level.
Every surface gleams. Every person looks lit from within or from a very talented lighting designer. I can’t tell which.
The VIP section curves along the mezzanine overlooking the dance floor below—low tables, dark leather, strategic privacy. The group’s already there, and the minute Layla sees us, she pops half out of the booth with a shriek that somehow cuts through the music.
“Nora!”
There’s no dignified way to arrive in a club after backseat sex and be greeted like a beloved relative, so I simply accept my fate and let her pull me into a hug.
“Happy birthday,” I say, laughing.
Layla leans back and takes me in. Her eyes narrow with quick, delighted suspicion. “Well, well, well.”
“Oh no,” I say.
“Oh yes,” Serena says from the booth.
I turn.
Serena’s in a dress so red and fitted it ought to require a permit.
Caleb’s beside her in a dark jacket, one arm slung behind her with the settled possession of a man who knows exactly where he belongs.
Audrey sits across from them in a sleek black dress, glasses catching the low light, her curls piled up in a way that makes her look both elegant and faintly dangerous.
Bennett’s at the end, looking expensive and patient in the way that suggests those are his default settings.
Logan has one hand draped over the back of the booth behind Audrey, watching all of this with the resigned calm of a man who knows resistance is futile.
And Dominic—
Dominic is grinning at me like a shark who’s scented blood in the water.
“No,” I say again, more firmly this time.
“Yes,” Serena says again, accepting the drink Dominic hands her without looking away from me. “You have post-sex face.”
“I do not have a post-sex face.”
“You absolutely do,” Audrey says. “It’s very glowy. Congratulations.”
“Can we just focus on the birthday girl? Happy birthday, Layla.”
“Thank you. Again,” Layla says. “I’ll accept that love bite on your neck as my gift because watching you and David fall in love has been my favorite show on Netflix this season.”
I gasp and clamp my hand over my neck.
David, the traitor, is laughing.
I turn to him. “You could help.”
“I could,” he agrees, entirely unrepentant. “But they’re not wrong.”
My mouth drops open. “Wow.”
Caleb lifts his glass. “Welcome to the group. We literally have no boundaries.”
Dominic appears at my side with a flute of something sparkling. “For the woman of the hour.”
“It’s Layla’s birthday.”
“And yet somehow you arrived looking like a case study in delayed gratification finally losing a civil suit.”
I take the drink anyway because I need the support. “You guys don’t ever let up, do you?”
“It’s part of the charm,” he says.
Jenna’s at the far end of the booth in a black dress so precise it looks engineered, one eyebrow arched as she takes me in. “There’s also a lipstick smudge just here,” she says, gesturing lightly near her jaw.
My soul leaves my body.
“Where?” I ask faintly.
Jenna rises calmly and steps into my space before anyone else can weaponize the moment further. She swipes her thumb once at the edge of my jaw, inspects the result, then nods.
“Gone.”
I stare up at her. “I love you a little.”
“That’s understandable,” she says, returning to her martini.
The table erupts.
Layla’s laughing so hard she has to lean on Bennett’s shoulder.
Serena actually claps. Audrey pushes her glasses up her nose with the air of someone filing this away for future use.
Logan looks at David, then at me, then back at David like he’s trying to determine whether this falls under social catastrophe or ordinary mating behavior.
David, meanwhile, has the audacity to look pleased with himself.
I turn to him with narrowed eyes. “You’re enjoying this far too much.”
“A little,” he admits.
“A little,” Dominic echoes. “He looks like a man who hasn’t been this happy since law school graduation.”
David raises his glass in Dominic’s direction, not even bothering to attempt a comeback.
Audacity and pride mingle in his smile—he’s so obviously in his element that for a second, I see the version of him that must have existed before everything got so heavy.
A lighter, less haunted man. A man who would’ve walked into this room without a single worry about how everyone perceived him, just ready to enjoy a night.
It’s strangely, arrestingly attractive, and if he were to suggest right now that we excuse ourselves to some darker, more private part of the club, I’d say yes before my rational mind could file its objections.
But he doesn’t. He leans over and tucks my hair behind my ear in a gesture so intimate I nearly combust, then we settle into the booth, the line of his thigh pressed to mine, his hand finding my knee under the table, thumb tracing lazy circles as the conversation whirls and crashes around us.
Every few seconds, Serena chimes in with a story about Layla’s antics in college, most of which I suspect are true but have been enhanced for shock value.
Audrey and Logan are conducting a quiet parallel conversation about biometric security protocols that seems to be serving as both foreplay and philosophical wrestling match.
Dominic orders bottle service with the bravado of a man who’s never had to think about his personal finances.
Jenna and Caleb exchange arched, devastating asides about the wine list.
It should be overwhelming. It isn’t. It’s like being absorbed into a neural network you didn’t know you were missing until it started firing at full capacity.
Sometime after the second round of drinks, the group drifts toward the dance floor in waves. Serena and Caleb first, then Layla dragging Bennett, then Audrey and Logan, who, despite all expectations, move together with an odd, endearing synchronicity.
David makes no move to join them, but when he turns to me, his eyes are intent and unguarded.
“Would you like to dance?” he asks.
“I have two left feet.”
“I’m not asking about feet,” David says, low. “I’m asking whether you want to let me hold you for three minutes in public.”
The way he looks at me has me melting.
