8. Knox #2
She flinches at that and her eyes go bright on cue. “I came to explain. About William. It wasn’t… it didn’t mean…” Her voice catches in the right place. “It just happened. I never planned for it to happen. You have to believe that I never meant to hurt you.”
I look at her, and I feel nothing, which is its own answer. No anger left, no betrayal, none of the heat I’d expect. Just the flat, clean distance you feel toward a stranger who’s standing too close.
“All right,” I say.
“All right?”
“You’ve explained. You can go.”
The tears stop being useful, and I watch her recalculate behind them, watch the soft thing harden into the thing that was always under it. This is the part of Blythe I never got to see while I was busy trying to be a gentleman. I’m almost grateful for the view.
“That’s it?” she says. “Three months, and that’s all you have for me?”
I frown at her.
“What is it you want me to say, exactly? That I’m devastated?” I shake my head. “You came here for a reaction I don’t have.”
Her glare cuts through the last of the tears.
“You know what your problem is, Knox?” Her voice climbs. “You never cared. You held yourself back the entire time and now you stand there cold as a wall, acting as though I’m the villain. What was I supposed to do?”
I look at her without bothering to hide the disbelief.
“Is that the version you’ve settled on? The one where I drove you to it, so none of the blame is on you?” My voice stays level, which I can tell unsettles her more than heat would. “You’re not gonna stand in my home and rewrite three months to my face.”
She falters, just slightly, losing her footing.
I look at her standing there in my hallway, certain the trying never happened, and the memory rises up to meet the lie and drown it.
The restaurant is quiet, perfect for getting to know someone on a Friday.
I’d chosen it on purpose. No spectacle, no scene to be seen in, just a corner table and low light and a chance to hear her over something other than a crowd. I’d wanted to know if there was a person under the gloss, someone I could build a year around.
“This is it?” She looked around the dining room, and her face turned into an expression I chose not to read at the time. “I thought we were going out.”
“We are out.” I pulled her chair for her. “Best kitchen in the city. I had to call in a favor for the table.”
“No, I mean… I thought we’d do something fun.” She sat, but her eyes kept moving past me, toward the window. “There’s that new place on Fifth. The boutiques stay open late for the right names. We could have made an evening of it.”
An evening of me with a card out, her pointing. I’d laughed, because I was sure she was joking.
Turns out, she hadn’t been joking.
I steered us back, ordered well, and asked her real questions, the kind meant to close the distance between two near-strangers.
She answered as though she was being audited.
Careful, giving me nothing, her attention drifting every time the talk turned from what I could provide toward who I actually was.
Back then, I told myself she was nervous.
Later, at her door, she turned and caught me by the collar and pulled me into a kiss before I’d finished saying goodnight. Her body pressing the length of mine, a kiss built to end one way and one way only.
At first I let it, because I’m not made of stone and she knew exactly what she was doing.
Then her fingers went to my collar, working the top button loose, her mouth moving to my jaw, a low murmur against my skin about how the night didn’t have to end at the door.
I pulled back.
“Hey.” I caught her hand at my throat, gentle about it, and a breath of a laugh came out of me. “Slow down. We’ve only just met. Properly, I mean. Tonight’s the first time I’ve actually talked to you.”
“So?” Her hand stayed where it was, her mouth coming back toward mine.
“So I told you I wanted to do this right.” I eased her fingers off my collar and held them a moment, so she’d know the no wasn’t a rejection. “I meant it. I’d like to know you before the rest of it. There’s no rush on my end.”
I’d been proud of it, God help me. The restraint, the seriousness, the better man I was practicing being. I thought she’d see it for what it was.
She didn’t. A look crossed her face. Looking back, it’s a disappointment that hadn’t come out the way she’d planned. Then it smoothed into a tight little smile.
“Of course,” she said. “You’re right. That’s… that’s sweet, actually.”
She stepped back through her door with a clipped goodnight and shut it, and I drove home telling myself the chill of it was nerves.
