Chapter 8 #2
Normal. Easy. Conversation that settled into the gaps between two people who were running out of excuses to keep each other at arm's length.
The domesticity of it should have alarmed me. It did. I minced the garlic and ignored every alarm bell ringing in my skull.
After dinner—a simple aglio e olio that she'd proclaimed "unreasonably good" while scraping the bowl—she curled onto the sectional with the leather-bound Pride and Prejudice I'd bought her in Hartfield.
Feet tucked beneath her. The book propped against a pillow—the gray one, naturally, the one she'd liberated from decorative duty.
I set up at the kitchen island with my laptop. The Riverside sustainability report needed finishing. The shading calculations for the western facade were overdue. I had legitimate, pressing, revenue-dependent work to accomplish.
I opened the file. Read the same paragraph three times. Closed the file.
Over the laptop screen, I watched her read.
She had a habit I'd noticed in Hartfield—her mouth moved faintly as she tracked the sentences, lips forming shapes around Austen's prose.
She'd sink deeper into the cushions by degrees, as if the couch were absorbing her.
One hand held the book; the other rested against her collarbone, fingers tapping an absent rhythm I suspected she wasn't aware of.
Her eyelids grew heavier. The tapping slowed. The book tilted in her loosening hold, pages fanning, until it came to rest spine-up on her sternum.
She was out.
I closed the laptop.
Watched her sleep, and knew I should stop. Knew this was behavior that crossed lines I'd drawn with my own hand this morning. Platonic. That had been the agreement. A sensible, necessary, adult decision between two people who were already in over their heads.
But in sleep, Willow shed every defense she carried while awake. No sharp comeback loaded. No self-deprecating joke at the ready. No bright performance to convince the world she wasn't scared. She was just—there. In my space. Trusting it enough to let go.
No one had trusted me with that in eight years.
Jessica had slept facing away from me in the last years of our marriage.
A wall of back and shoulder, the topography of a woman who'd stopped believing I deserved her vulnerability.
And she'd been right. I hadn't earned it.
I'd been too consumed by the next project, the next proposal, the next building that would stand long after my marriage had collapsed into rubble.
Willow Monroe was asleep on my couch with a nineteenth-century novel rising and falling on her chest, and she'd given me her unguarded self without a second thought, and I wanted to be worth that. Wanted it in a way that had nothing to do with arrangements or contracts or age gaps.
This was a problem.
I should wake her. Guide her to the guest room. Maintain the boundary.
Instead, I moved to the couch. Sat on the edge with care, keeping space between us. The cushion shifted under me and she stirred—not awake, not asleep. Suspended in that liminal place where the body responds on instinct and the brain hasn't caught up.
She scooted toward me. Toward warmth, toward proximity, the way a person reaches for solid ground when the floor tips. Her arm reached around me, settling against me, cuddled against my side like she belonged there. My arm instinctively made room for her.
She mumbled. Not coherent. Half-formed syllables, fragments of a dream that hadn't survived the journey from unconscious to conscious. Nonsense sounds that would've embarrassed her if she were awake.
It was absurd.
It leveled me.
My hand moved before the rational part of my brain could file an objection. I brushed the hair from her face. My fingers grazed her temple. The curve of her cheekbone.
Her eyes opened. Not a snap—a slow, tidal thing. Rising from deep and unfocused to the surface. Hazy. Blinking.
Then finding me.
This close, I could see the ring of amber in her hazel irises, the freckles scattered across her nose that she covered with makeup during the day. A constellation I hadn't known existed until now, inches away on my couch in the dim apartment with the city spread beneath us.
She registered how close we were. My hand still near her face. My body angled toward hers. The collapsed distance between where I should have been and where I was.
She didn't flinch. Didn't deflect. Didn't reach for a joke to detonate what was building.
She just looked at me. And I saw it—the same want I'd been strangling for weeks, reflected back without a filter, without armor, without the thousand qualifications we both kept stacking between us and this moment.
I made the choice.
Not impulsive. Not accidental. Not a collision born from an argument or a dare or a convenient excuse about selling our story. Deliberate. Eyes open. Knowing exactly what I was doing and what it would cost.
My hand cupped her jaw. My thumb traced her lower lip—a question, the last off-ramp before the highway. She didn't take it. Her breath hitched against my thumb, and her eyes held mine, and I understood that we were both choosing this.
I kissed her.
No audience. No arrangement. No reason except the only reason that had ever mattered.
This wasn't the controlled brush of lips in my office weeks ago—that careful, calibrated contact designed to prove we could be convincing without being consumed.
This was the demolition of that theory. This was what happened when two people ran out of flimsy excuses that were never meant to hold true weight.
She responded instantly. Her hand fisted in my shirt, pulling me down, pulling me closer, and a sound caught in her throat—not a moan, not a gasp, a thing in between that bypassed my brain and went straight to my blood.
My hand slid into her hair. She arched into me and I was gone—every rational argument I'd constructed dismantled in the time it took her mouth to open against mine.
The book tumbled to the floor. Neither of us noticed.
I angled her beneath me on the couch—one hand braced beside her head, the other cradling her jaw—and she pulled me down by the shirtfront, and the feel of her body under mine, warm and real and wanting, incinerated every boundary we'd built that morning.
