14. Melody
— ? —
Melody
The restaurant sits right on the water, all white linen and salt air, and after two weeks of takeout on his floor and my boxes half-unpacked across town, it is the least discreet place two people in our situation could possibly eat lunch.
“This is very public,” I say, sliding into the chair he’s pulled out for me. The terrace is packed with the kind of people who summer as a verb - designer sunglasses, effortless tans, the casual wealth that comes from never having to check a price tag.
“That’s the point.” Noah sits across from me, completely at ease. “We can’t keep hiding.”
“I know.” I move my fork around a plate I’m not touching, watching the light play off the water. “But I’m still married. Technically. Legally, until he signs the damn papers.”
“Then let me help you fix that.”
“How? You going to hold a pen to his hand?”
“I have lawyers. Very expensive, very creative lawyers.”
“Noah-”
“I’m serious. You gave him until Friday. If he doesn’t sign, we go to court. We lay out everything - the letter, Patterson’s testimony, the texts. We bury him so deep in his own mess that signing becomes the kindest option he has.”
“And if he still refuses?”
“Then we make it hurt.” His voice goes flat in a way I haven’t heard before. “I don’t play fair with people who hurt the ones I love.”
The ones I love. He says it so easily, like it’s not a grenade he just rolled across the table.
“You’re terrifying when you go all ruthless billionaire.”
“I prefer ‘protective.’”
“Same energy, different branding.”
He reaches across the table and takes my hand. Right there. In the open. In front of the couple two tables over and the waiter with the water pitcher and the whole bright, gossiping afternoon.
My first instinct is to pull back. To hide. To remember that I’m still legally bound to a man who doesn’t deserve the title of husband.
My second instinct wins.
“You realize what people will say.” My voice comes out lower than I mean it to. “I’m your cousin’s wife, Noah. That’s the sentence. That’s the whole headline. Nobody reads past it.”
“Let them read whatever they want.”
“It’s not that simple-”
“It is, though.” His thumb moves over my knuckles, slow circles that make my heart stutter. “I’m not going to whisper about you in elevators. I’m not going to pretend you’re someone I just met when I know exactly how you sound when you-”
“Okay, point made.” My cheeks flush, and I’m grateful for the sunglasses hiding my eyes. “But the optics-”
“The optics are that I’m in love with a woman who deserves to be loved properly, and I don’t care who knows it.” He lifts my hand and presses his lips to it, right there in the sunshine where anyone can see. “So say it out loud with me. I’m here. You’re here. Let people have their opinions.”
And the terrible part is I want to. I want the open table and the held hand and the version of my life where I don’t apologize for surviving.
I’ve spent so long shrinking myself to fit into spaces that were never built for me - Leo’s expectations, his family’s approval, the careful performance of a happy marriage. I’m so tired of shrinking.
I feel the smile start before I decide to let it.
“Okay,” I say. “Let them.”
I lift his hand and kiss the back of it, deliberate, sunlit, watched. A woman at the next table actually gasps, and I don’t care. I don’t care about any of it.
For the first time in months, maybe years, I feel like myself.
***
The waiter arrives with menus and raised eyebrows, and Noah orders for both of us without looking away from my face.
The food arrives - something with lobster, something with champagne, something that probably costs more than my electricity bill - and we eat while the afternoon stretches out golden around us.
He tells me about the hotel he’s renovating in Bali, and I tell him about the apartment I’m slowly unpacking, and it feels so normal that I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“You’ve got sauce on your chin,” he says.
“No I don’t.”
“You absolutely do. Right there.” He reaches across the table and swipes his thumb across my jaw, then licks it clean. “Delicious.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“That’s efficient.”
I throw my napkin at him. He catches it one-handed, grinning, and something loosens in my chest. This is easy. He makes everything easy.
“Tell me something,” I say, leaning back in my chair. “Something real. Not the resort-owner stuff, not the business. Something nobody knows.”
He considers this, tilting his head. “The deep water still scares me.”
“Bullshit. You pulled me out of the ocean.”
“And it terrified me the whole way. I nearly drowned when I was eight. Summer camp, some kid pushed me into the deep end as a joke. Counselor had to fish me out.” He shrugs like it’s nothing, but I catch the tension in his jaw.
“Took me years to get back in the water at all. I’m fine where I can touch - it’s the deep, past the drop-off, that still gets me. ”
“Noah. You own beach resorts.”
“I know. Ironic, right?” He smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “That’s why I was at the bar that night instead of on the water. I love looking at the ocean. Being in it is a different story.”
“But you came in after me. When I went under.”
“Yeah.”
“Even though you were scared.”
“You were drowning, Melody. Fear wasn’t really a factor at that point.”
The words hit me somewhere soft. I think about him watching me go under, think about what it must have cost him to dive in anyway, to push past whatever that eight-year-old version of himself still carries.
“Your turn,” he says, steering us away from the moment before it gets too heavy. “Something real. Something nobody knows.”
I think for a second. “I’ve never been on a roller coaster.”
“Never?”
“My mom was terrified of them. Like, phobia-level terrified. She used to have panic attacks just walking past one at the fair. So I never went on them, because I didn’t want to make her feel bad.
” I trace the rim of my water glass. “And then she died, and I kept not going on them, because it felt like I’d be betraying her somehow.
Like enjoying the thing she feared would be disloyal. ”
“That’s not how that works.”
“I know. But grief doesn’t follow logic.”
He catches my hand across the table, his thumb rubbing slow circles on my palm. “We should go. Find the biggest, most terrifying roller coaster in the Midwest and ride it together.”
“You hate heights.”
“I never said I hate heights.”
“You didn’t have to. You white-knuckled the railing at every rooftop bar in Thailand.”
He laughs, caught. “Fine. I’m not great with heights. But I’ll do it anyway. For you.”
“That’s very romantic.”
“I’m a very romantic person.”
“You’re a person who just licked sauce off his thumb in public.”
“Romance takes many forms.”
I’m laughing now, really laughing, and he’s watching me with that look again - the one that makes me feel seen in a way I’m still not used to. The one that makes me want to tell him everything, every broken piece, every jagged edge.
“I like this,” I say quietly.
“This?”
“Us. Talking. Being stupid together.” I squeeze his hand. “I forgot what this felt like. Having someone who actually wants to know me. Not the version I perform for everyone else. Just... me.”
“I like you,” he says simply. “The real you. The one who eats too fast and argues with newspaper editorials and can’t ride roller coasters. All of it.”
“Even the messy parts?”
“Especially the messy parts.” He turns my hand over and presses a kiss to my palm. “The messy parts are what make you interesting.”
We finish lunch in comfortable silence, the kind that doesn’t need to be filled.
The terrace empties out as the afternoon fades, couples drifting off to whatever beautiful people do after expensive lunches, and I let myself sink into the moment.
The warmth. The salt air. The man across from me who looks at me like the afternoon was built around me.
What I don’t see, because I’m finally, foolishly not looking over my shoulder, is the man across the terrace by the railing.
Phone up. Angled at us. Not taking a call.
Leo watches us through his screen, capturing every touch. Every kiss. Every moment of the happiness he doesn’t think I deserve.
Building his ammunition.