When the hallway returns, Blythe is still standing in it, waiting to be told she was wronged.
I lean back against the wall and cross my arms, suddenly tired of all of it.
“Let’s stop pretending with each other. It’s late, and neither of us has the energy.”
“You shut me out,” she insists, but the certainty’s gone thin. “You held yourself back, you never…”
“Then you could have said so.” It comes out harsher than I mean, and I don’t rein it in.
“You could have talked to me. I asked you, more than once, whether we had a problem, and every time you looked me in the face and said we didn’t.
I wasn’t asking for nothing, Blythe. I was paying attention. I always am.”
Her mouth closes.
“That’s the part you keep getting wrong about me.” I hold her eyes. “You decided I was a fool because I was being patient. I wasn’t. I know you went into my files. I know you fed what you found to my competitor. Did you honestly believe I wouldn’t?”
The color drops out of her face, and for once there’s no performance ready to cover it.
“I needed the money,” she says, and at least it’s closer to honest than anything else she’s said tonight. “And you… you had all of it! And you never once offered! You never tried to actually take care of me. A real partner would have…”
I don’t say the rest of it. I don’t tell her about the call I made, the strings I pulled, the tuition handled and the scholarship arranged for a younger sister she mentioned exactly once over wine, all of it done quietly because I didn’t want it to weigh on our relationship.
Even now, I’m not going to stand here and hold it over her head to win an argument. That isn’t why I did it.
“There’s your confession,” I say instead. “What you were really after the whole time. Good to finally hear it out loud.”
My jaw tightens, and whatever was left in me for this conversation goes out.
“We’re done, Blythe. You made your choice the moment you decided lying was simpler than talking, and you don’t get to come here and grieve a relationship you sold for parts.”
“And what, you’ve upgraded?” Her lip curls. “Straight to Adriana Rosewood. You think she’s any different in using you?”
I roll my eyes and push off the wall, crossing to hold the door wider.
“Goodnight, Blythe.” I tip my head toward the hall. “Go home. Get some rest, you shouldn’t be on your feet arguing in your condition. Good luck with the baby. Truly.”
It isn’t warm and it isn’t cruel. It’s just a door I’m done with.
She stares at me a moment, looking for a crack to wedge back into and not finding one. Then she goes, heels clipping down the corridor, and I shut the door on the sound of them.
The quiet after is enormous.
So much for sleep and one decent night I’d promised myself. I came home for rest and instead got my mother, then my ex, back to back. A full evening’s ambush in my own place when all I wanted was eight uninterrupted hours alone.
I scrub a hand down my face and give up on the idea of bed entirely.
There’s no sleeping on top of all that. I pour a drink instead, wine old enough to know better, and drop onto the couch in the dark with it.
The city burns low through the glass and I just sit, turning the glass. I think about how completely I felt nothing for the woman who cried in my hallway.
That’s the lesson, if there is one. I tried the real thing once, did it properly, opened the door an inch, and it walked off with my numbers.
What Adriana and I have can’t do that to me. There’s nothing real in it to exploit, no door left open, just terms, an exit, and two people who know exactly what the other is.
Clean. Controlled. It can’t bleed me.
That’s the whole appeal. I’d stake my name on it.
A text pierces the quiet, my phone lighting up on the cushion beside me.
I pick it up, and there’s her reply, the whole of it:
Adriana: I’ve decided against murder. Adriana: You’ll need to be alive to suffer through this dinner with me. Adriana: Send me the date and a one-page biography I can study about you.
I read it twice.
“Menace,” I tell the empty room, and the laugh comes up out of nowhere, low and unguarded, the first honest thing I’ve felt all night.
A one-page biography. She’s going to study me.
Of course she is.
I’m still grinning at the screen, the night’s grim weight lifting clean off my chest.
Whatever else this arrangement turns out to be, the woman is not boring. I could have done far worse for a partner in crime.