Chapter 5
Alex woke early, which had never once in her life been a problem until this particular morning, when it meant lying in the dark for a full twenty minutes replaying a kiss she had absolutely no business replaying.
By the time she made it downstairs, she’d built an entire strategy.
Brisk. Professional. The kind of energy she brought to a client call after a bad pitch, competent and unbothered and giving away nothing.
She poured her coffee, checked the weather through the window (still bad, still snowing, the world beyond the glass reduced to a smear of white), and had just settled into the illusion of composure when Dani appeared at the top of the stairs already dressed for yoga, hair pulled back, expression arranged into something so carefully neutral it might as well have had a sign taped to it.
“Morning,” Dani said, breezing past her toward the coffee pot like the counter itself might be dangerous to linger near.
“Morning.” Alex kept her eyes on her mug. “Sleep okay?”
“Great. Fantastic. You?”
“Wonderful.”
Neither of them had slept well. It was obvious in the too-quick answers, the studied casualness, the way Dani filled her mug and immediately retreated three full steps toward the living room as though putting distance between them might undo the previous night by sheer geography.
“I’m going to do my practice,” Dani said, already moving. “Then I’ve got some calls to try to make. Well. Try to try. You know.”
“Right. The signal.”
“The signal.” Dani nodded, too many times, and disappeared toward the windows, leaving Alex alone in the kitchen with a coffee going cold in her hands and the distinct, uncomfortable sense that she’d spent the entire exchange holding her breath.
The day unfolded in careful increments after that, both of them orbiting the house with the exaggerated politeness of two people determined not to acknowledge the thing sitting between them like a third guest. Alex found herself narrating the obvious.
I’m going to make lunch now. I’m going to check the firewood.
I think I’ll read for a while. Dani, for her part, had never in twenty-four hours been so vocal about her own agenda, announcing each small task like she was leaving a trail of breadcrumbs to prove she had somewhere specific to be that wasn’t wherever Alex happened to be standing.
It was almost funny, if either of them had been in a place to find it funny.
They reached for the same mug at the same time around noon, both hands landing on the handle at once, and the jolt of contact sent them apart so fast Alex nearly knocked over the dish rack.
“Sorry,” she said, too quickly.
“No, you—” Dani gestured vaguely. “Go ahead.”
“I don’t even want that one.”
“Neither do I, apparently.” Dani let out a short laugh that had no real humor in it, running a hand over her face. “Okay, this is ridiculous.”
“What is?”
“This.” Dani gestured between them, encompassing the whole strained, overcorrected day. “We’re acting like two people who robbed a bank together and can’t be seen in the same room. It was a kiss. People kiss. It doesn’t have to be a whole thing.”
“I agree completely.” Alex said it fast, maybe too fast, and reached for the mug again just to have something to do with her hands. “It was the wine. We established that. No thing to be had.”
“Right. No thing.” Dani nodded, arms crossing, a posture Alex was starting to recognize as her version of bracing. “Good. Glad we’re on the same page.”
“Very glad.”
They stood there another beat too long, close enough at the counter that Alex could feel the warmth coming off her, close enough to remember exactly what it had felt like the night before when that distance hadn’t existed at all, and then Dani stepped back, breaking whatever was building in the silence, and reached for a granola bar from the pantry like it was the most urgent task available to her.
“I’m going to go read,” Dani said. “In my room. Alone. With the door shut.”
“Great plan.”
“It is a great plan.”
She left. Alex stood at the counter for a long moment after, staring at the mug they’d both reached for and neither of them had actually wanted, and thought, with a clarity that felt entirely unwelcome, that pretending the last twelve hours hadn’t happened was going to be a great deal harder than either of them was currently willing to admit.
By evening the house had gone quiet in the particular way it did when two people were both very deliberately staying in separate rooms, and Alex found herself standing at the window watching the storm instead of reading the book she had abandoned on the couch, listening for footsteps she was trying very hard not to want to hear.
Upstairs, in her own borrowed room, Dani sat cross-legged on the bed with her phone useless in her hand, replaying, against her own better judgment, the exact moment Alex had leaned in first, and wondering why a single kiss from a woman she’d known less than a day had managed to rattle something in her that six years of careful distance had never once touched.