Platonic. What a joke. What a spectacular, self-deluding, destined-to-fail joke.
I kissed her jaw. Her neck. The hollow below her ear that made her gasp and arch and dig her nails into my shoulders in a way that suggested she had no idea what she was doing to me.
Her fingers raked through my hair—the same gesture from my office weeks ago, except now there was no pretense.
No rehearsal. Just raw, unmediated need that had been accumulating since the day she told me my tie was crooked and my pulse did a thing it hadn't done in twenty years.
My tongue tangled with hers, sliding against that sweet forbidden heat, quickly igniting the dangerous spark inside me until we were both shaking, both breathing in ragged pulls that sounded loud in the quiet apartment.
The kiss slowed—not stopping, never stopping—but shifting.
Turning tender. My mouth moving against hers with a gentleness that surprised even me, a man who'd forgotten he was capable of gentleness.
Then urgent again, as if tenderness were too dangerous, as if the vulnerability of being soft with each other was harder to survive than the heat.
Then tender once more. A cycle I couldn't break. Savoring and devouring and savoring again, two people who couldn't decide whether this was the beginning of everything or the end of safety.
Her hands cupped my face. Held me there. Kissed me with a thoroughness that rearranged the furniture of my interior life.
I'd kissed women in the years since my divorce. Competent kisses. Pleasant kisses. Kisses that accomplished their objective and left no residue.
This kiss left residue. This kiss left structural damage. This kiss was going to require renovation.
We surfaced.
Foreheads touching. Breathing jacked up. Her hands still on my face, my hand still in her hair, the city beyond the windows indifferent to the fact that two people on a sectional had just detonated every rule they'd set.
Neither of us laughed it off. Neither of us reached for a joke.
I waited for regret. It didn't come. What came instead was clarity—the terrible, clean kind that left no room for pretending. I wasn't performing anymore. Hadn't been for a while. The arrangement was a scaffolding I'd been hiding behind, and Willow had just pulled it down.
"That wasn't part of the arrangement," I said. My voice sounded rough. As if the kiss had reached into my throat and rearranged that too.
She was still flushed, still breathing hard, still looking at me with those impossible eyes—amber and green and more honest than any speech either of us could have composed.
"No," she said. "It wasn't."
"Every rule we made this morning—"
"Gone." She traced my jawline with her thumb. "Obliterated. Not even rubble. Just... a crater."
“And how do you feel about that?”
“Freaked out.” She held my gaze. Didn't waver. "I'm not sorry, though."
"Neither am I." And I meant it. Whatever came next—the complication, the fallout, the inevitable reckoning with the fact that our arrangement now carried a payload neither of us had signed up for—I didn't regret this. Couldn't.
She pressed her palm flat against my sternum. Not pushing. Feeling.
"Six more days," she said. "Under the same roof."
"Six more days."
"We're going to be terrible at boundaries."
"We're going to be catastrophic at boundaries."
That got a real smile—wide and unguarded, the kind she usually hid behind a quip. "At least we're self-aware about our inevitable failure."
"I've always believed in realistic expectations."
She laughed. The sound broke through the charged quiet of the apartment, warm and human and purely Willow. She pulled back, sat up, ran a hand through her wild hair.
"I should go to bed," she said. "The real bed. The guest bed. Before we make this more complicated than it already is."
She was right. I knew she was right.
"Willow."
She paused at the hallway entrance, turned.
I wanted to say a dozen things. That I hadn't felt this alive in eight years. That she terrified me in ways blueprints and load-bearing walls never had. That I was falling, had been falling, and the only structural support I could find was her.
What I said was: "Goodnight."
She held my gaze for a beat. Smiled—smaller now, private, meant only for this moment between us. "Goodnight, Callum."
Her footsteps retreated down the hall. The guest room door closed.
What the hell did we just do? The couch was still warm where she'd been, the abandoned novel splayed on the floor, the taste of her still on my mouth—and I stared at the city doing what cities do: carrying on regardless.
Six more days under the same roof. The fake relationship now carrying the full freight of the real thing. A woman asleep in my guest room who had no business trusting me and did it anyway.
I picked up the fallen copy of Pride and Prejudice, smoothed the bent pages, and set it on the coffee table. Austen would have appreciated the irony. Two stubborn people, convinced they understood each other, blindsided by the discovery that they'd been wrong about everything that mattered.
I turned off the lights, stretched out on the couch that still carried the ghost of her warmth, and did what I'd been doing for weeks.
Thought about Willow Monroe.
Except now I didn't need to imagine. Now I knew. The taste of her mouth. The sound she made when I kissed her neck. The feel of her hands on my face, holding me as if I were worth holding.
This was the most dangerous blueprint I'd ever drawn. No engineering margin. No fail-safes. No load calculations that could predict how much pressure two flawed people could bear before the structure buckled.
I was in it. All the way.
And for a man who'd spent his adult life designing buildings meant to endure, the most terrifying prospect wasn't the falling.
It was discovering I didn't want to be caught.
I wanted to fall. Wanted it with her. Wanted whatever came after the impact, even if it left a mark.
Especially if it left a mark.
I closed my eyes. Sleep wouldn't come easy.
But for the record—I didn't need it to.