Chapter 11
I picked up the towel—I had to dry off somehow—but I didn’t tie it.
I told myself it was petty—pointless, really—but it felt like the only control left to exercise. A knot would have been consent to being covered. Letting it hang was a decision to be seen.
He was waiting by the windows, the harbor thrown bright behind him. Daylight turned the suite into a glass box, the bridge a pale sweep across the sky. He glanced at the slick trail my feet had left and then back to my face, like the mess belonged here because I did.
“Drink,” he said, and I did.
The champagne snapped sharp on my tongue. I held the glass, didn’t look away.
“What now,” I asked, “or do you prefer to keep me guessing?”
His mouth did that almost-smile again, the one that never showed teeth. “Now, you’ll get dressed. Then we’re going to King Street.”
“For …?”
“Clothes,” he said, as if that were a language we both spoke. “Shoes. Whatever you want. Whatever I want on you.”
I barked out a laugh I didn’t feel. “You’re going to Pretty Woman me.”
“If that helps you name it.” He tipped his glass. “Consider today an errand. You’ll spend the night here.”
There it was: the line drawn in permanent marker.
“You’re very sure of yourself.” The towel shifted. I pressed a palm to it. “You don’t even know if I snore.”
“I know enough.”
“You’re not asking.”
“I am.” His voice didn’t lift, but it landed. “Say yes. Or say no. If you say no, I put you in a car and you go home and we don’t speak again. If you say yes, I don’t spend the day pretending we’re something we’re not.”
“What’s that mean?” My mouth was dry. “What are we?”
“Hungry,” he said simply. “And done lying to ourselves.”
Heat climbed my chest. “You’re very good at writing my motivations for me.”
“You wrote them first.”
My phone sat faceup on the coffee table where he’d placed it earlier, as if he knew I’d need it to make this real. I stared at the black slab of it like it might give me permission.
“You’re asking me to blow off work all day,” I said. “I have to teach a class tonight.”
“Reschedule,” he said. “Tell them the village is bigger than one day.”
“You really want to test my five-star Yelp reviews?”
“Say yes,” he repeated, patient to the point of cruelty. “Or don’t.”
He would do this on and on, I realized. He would stand there and let me wrestle myself into knots rather than push a finger into the tangle. He was letting me own the choice.
“I’ll have to disappoint people at the shop,” I said, thin.
“You’ll handle it.”
“I’ll handle it,” I echoed, and then the word that scared me and thrilled me in equal measure: “Yes.”
It left my mouth softer than I meant, but I didn’t take it back.
He nodded once, decision accepted, not celebrated.
The logistics steadied my hands. I typed fast—an Instagram story with a leafy background: Closed today—family obligations.
Classes moved to Monday, same time. Check your inbox!
I sent a group text to tonight’s class, added three heart emojis to soften the blow, and forwarded a curbside pickup list to my part-time cleaner with a Double pay if you swing by? I owe you big .
“Family obligations,” he repeated, amused.
“It’s not entirely a lie,” I said, thumb hovering over Stephen’s contact. The dots of his avatar pulsed like judgment. “Your existence is very much a family obligation.”
“Don’t tell him,” Atticus said, calm and absolute.
“I wasn’t planning on sending him a selfie with your cleaver tattoo in the frame.”
“Don’t tell him,” he said again. “Not yet.”
The not yet threaded through me like a wire.
“You do realize this is insane,” I said, even as I drafted a note to Alana— Can you cover tomorrow’s breastfeeding circle if I bribe you with cacao?
—and hit send. “You are my brother’s friend.
You were at his birthday party. You brought me to a penthouse and told me to shower with the city watching. ”
He didn’t flinch. “It’s insane,” he said. “It’s also what you wanted.”
“I wanted a stranger,” I said before I could soften it. The admission sounded harsher out loud, and maybe more honest. “No names. No cross-pollination with my real life. Not this.”
“You wanted danger you could laminate,” he said. “Something you could put in a folder and tuck away. Safe. Contained. The universe didn’t cooperate.”
“So the universe is … you?”
“That’s not my religion,” he said lightly. “But for today, I’ll allow it.”
“Are you him?” The question had been stalking me. I let it step into daylight. “Are you the man from Alpha Mail?”
His gaze held. Outside, a tour boat carved a bright line through the water. Inside, I counted three beats of my own heart.
“I read your letter,” he said. “It reached me.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the one you get.”
Vague and maddening, just like I’d expected. “So not Alpha Mail?”
“I don’t wear their name,” he said. “I don’t take their assignments.”
“But you took me.”
He didn’t blink. “Yes.”
I tasted salt. “And Stephen? What does he know?”
