14. Almost-Kiss, Almost-Truth
Chapter fourteen
Almost-Kiss, Almost-Truth
Sienna POV
The door clicks shut behind Delia and I turn on him.
"You went outside without me."
Atticus sets his phone on the table. Doesn't reach for it again. Just turns to face me with his hands loose at his sides and his expression doing that thing it does. That careful, controlled neutrality that I used to mistake for indifference and have since learned is something else entirely.
"Yes," he says.
"We agreed. Equal footing. I keep my voice, I keep my choices—"
"You did."
"That's not—" I stop. Pull in a breath through my nose. "Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Agree with me before I'm finished being angry. It's patronizing."
His mouth almost does something. He doesn't let it. "Okay."
"I'm serious, Atticus."
"I know you are."
I cross my arms and look at him across the suite's sitting room, the lamp still warm from the content shoot, the couch still slightly displaced from where Delia's camera guy kept repositioning us.
The room has the feel of a set after the crew has gone.
Bright and hollow and slightly false, the way everything built for a camera looks once the camera leaves.
Atticus doesn't look false.
That's the problem.
"You decided I couldn't handle it," I say. "You decided it for me. Without asking."
"I decided," he says, "that I wasn't willing to watch you handle it alone when I could stand between you and it instead." A pause. "That's different."
It is different. I hate that it's different.
I hate that I know the difference.
"It's still control," I say, but my voice has lost some of its edge and we both hear it.
"It's not control." He says it quietly. Like he's been turning the distinction over for a long time and has finally found the words that fit.
"Control is doing it and not telling you.
Control is deciding what you get to know.
I told you everything. I gave you the recording.
" His eyes hold steady on mine. "I just went first."
The silence after that sits differently than the silence before it.
I unfold my arms. Not a concession. Just, I don't need them there anymore.
"You can't keep doing that," I say.
"Going first?"
"Making it hard to stay mad at you."
This time he does almost smile. It does something inconvenient to my chest.
The content shoot had been Delia's idea, which meant it was non-negotiable and framed as optional.
Something casual, she'd said. Playful. Let them see the chemistry.
What she meant was: perform being in love with him for sixty seconds so I can clip it and schedule it and make forty thousand people feel like they're in on something intimate. What she meant was: let the camera have what I've been protecting.
The videographer set up in the sitting room while Delia hovered at the doorway with her tablet, and Atticus had looked at me across the small space with something in his eyes that I read as we don't have to.
Except we did, and he knew it, and so did I, so I sat down on the arm of the sofa and said, "Let's get this over with. "
Which was apparently charming, because the guy behind the camera laughed.
Atticus sat beside me. Not close enough to touch.
Close enough that if either of us moved, we would.
The lamp threw gold light across the side of his face.
He looked the way he always looks, which is to say like someone designed specifically to make concentration difficult.
The jaw, the stillness, the way his shoulders settle like he's permanently at rest inside his own body, unhurried by everything the world keeps throwing at him.
I am not unhurried.
I am the opposite of unhurried.
"Say something," the camera guy prompted.
"Something," Atticus said.
I looked at him. "That's the best you've got?"
"First attempt." He turned his head and his eyes came to mine. The lamp caught the dark of them and for a second I forgot what question I was answering. "Give me a second."
"That's one."
"You're counting?"
"I'm always counting." I held his gaze. "Two."
"You're terrible at this."
"At counting?"
"At relaxing."
I opened my mouth to tell him I was perfectly relaxed and he reached over and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. Unhurried. Like he'd done it a hundred times before. Like it was a thing that happened between us, natural as breathing.
I went very still.
"Three," he said, quiet. Looking at me like the camera wasn't there.
The camera was absolutely there. I was absolutely not thinking about it.
"Cut," Delia said from the doorway, and her voice had the particular texture of someone trying not to show satisfaction. "That's the one."
Atticus dropped his hand.
The air in the room rearranged itself around the absence of his touch.
I stood up and walked to the window and looked out at the city lights and told myself that the warmth climbing up my throat was from the lamp. The lamp was warm. That was a factual, defensible explanation that had nothing to do with his fingers at my temple, careful as a question.
Later, after the videographer packed up, after Delia gave us our performance notes and our talking points and her approval like we were children who'd passed a test, Atticus told me to order whatever I wanted from room service and disappeared into the suite's second bedroom.
I ordered soup I didn't eat and stared at the city until it blurred.
