Chapter 35
Chapter Thirty-Five
Halston
Now. . .
Things are strange, and I have no useful category for strange anymore.
That is the part no one explains about losing ten years. People tell me what happened. They hand me files, calendars, careful summaries, and doctor-approved language. They speak as if information can become memory if delivered in the correct tone.
It can’t.
I wish I had someone who could guide me through this without wanting anything from me—or being paid by my family.
Someone who could stand beside me and say, yes, that terror is yours, but so is the wanting underneath it.
Someone who could give me a hand with all the changes happening, and not turn my confusion into a report.
My therapist would try to manipulate everything.
I can’t tell anyone.
That is the problem with lies. The large ones can be dressed beautifully. The small ones arrive with their buttons misaligned.
Aren is the new guy—supposedly my old driver. Earlier, he told me I had a meeting at seven.
It was not in the family calendar.
I nodded and got dressed anyway.
Then the burner phone lit up. It was Creed. See you at seven. No pressure, but I can’t wait to see you.
So here I am, in the black unmarked SUV that belongs to my family, moving through Midtown while the city pretends not to know me.
Rain has polished the avenues until every red light smears across the pavement.
People on the sidewalk carry paper bags and umbrellas, and private lives.
A woman laughs into her phone near a halal cart.
The world continues to be ordinary in front of me, which feels almost rude.
Creed’s building is on West Thirty-Third, where Hudson Yards rises close enough to Madison Square Garden that I have passed the blocks several times on my way to galas, medical appointments, fundraisers . . .
Aren pulls to the curb. The engine keeps running.
“Sir,” he says. “The apartment is the penthouse. The doorman knows you are coming. He will not log you. I will be here for the full hour. You’ll be safe in there.”
The last sentence should comfort me.
It doesn't.
I turn my cufflink with my thumb. The Saint Claire crest catches a passing wash of light.
It looks like every other cuff link my stepmother has ever approved for me.
It is not. There is a hinge inside the post, a small pad hidden where my thumb can find it.
“Press it,” Aren told me the first day he introduced himself, “and I am at the door in under ninety seconds.”
“Mr. Saint Claire,” he says. “Mr. Lafontaine is waiting for you.”
I stop for half a second.
“Thank you,” I say, because I am very good at sounding all right.
The lobby smells like stone, flowers, and climate control. A woman behind the desk looks up, then looks away with the trained blankness of someone being paid well to forget faces. No one asks for identification. No one writes my name down.
I step into the elevator. The doors slide closed.
The car begins to climb.
My reflection appears in the brushed metal, lengthened and dim. Dark coat. Dark suit. The tie I knotted twice because the first attempt sat too loose, and the second sat the way Constance prefers. That thought makes something sour move under my skin.
I need to stop doing that.
Giving people the version of me they trained themselves to expect.
A son who eats when watched. A patient who sleeps when medicated. A man who signs where the flag is placed. A body in a chair. A voice that doesn't interrupt.
Except I don’t know what version of me Creed has been waiting for.
That is the fear. Not whether he will want me. Want is easier to survive than hope. I can see want coming. I can feel it in the air, in a hand, in the slow drop of someone’s gaze.
Hope is worse.
Hope asks me to become someone I may no longer be.
Will I be enough if I don't remember how I loved him?
Will he look at me and find only the outline of a man he once buried without a funeral?
How much did he matter to me? How much did I matter to him?
Were we tender? Were we cruel? Did I make him laugh?
Did I make him wait? Did I leave pieces of myself in his hands and then disappear so completely that all he could do was keep holding them?
Fuck.
I close my eyes.
My left hand has found my right wrist beneath my coat. Thumb against the trinity-knot. The pressure is small, automatic, private. My body has been making this gesture in moments before impact for as long as I have been a man who needs it.
Boardrooms. Dinners. Doctor’s offices. Therapy. Every morning, Constance’s voice came through the door asking if I had taken what I was supposed to take.
I have done this without knowing why.
I don't know why yet.
My body does.
The elevator slows.
The doors open onto a small private vestibule. Low lamp. Pale wall. A narrow hall ending at a dark door.
And Creed.
He is standing with one hand on the frame, like he has been listening to the elevator rise floor by floor. As if each number cost him something. He is bigger than my mind prepared for and exactly as solid as my body seems to know.
