Chapter 14
fourteen
Evie
The footsteps stop at my door.
I know the rhythm. Two weeks of it, the particular weight of him on hardwood, the pause where he listens for my breathing before he decides.
I've memorized the cadence like I memorized donor names and medication schedules, without trying, without wanting to, the knowledge settling into my bones like something I was always going to learn.
Tonight the pause is longer.
The silk catches the hallway light, champagne against the white sheet, the strap slipping off my shoulder where I shifted in the dark. I left the door wide. I left the lamp off. I hear his breath catch.
My eyes are open.
I sit up.
The sheet falls to my waist. The hallway light falls across the bed because he leaves the bathroom light on when he walks this corridor.
I've clocked that too. The light, the pause, the moment he decides to cross.
Every night for two weeks, the same sequence, and he thinks I've never heard any of it.
He's in the doorway. One hand on the frame, body half-committed to the threshold, and the hallway light cuts across his shoulders and leaves his face in shadow but I don't need to see his expression because I can read the tension in his stillness.
"I'm awake."
Two words. Whispered, but they land in the silence like I shouted them.
His hand tightens on the frame.
"Evangeline." Low, rough, barely a voice at all. "How long."
Not how long have you been awake tonight. How long have you known.
"Long enough."
I push the sheet back. My bare feet hit cold hardwood. The camisole barely covers my breasts and I feel the air on my skin as I stand, feel it on the hickey he left three days ago that I've been wearing like a brand under my clothes.
I walk past him. He's a foot taller than me and standing in a doorway and I have to angle my body to clear his chest, close enough that his heat bleeds through his t-shirt, close enough that the top of my head brushes his jaw. Then I turn left and walk into his room.
His territory. His bed. His space.
"Evie." Behind me, not a protest.
The master suite is cooler than the hallway by several degrees, and my skin tightens everywhere the air touches it. One stripe of amber light falls through the gap in his curtains, cutting across the foot of the bed to the hardwood floor.
The bed is made with military precision, white sheets pulled taut, one pillow showing the impression of his head.
A packed bag sits by the door, black and zipped and ready, and the sight of it hits my chest like a bruise because of course he keeps a bag packed, of course he sleeps in a room designed for leaving.
Cedar. Clean linen. And underneath both, concentrated and warm, him. The smell is everywhere in here, saturated into the sheets and the air and the walls, and my heartbeat kicks at the base of my throat.
The rosary on the nightstand catches the amber light. Worn wooden beads, silver crucifix. Odette's. Something cracks in my chest at the sight of it, fast and sharp, because the man who comes to my room in the dark and touches me while I sleep keeps his grandmother's rosary where he can reach it.
I turn to face him.
He's standing in his own doorway now, one hand on the frame, backlit by the hallway.
"So." I keep my voice low, barely above a breath, and the corner of my mouth pulls despite everything. "Two weeks of me leaving that door open and wearing silk to bed and you still needed me to sit up and spell it out."
His jaw shifts. Not a smile. Half of one, fighting through the tension in his expression. "I noticed the door."
"You noticed the door." I stare at him. "I have been lying in that bed every night performing unconsciousness like it's a full-time job, Remy. I deserve a SAG card."
The smile wins. His mouth curves, barely, one corner lifting in the dark.
Then the humor dies as quickly as it came. His eyes track down my body and back up and I feel the path of his gaze like fingertips, like the hands I've been pretending not to feel for fourteen nights.
"I don't want to go back to that room." Quiet. The truest thing I've said to him since Louisiana. "I don't want to pretend I'm sleeping while you pretend you're not here. I don't want to perform for you." My voice catches on the last word, just slightly, and I let it. "I'm so tired of performing."
I cross the room.
I just walk to him, without the careful calculation I've applied to every step I've taken since I was old enough to walk into a room full of cameras. My hands find his chest over the cotton of his t-shirt and his breathing changes under my palms, and my own chest unlocks at the contact.
"Evie." His voice drops low, barely audible, rough and close, his mouth near my hair. "You sure about this?"
The man who's had his hands on me almost every night for weeks wants to check. Something between a laugh and a sob catches in my throat and I swallow both.