His hand settles on my lower back during the second setup. Another shot, different angle, Delia wanting movement, something that looks like you're mid-conversation, and I keep my breathing even.
I keep it even the way I keep my voice even when my father calls.
The way I keep it even when I'm behind the bar at last call and someone tries to start something and I have to be the thing that doesn't move.
Atticus's hand is warm through the fabric of my shirt. It sits there like it belongs there. Not possessive. Not performative. Just present. A fact of gravity. Like he's simply where he is and where he is happens to be here, against the small of my back, steady.
I stare at the middle distance and smile for the camera and think about the rule. No sleeping together, he'd said. No kissing unless cameras demand it.
The cameras are demanding it.
They are not demanding his hand on my back.
He hasn't moved it.
I haven't moved away.
Cut, Delia says, and then she says something about angles and something else about the morning slot and I track none of it because Atticus's hand lifts from my back at exactly the same moment his thumb traces one slow, absent arc at the base of my spine.
There and gone, so brief I could tell myself it was an accident. I feel it low in my throat.
I feel it in the backs of my knees.
I pick up my water glass and drink half of it and Delia keeps talking.
The lights go off for the final content run.
Atmospheric, Delia had said. Moody, it plays better at night.
In the sudden dark the suite contracts around us.
Smaller. Warmer. The city pressing color through the high windows, amber and blue, painting the room in something that doesn't belong to either of us.
The camera guy is gone. Delia is in the hallway on a call. It's just Atticus and me in the half-dark with whatever this is, unnamed, sitting in the space between us like a third person who got here first.
I'm standing near the window when he speaks.
"I remember that night."
I don't ask which one.
He says it the way he says most things. Measured, precise, each word placed where he means it. "The drive. The way you didn't push when I didn't talk. The front step, and the way you stood there." He stops. Starts again. "You were looking at me like you weren't scared of anything I was."
The city blurs below us. I keep my eyes on it.
"I told you off-limits," he says, "because that was the only language I had for it."
"For what."
A pause. Not hesitation. Consideration. Like he's making sure the thing he's about to say is the exact true thing and not something that just sounds like it.
"For the fact that I would've wrecked you.
" His voice is low. Even. Like a confession that's been filed down until all the rough edges are smooth.
"Not on purpose. Not because I didn't—" He stops again.
"I was the wrong version of myself then.
And you were—" A breath. "You were already built.
Already whole. And I knew if I reached for something I wasn't capable of holding right, I'd damage it.
So I named it off-limits and I left it there. "
I turn around.
He's closer than I realized.
He's been moving without my noticing, or I've been moving without noticing, or the room has quietly rearranged itself while I was watching the city. Either way there are maybe three feet of amber-lit dark between us and his eyes are on my face like they've been there for a while.
"You remember every detail," I say. Not a question.
"Yes."
"Of one night. Years ago."
"Yes."
I should say something deflecting. Something wry and self-protective, something that puts two inches of irony between me and this moment so I can breathe inside it. I have a whole catalogue. I've been building it my entire adult life.
I don't reach for it.
He takes one step toward me and I don't step back, and the space between us goes from three feet to almost nothing, and his eyes drop to my mouth and then come back up, and I think, clearly and completely: oh.
Oh.
This is what it's been the whole time. Not the arrangement. Not the cameras, not the PR, not Calvin and his threats and the recording on Atticus's phone. This. This specific inch of air between us, finally out of places to hide.
His head dips.
My chin lifts.
The space closes to the width of a held breath.
My phone rings.
The sound hits the room like something thrown.
We both go still.
I close my eyes for exactly one second. Open them. Atticus is watching me, expression unreadable, three inches away, his breath shallow.
I take a step back. Reach for my phone.
The screen is bright in the dark.
Mason.
I look up at him.
Something moves through his face that I can't name before he puts it away, back behind the careful architecture of his control, and he straightens. One step back. Two. His hands go into his pockets like that's where they've been all along.
"You should get that," he says.
His voice is even.
I answer the phone.
"Hey." My voice comes out steady. That's something.
Atticus turns away. Walks to the window I just left and stands where I was standing. His hands are in his pockets and his back is to me and he looks out at the same city I was looking at, and I wonder what it looks like from where he's standing.
I wonder what everything looks like from where he's standing.
Sienna? Mason says. You there?
"I'm here," I say.
I keep my eyes off Atticus Knox and I do not think about the inch of air that lives between almost and everything.