Barefoot, wearing faded jeans and a washed-thin T-shirt that has lost the fight against his shoulders, he looks built by years of ice, impact, and restraint.
Broad chest. Strong neck. Forearms carved by work he never had to describe to anyone.
His hair is longer than I expected, damp-looking in places, dark blond turning brown where it falls near his cheek, waves pulled back from his face only to come loose again.
He looks like a man who was once photographed for being beautiful and then lived enough to make beauty less convenient.
His jaw is not quite symmetrical, like the way beautiful things stop being perfect once life gets its hands on them.
There is a roughness to him. Scruff darkens his face, close enough to intentional, uneven enough to be human.
His mouth is fuller than I remember from the screen, the corner split and healing.
His eyes are pale blue-gray and fixed on me with an intensity I feel before I understand it.
The hand on the doorframe is his left.
I see the trinity knot first.
Three dark lines folding into one shape.
The same shape on my wrist.
The same shape on hers.
The woman I have not allowed myself to think about by name since the call, because if I say Livia inside my own mind, I'm not sure what else will come loose with it.
Creed doesn't speak.
Neither do I.
I step out of the vestibule.
My body goes still.
A small change crosses his face and disappears before anyone else would catch it. His fingers tighten once on the doorframe.
He’s giving me the hall. The choice. The distance.
I cross it.
I don't remember deciding to move.
The closer I get, the more human he becomes, which is unfair.
The corner of his mouth. The tired lines near his eyes.
A small scar near his brow. The scent of soap, clean cotton, and something warmer beneath it.
His throat works once. His right hand curls and uncurls at his side, as if it misses having a coin to worry across his knuckles.
I stop close enough to touch him.
I don't.
His gaze drops to my mouth for less than a second.
Mine drops to his wrist.
The tattoo is darker than mine, or maybe it only seems that way on him. On Creed, the mark looks less like decoration and more like a vow that has learned how to survive without witnesses.
My fingers lift before I can stop them.
I stop an inch from his skin.
Creed’s eyes close.
Not fully. Not long. Just enough to tell me he felt the ghost of a touch.
That is the first thing I understand tonight with absolute clarity. He has been living inside me for almost ten years.
I lower my hand.
His eyes open.
There is pain in them and also patience.
My breath leaves wrong.
“Hi, Hal,” he says.
Two words.
My name in his mouth is not the name my family uses.
It is smaller. Warmer. Devastating in its lack of ceremony.
Hal.
I don't have anything to say.
Which is unfortunate, because I have spent a couple of days writing what I would say.
I drafted whole sentences in the dark. I rehearsed lines.
‘I don't know you, and my body does. I have been told a version of myself I’m no longer convinced is the only one.
I have a question that doesn't have language yet.’ All of them, every one of them, falls out of my head the second Creed says, ‘Hi, Hal.’
I lift my left hand.
I take his.
My thumb finds the trinity knot like the ink is iron and I am the magnet, and it presses there with a small, involuntary pressure that is going to ruin me if I let myself think about what it means.
Creed inhales.
Once.
It is not a sound a person makes on purpose.
His right hand lifts.
He doesn't take my hand off his wrist.
He turns his arm just enough to make room for what he is about to do, and then his right thumb finds my left wrist underneath my cuff—the wrist I have been gripping for ten years in private and beneath fabric—and presses there, against my own trinity-knot, with the same involuntary pressure I have just put on his.
My breath leaves in just a line of air that gives up trying to be ordered and goes where the body wants it.
I don't know how long we stand in the doorway.
It can't be more than ten seconds.
It is, by the measurement my body is using tonight, an hour inside the hour.
Creed steps back into the apartment first.
I follow.
He closes the door behind me.
The sound is soft. Expensive. Final in a way doors should not be allowed to sound.
For one irrational second, every part of me listens for a lock.
There is one. Of course, there is one. A low, discreet click that belongs to a penthouse designed by people who understand money, privacy, and fear as neighboring concepts.
My pulse reacts before my mind can. My thumb finds the modified cuff link.
Press once, Aren said, and I am at the door in under ninety seconds.
I don't press.
Creed notices my hand.
He notices everything.
He says nothing.