"Take this off."
I pull at the hem of his shirt and he lets me, arms lifting, and I drag the cotton up and over his head and drop it somewhere behind him. He has to bend a little for me to clear it.
The amber light from the curtain gap falls across his bare torso and I stop breathing for a second.
I've watched this body do laps in the LeBlanc pool every summer he came home, when he was a jock who didn't know I was looking.
I've felt it in the dark in a Quarter hotel room the night before he left again.
But I have never seen it like this, six inches from my face, no chlorine or crowd or bourbon between us. Mine to look at. Mine to learn.
I start at his collarbones. Fingers first, tracing the shape of him, the lean muscle that runs along his shoulders and down his arms. His skin is warm under my fingertips and the room is cool against my bare legs and the contrast makes everything sharper, every nerve ending awake and paying attention.
His gaze tracks me, that same focused attention I've felt across dinner tables and kitchen counters for weeks, not clinical at all.
My fingers find the scar on his left side.
It runs along his ribs, raised and long, the tissue ridged under my touch, and I can tell this wasn't clean or quick. I trace the full length of it and feel him go still, a different kind of still than before, the kind that means I've found something he keeps covered.
"That one's boring." It's easy and smooth, a smile in his voice that I've heard him use on clients and teammates and bartenders. "Old story. Not worth telling."
"That sounded rehearsed." I keep my fingers on the scar. I've watched my father close doors with the same smooth misdirection a thousand times. "How many women have gotten that line?"
His exhale comes out shorter than he planned. "Enough that it usually works."
"It didn't work."
"No." Quieter now, the smoothness fraying at the edges. "It didn't."
I don't push. I don't ask. I just leave my hand there, on the scar he won't explain, and let the silence stand.
My fingers move to his right shoulder, where rougher damage tells a different story. Whatever made this mark tore instead of cut. "Military," he offers before I can ask. True and incomplete and he knows I know it.
"You're giving me the bullet points version of yourself."
"Darlin', the full version's got footnotes nobody wants to read."
"Try me."
His throat works. The shift in the air between us when he swallows whatever the real answer was and lets the silence stand instead. My fingers keep moving.
And then I find the tattoo.
Left chest, over his heart, and the ink is dark against his skin in the amber light.
Handwriting. Not a font, not stylized, but actual handwriting, the particular slant and weight of a specific person's hand, and underneath it a small caduceus woven into the letters.
My fingers stop on the ink and my lungs stop working because I know this handwriting.
I know it from the framed documents in the LeBlanc estate hallway, from the charity letterhead Odette keeps in the kitchen drawer, from the portrait dedication in the sitting room that I've walked past a hundred times since I was six years old.
Arthur LeBlanc signed his name with that same forward slant, the capital A with its decisive downstroke, the way the last letters of his surname trailed off like he was already thinking about the next thing.
My throat closes.
"That's your father's." The words come out broken, more breath than voice, and my fingers are trembling against his chest and I can't make them stop.
He nods. Just once. His mouth opens and nothing comes out and then he swallows hard and tries again.
"Got it after I finished combat medic trainin'.
" The words are rough, pulled from somewhere deep, and every vowel has stretched wider than he'd ever let them in San Francisco.
"Thought if I couldn't be a doctor the way he was, I could at least, I could carry somethin' of his. Of what he wanted for me."
The thought hits my body before my brain can process it, heat flooding my chest and my eyes burning and my whole hand pressed to the ink, against the handwriting of a dead man whose son carries him in the only permanent way he'll allow himself.
Arthur LeBlanc's hand. Remy's skin. The heartbeat underneath, fast and hard and real.
His hands are at his sides. Fisted. He's standing completely still while I touch him and he's giving me access to the most vulnerable thing on his body and his hands are clenched at his sides like he's bracing for impact, like every woman who's ever seen this tattoo has asked a question he couldn't answer and he's waiting for me to be the next one.
"Tripp." The name I used when I was fourteen and in love with a boy who didn't see me. The name I whispered in a hotel room in Louisiana. It lands differently now, in this room, with his father's handwriting under my palm. "I can hear you."