Chapter 11 Nolan
I wake to grey light filtering through the curtains and the distant sound of traffic.
For a moment I don’t remember. I’m still half asleep and comfortable. Then memory crashes back and I squeeze my eyes shut. I can’t believe we did that.
I lie there for a while, staring at the ceiling and listening. The apartment is quiet. Either Erik is still asleep on the couch or he’s learned how to move without making a sound. Given what I know about him, it’s probably the latter. Control freak.
The whole evening had been weird. More than weird. It was awkwardness on steroids.
And the look he’d given me when I’d offered to let him sit on the sofa with me? I’m not trying to trap you, asshole.
Just because he’s used to being a manipulative dickwad, it doesn’t mean that everyone else plays that kind of game. I wasn’t being nice. I wasn’t being friendly.
The truth is stupider than that.
I didn’t know what else to do.
When he walked through that door, I panicked.
Not visibly—I’m better than that—but inside, everything went sideways.
I’d spent all afternoon preparing for a fight.
I’d rehearsed what I’d say when he brought up the morning, how I’d cut him down when he tried to apologize or, worse, pretend it never happened.
But then he was just there, filling up the doorway with his expensive suit and his perfect hair and those blue eyes that make me want to do violent things, and my brain short-circuited. He might be a heartless corporate bastard, but my god, that heartless corporate bastard makes my heart race.
I couldn’t look at him. That was the problem. Every time our eyes met, I remembered. His mouth on me. His hands. The sounds he made when I touched him. If I let myself look too long, I was going to do something stupid like cross the room and kiss him again.
So I was pleasant instead. Polite. Gave myself something to do with my hands and my mouth that didn’t involve him.
It worked, mostly. Until it didn’t.
That moment at dinner when our eyes caught and held. The electricity in the hallway during the check-in, standing so close I could feel the heat of him. The way he looked at me like he was starving and I was the only thing that could fill him up.
I wanted to kiss him so badly my teeth ached with it.
I didn’t. I won’t. I’m not stupid enough to let chemistry derail everything.
But god, it’s hard.
I drag myself out of bed and into the bathroom. The shower helps—hot water, closed door, a few minutes where I don’t have to think about anything except getting clean. I take longer than I need to. Stalling.
Eventually I can’t justify hiding anymore. I pull on jeans and a t-shirt, take a breath, and open the bedroom door.
Erik is at the kitchen table with a laptop and a coffee. He’s already dressed—of course he is—in slacks and a button-down.
“Morning,” I say.
He looks up. Our eyes meet and there it is again, that jolt of awareness that runs through my whole body. I look away first.
“Morning. There’s coffee.”
“Thanks.”
I pour myself a cup and lean against the counter, maintaining distance. The kitchen is too small. Everything in this apartment is too small.
I take a sip of coffee instead.
“Sleep well?” he asks.
“Fine. You?”
“Fine.”
We’re both lying. I can see the shadows under his eyes, the tension in his shoulders. He slept about as well as I did, which is to say not at all.
Silence stretches between us. He returns to his laptop. I stare at my coffee.
This is what the next two weeks are going to look like. We’re going to sit in this tiny apartment, trying not to look at each other, pretending we’re not both thinking about what happened yesterday.
And that’s assuming we don’t repeat it.
I’m going to lose my mind.
“I need fresh air,” I say abruptly.
Erik looks up. “What?”
“Fresh air. Outside. I can’t—” I gesture vaguely at the apartment, the walls, the oppressive intimacy of the space. “I can’t sit in here all day.”
“The compliance requirements—”
“Say we have to stay together and respond to check-ins within fifteen minutes. They don’t say we have to be trapped indoors.” I set down my coffee. “We could go somewhere. A park. Somewhere with trees and sky and air that doesn’t smell like—”
I stop myself before I say you.
“—like the city,” I finish.
Erik is quiet for a moment. I watch him weigh the options, calculate the risks. Always calculating, this one.
“I need to be back by noon,” I add. “Visiting hours start at one and I want to see Ellie.”
“There’s a nature reserve about forty minutes north. Hiking trails, forest, that sort of thing.” He’s already pulling out his phone. “I’ll call a car.”
“You have a driver on standby?”
“I have a service.” He says it like it’s obvious, like everyone has a service for calling cars at a moment’s notice.
Twenty minutes later we’re in the back of a black sedan, gliding through morning traffic toward the edge of the city. Erik sits on his side, I sit on mine, a careful foot of space between us. The driver doesn’t try to make conversation.