“What he needs to,” he said. “He knows I don’t touch his family.”
“Except you are,” I said, throat tight. “Here we are. Daytime. No plausible deniability.”
He took a step toward me that I felt more than saw. “If you want deniability, say no and leave. If you want what you wrote, stop asking the wrong questions.”
“What are the right ones?”
“What you’ll wear,” he said, without missing a beat. “Where I’ll put my hands tonight. How long you’ll last if I make you stand in the window again.”
A tremor went through my legs. “I hate you.”
“You will,” he said. “And you won’t.”
He checked his watch. It wasn’t a flourish—it was logistics. “We have an hour before the shops get crowded. Dry your hair. Put on what you came in with. We’ll fix it.”
I should have bristled. I did, a little. But the bigger part of me—traitor, thrill-seeker, whatever we were calling her now—liked being told what to do by someone who made my skin feel like it had electricity under it.
When I looked up, he was close enough to kiss if kissing were a language we spoke. He didn’t touch me.
“Shoes,” he said.
I padded back to the bathroom, pulled on my clothes and sandals, and laughed once under my breath at the absurdity and the inevitability of it all.
I brushed my hair into a quick, damp ponytail, dusted my cheeks with powder, and told my reflection—firmly—that she could do hard things, including walking behind a man like Atticus across a lobby without flinching.
I didn’t flinch. The lobby eyes did their thing again when we crossed to the car, curiosity tugged by his gravity. The driver opened my door. I slid into the cool dark and tried to memorize the sensation of choosing this.
Charleston at noon was a knife of light. King Street shimmered—a parade of glossy windows, tourist sundresses, and handbags I could pay three months of my mortgage with. He didn’t ask where I wanted to start. He told the driver where to stop, and we stopped there.
The first boutique had a door that dinged politely and a woman with a name tag in a font that implied she also knew how to monogram linen napkins. She glanced at me, then at him, and recalibrated fast.
“We need a rack,” he said, not loud, not arrogant—just the way you’d say water in the desert. “Dresses. Day to night. Nothing fussy. Something that looks like it was made for her even if it wasn’t. Heels she won’t fall in.”
The saleswoman’s smile rearranged itself into competence.
“Of course.” She swept a measuring look over me, one that bounced off my damp ponytail and landed on the parts of me that made clothes choices complicated.
Not difficult—just honest. Hips. Thighs.
The breasts I pretended not to notice under most lighting.
“We’re not doing tailoring,” he added, and that took the needle out of the situation. “We’re doing now.”
“Understood.” She snapped her fingers, and a younger associate materialized with an armful of draped fabric.
The dressing room was a small cathedral of mirrors.
I stood on a low platform that made me feel like a reluctant debutante.
He sat. Not in the tucked-away boyfriend chair outside the waiting area.
In the room. The saleswoman didn’t blink.
The door stayed mostly closed, his presence its own kind of permission.
“Try this,” the associate said, pressing a slip of silk into my hands, bias-cut and innocuous until I pulled it on and realized it was designed to morph into a second skin.
I caught my breath. It was a color that didn’t have a fruit name.
Bone? Sand? A warm neutral that looked accidental and expensive.
I turned to the mirror. The fabric skimmed my stomach without clinging, draped at the hips like a secret, framed the curve of my shoulders in a low cowl. I felt naked and armed at once.
Atticus didn’t speak for a full three seconds. Then: “Turn.”
I did. The back dipped farther than the front, revealing a spine I usually forgot I liked. The silk floated at my calves.
“That one,” he said.
“It’s the first one I tried on.”
“It’s the right one.”
A laugh bubbled up and died in my throat. “You’re not even going to pretend to be a man who requires options?”
“I know what I like on you,” he said, and heat climbed the back of my neck because the on you did something dangerous to my insides.
We still tried on options—because I needed a montage to calm the part of me that wasn’t sure if the silk was a costume.
A black sheath that made me feel like a courtroom.
A floral that made me look like someone’s well-funded niece.
He said very little, but his very little was a scalpel.
“No.” “Too sweet.” “Too loud for the room I want you in.” He wasn’t dressing a doll—he was calibrating a presence.
The silk stayed.
Shoes next: straps that would leave marks by midnight, block heels that would not.
He chose a pair I would have walked past for being too simple—nude leather, barely-there straps, a lift that turned my legs into the best version of themselves without promising to murder my arches.
I caught my reflection with the shoes and the dress and felt the click you get when a puzzle piece slides in without wobble.
“I can’t afford all of this,” I said, reflexively, even though this was very clearly not my wallet.
He didn’t speak.
The look on his face told me everything I needed to know about what he could and couldn’t afford. So, I believed him.