I think about all the times I’ve hidden at the edges of rooms just like this one, watched people shed their daily armor under strobe and bass, and felt a wistfulness I denied even to myself.
“David.”
“Dance with me, Nora.”
His voice drops on my name the way it always does—half a register lower, the vowels softening, the consonants going precise.
The voice that undoes me every time because it’s the sound of a man who spent seven years not saying anyone’s name like that and has decided that mine is the one worth breaking the silence for.
I take his hand. He pulls me onto the floor.
It’s packed. I immediately regret the heels, but David seems to anticipate the hazard and locks a steadying arm around my waist, pulling me in until our bodies are flush.
He isn’t a dancer—it’s more of a rock, a sway, an exercise in standing in place together while everything else in the club moves, splits, and twists around us.
The song is sticky with synth and thudding bass, but the only thing I can really process is the slide of David’s hand from my waist to the small of my back, holding me with a steadiness that says this is the only place he wants to be tonight.
He lowers his mouth to my ear. “Doing OK?”
I nod against his shoulder. “Better than OK.”
“Good.”
His hand spreads over my back, warm and broad, and I let my palms settle against his chest. Beneath the black shirt, his heart is beating faster than his face would ever admit to. I like that about him. The tell. The reminder that all that composure is, at least partly, excellent packaging.
Around us, the room pulses and flashes. Serena and Caleb are maybe ten feet away, moving in the kind of close, unselfconscious rhythm that suggests they have no interest in pretending they’re here for the music.
Layla’s laughing at something Bennett murmurs into her hair while he sways with all the dignified restraint of a billionaire reluctantly complying with merriment.
Audrey and Logan are somehow dancing like two people who studied for it separately and then met in the middle with surprising success.
But David and I are in our own pocket of gravity.
I tip my head back enough to look at him. “You realize this barely qualifies as dancing.”
“Mmm. I just like holding you while I imagine what I’m going to do to you later.”
“I’m sorry, I missed that. Could you repeat it?” I say, arching my brow in the way that always tells my students to stop being smartasses but, with David, means the opposite.
His mouth tugs up. “I like holding you. I like imagining later. I like knowing I get to have both.”
This man, who spent his childhood moderating himself for the comfort of others, who spent his adulthood constructing arguments so sharp nobody could see past them—he looks at me with an honesty I never learned to brace for.
My breath stutters a little. “That’s quite a lot of liking, Mr. Kingsley.”
“Accumulate enough and it turns into more,” he says, fingertips splaying wide at the base of my spine. “You’re impossible not to love.”
The way he says it—like it’s merely the logical endpoint of observable data—makes something in my chest go incandescent.
I glance away, overwhelmed, and spot Dominic tangled up with Jenna near the edge of the dance floor.
And the way she’s looking at Dominic is, for lack of a better word, devastating.
Not the hungry longing you’d expect from someone who’s been the object of his pursuit for months.
It’s more complicated. Like she’s plotting the slowest, sweetest route toward surrender and refuses to signal whether or when she’ll get there.
He leans in and says something. She laughs, caught in the gravity of him. But like she’s fighting to stay out of orbit and already knows she’s doomed.
“How long do you think she’ll hold out?” I shout up to David over the chorus.
He doesn’t have to follow my gaze. “Jenna?” he says.
“Twelve more days. Maximum. She’s pathologically strategic, but Dominic’s an idiot with stamina.
It’ll be a war of attrition and everyone else will suffer, but he always wins in the end.
” He grins, and it’s so sharp and self-aware that I want to bite it off his face and keep it for my own.
“Twelve days?” I say. “That’s very specific.”
“It’s my hope, to be honest. They’ve been dancing around each other for years—ever since she started working for Bennett, really. This past year, he’s really ramped up his pursuit. It’s bound to come to a head sooner or later.”
I shake my head, but secretly I think he’s right—about Jenna, about everything. About the way that, given enough time, people end up exactly where they’re trying not to be. Simply because it’s where they belong.
“Do you think . . .” I hesitate, then finish, “Do you think it’ll go well for them?”
David’s expression goes briefly reflective, then he tips his head to the side and hums under his breath.
“She’ll eat him alive,” he says. “Which is what he wants, honestly. He’s been letting her set all the rules.
But sooner or later, she’ll break one. But it has to be willingly.
He likes her too much to accept anything other than complete surrender. ”
“I wish I could set all the rules,” I say, not sure if I mean it as a joke or a confession.
David dips his head so our foreheads nearly touch, the crowd closing us in but never coming near enough to break the little sphere he builds around moments like this.
“You already do,” he murmurs. “You just haven’t noticed.”
“Not true. You set rules all the time. You’re a lawyer. You collect them.”
His eyebrow lifts. “And yet you keep breaking mine. Most people don’t get away with that.”
“Is that a challenge or an accusation?”
He smiles—crooked and private. “It’s a fact. A deeply inconvenient one.”
I lean in, curious, emboldened by the anonymity of dim light and intoxicating bass. “So what would you do if I broke the next rule?”
“That depends.”
“On?”
“Whether you want me to enforce or surrender.” The heat of him moves through my blood.
“Surrender,” I say, loving the way his hands flex at my waist, as if he’s barely holding himself together.
“Then what’s the rule you want to break?”
“A social rule—leaving a birthday party before the cake.” I pull back slightly, looking into his amused eyes before I lean back in and place my mouth next to his ear. “I think I’d like to be the dessert.”