I watch the buildings thin out, glass and steel giving way to brick and then to trees. The tension in my shoulders starts to ease as the city falls away behind us.
“I used to come here with Anna,” Erik says suddenly. “When we were younger. Our parents had a house not far from here. Weekend place.”
I glance at him, surprised. He’s staring out the window, expression distant.
“Nice,” I say, because I don’t know what else to say.
“It was.” He doesn’t elaborate.
The car drops us at a trailhead parking lot. There are a few other cars but the trails themselves are quiet. We pick a path at random and start walking.
The forest is beautiful. It’s late spring, everything is green and alive. Sunlight filters through the canopy in shifting patterns. Bird sing somewhere overhead. The air smells like pine and earth and growing things.
I take a deep breath and feel something unclench in my chest.
“Better?” Erik asks.
“Yeah. Much.”
We walk in silence for a while. The path is wide enough for two, but we keep drifting apart and then back together, some unconscious gravitational pull neither of us can quite escape. Every time our shoulders almost brush, I feel that spark of awareness again and I have to consciously step away.
It’s worse out here, somehow. Without the apartment walls to contain it, without the distractions of cooking and cleaning and television, there’s nothing between us but air and want.
“About yesterday,” Erik says.
My stomach tightens. “Which part?”
“The morning. I shouldn’t have—” He stops walking, turns to face me. “I shouldn’t have called it a mistake and left like that. It was cowardly.”
I stop too, turning to look at him. Big mistake. The light out here catches his eyes, turns them impossibly blue, and I forget for a second how to breathe.
“Is that an apology?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” I start walking again. “Noted.”
He catches up, falls into step beside me. “That’s it? Just ‘noted’?”
“What do you want me to say? That it’s fine?” I keep my eyes on the path, on my feet, on anything but him. “It doesn’t matter what I say. It doesn’t change anything.”
“It matters to me.”
I stop again. He stops too, and suddenly we’re facing each other in the middle of the trail, morning light dappling through the trees, and he’s looking at me with an expression I can’t read.
“Why?” I ask. “Why does it matter what I think?”
“I don’t know.” His voice is rough. “It just does.”
The air between us feels thick, charged. I should step back. I should make a joke, break the tension, keep walking.
Instead I stay exactly where I am and watch his eyes drop to my mouth.
“This is a bad idea,” I say.
“I know.”
He takes a step closer. I don’t move away.
“If you kiss me again,” I say, “I’m going to kiss you back. And then we’re going to have a problem.”
“We already have a problem.”
He’s close enough now that I can feel the warmth of him and smell him. My hands are shaking. I curl them into fists at my sides.
“Erik—”
He kisses me.
It’s softer than yesterday. Slower. His hand comes up to cup my jaw, tilting my face toward his, and he kisses me like he has all the time in the world. He kisses me like this is the only thing that matters.
I kiss him back because I can’t not. I’ve been thinking about this all night. His mouth is warm and his hand is gentle on my face and for one perfect moment, nothing else exists.
My fingers find his shirt, bunch in the fabric. He makes a sound against my lips—a groan or a sigh, I can’t tell—and pulls me closer. His other hand settles on my hip, right over the bruise from yesterday, and the small flare of pain makes me gasp.
I pull him back down, kiss him harder. He responds in kind, teeth catching my lower lip, tongue sliding against mine. Heat pools low in my belly. I want—I need—
Voices. Coming down the trail.
We break apart so fast I nearly trip over my own feet. Erik steadies me, one hand on my elbow, and then we’re standing a respectable distance apart as a couple rounds the bend with a golden retriever on a leash.
“Morning!” the woman calls cheerfully.
“Morning,” Erik replies, voice perfectly steady like he wasn’t just kissing me breathless thirty seconds ago.
I manage a nod. My heart is hammering so hard I’m sure they can hear it.
The couple passes. The dog sniffs at my ankles and then loses interest. They disappear around the next bend, and Erik and I are alone again.
Neither of us moves.
“We should head back,” I say finally. My voice sounds strange. Wrecked. “Visiting hours.”
“Right. Yes.” He runs a hand through his hair, messing up the careful styling. He looks almost human like this. Almost touchable.
We walk back to the trailhead in silence. Not touching. Not looking at each other. The kiss hangs between us, impossible to ignore.
I don’t know what we’re doing. I don’t know what any of this means.