9. Victoria #3
I wasn’t doing anything. I was standing in a hallway in my own estate in my nightgown and my glasses, running from a man who had done nothing more than look at me like I was worth looking at. That was all. That was the whole of it.
I pushed off the wall and made my way toward the kitchen.
The estate was quiet. I could hear the low murmur of Brynn and Coach from somewhere on the other side of the house, soft voices and the occasional sound of her laughter, and it settled something in me even as it tugged at something else.
She was all right. She was more than all right.
She had someone who looked at her the same way Rhett looked at me, and she had the good sense to let him.
I filled a glass of water at the kitchen sink and stood there drinking it in the dark.
Ryan had loved this kitchen. That was the thought that came in, the way thoughts about Ryan always came in.
Sideways, without warning, arriving on the back of something as ordinary as running water.
We’d stood in the kitchen of our first apartment for an hour once, arguing about where to put the coffee maker, and he’d been so unreasonably committed to his position that I’d finally just let him win.
He was wrong. The coffee maker had been in the wrong spot for the entire two years we lived there.
He knew it and I knew it and neither of us ever said so.
I set my glass down.
I was smiling.
That surprised me enough that I stood there for a moment and just let it happen.
Stood in the dark kitchen of the estate I bought for a man who never got to see it and smiled at the memory of a coffee maker argument, and it didn’t hurt the way it usually did.
It was just him. Just Ryan, the way he lived in all the small things. The way he always would.
You’re allowed to be happy, Vee.
That was what he used to say whenever I got too deep in my own head. Not an instruction. Just a reminder. Like happiness was a thing I kept forgetting I had permission for.
I heard footsteps behind me.
I didn’t turn around. I didn’t have to.
Rhett moved through a room differently than anyone else I’d ever known. All that size, and yet he never announced himself with it. He just arrived. Filled up the space without demanding anything from it.
He stopped somewhere behind me. Close enough that I could feel the warmth of him in the cool of the kitchen, but far enough that there was still a decision to be made.
Neither of us said anything for a moment.
“Couldn’t sleep?” he asked finally.
“I don’t sleep in unfamiliar places.”
“This place isn’t that unfamiliar. You designed it.”
“I designed it,” I agreed. “I’ve never lived in it.”
He was quiet for a beat. He seemed to understand the distinction. That was the thing about Rhett that I kept running into, no matter how many times I tried to convince myself otherwise. He caught the things I left unsaid the way you only could if you’d been watching long enough to learn the gaps.
I turned around.
He was leaning against the kitchen doorframe with his arms crossed, barefoot, still in the clothes he’d had on all day.
His hair was doing what it always did when he’d been running his hand through it, that disheveled thing that should not have looked as good as it did.
He was watching me with those ice blue eyes and not pretending he wasn’t.
“You should go to bed,” I said.
“Probably.”
“You have practice tomorrow.”
“We all do.” He tilted his head. “You should sleep too.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve been fine all day,” he said. “That’s a lot of fine for one person.”
I looked at him. At the freckles across the bridge of his nose that I’d never noticed until today, when the afternoon light caught them just right. At the steadiness of him, standing there in my kitchen at God knows what hour, not asking anything of me. Just present. Just there.
Ryan would have liked him.
The thought arrived without any of the usual weight. No guilt attached, no flinching away from it. Just the clean, simple truth of it landing in the center of my chest and staying there.
Ryan would have liked him enormously. He would have watched Rhett manage Coach and Brynn and the media chaos of this afternoon and he would have looked at me with that expression he got sometimes, the one that meant *see, I told you* and then he would have been completely insufferable about it for the rest of the evening.
You’re allowed to be happy, Vee.
My throat tightened.
I took a step toward Rhett and then stopped.
One step. Just the one. Enough to close half the distance between us and no further, because the other half of it was the part I didn’t know what to do with yet.
He didn’t move. He just let me stand there, a step closer than I’d been a moment ago, and waited.
I looked up at him.
He looked back.
“Good night, Rhett,” I said quietly.
His face shifted. Recognition, maybe. Or patience. The patience of a man who had been waiting for three years and understood that waiting a little longer wasn’t going to cost him anything.
“Good night, Miss C,” he said.
I turned back down the hallway toward my room.
I didn’t look back.
But I was still thinking about that one step when I finally closed my eyes.