Chapter 35 #2
The apartment opens beyond the entry in clean lines and muted light.
Wide-plank floors. Low furniture. Floor to ceiling glass, the city beyond it blurred by rain and distance.
The view should feel grand. It doesn’t. It feels sealed off, like Manhattan has been placed behind a museum case.
The lamps are warm, but the air still holds that hotel-cool hush of a place kept ready for someone who rarely lets himself come home.
The first impression is that it’s too clean.
Not empty. Not careless.
Worse.
It feels exactly like my apartment does. Perfectly arranged. Beautifully maintained. Unlived in. A place where a person can sleep, dress, leave, and never disturb the version of himself the room was designed to hold.
There is art on the walls that looks chosen by someone with excellent taste and no emotional investment in being understood. A bowl of green apples on the kitchen island.
“Do you want something to drink?” Creed asks.
His voice is controlled, but not flat. That is the problem with him. He is not cold. Cold would be easier. Cold would give me a wall to stand against.
This is restraint.
“No,” I say, too quickly.
His gaze moves over my face. “Water?”
The correction is almost gentle. Not “do you want.” Not a choice with a trapdoor under it. A practical offer. A man solving the easiest part of an impossible night.
I swallow. “Water would be good.”
He nods once, then moves to the kitchen.
I watch him because I don't know where else to put my eyes.
He is barefoot on his own floor, but nothing about him feels casual.
He moves like a man who has taken hits for a living and learned not to waste energy on anything that doesn't matter.
Shoulders broad beneath the worn T-shirt.
Back strong. Neck tense. The faded denim sits low on his hips, and I hate that I notice.
I hate that my body knows how to notice him before my mind can decide whether noticing is allowed.
He takes a glass from the cabinet.
One glass.
I wonder if he almost reached for two.
The thought is small and brutal.
When he hands it to me, his fingers don't touch mine. He makes sure of it. That restraint is its own contact.
“Sit,” he says, then corrects himself so fast I almost miss it. “Please. Take a seat wherever you want.”
There. A microfracture.
I take the leather sofa because it is nearest and because my legs have begun to feel less reliable than I would prefer. The cushion slightly gives under me. It’s soft. Too soft. I sit on the edge anyway, back straight. I take the glass Creed hands me, holding it with both hands like evidence.
Creed takes the chair adjacent to the sofa.
He sits forward, forearms on his thighs.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” he says.
His eyes stay on me. He looks at me as if I’m an apparition, a miracle, a wound that learned how to walk back into the room.
I want to tell him I don’t understand anything.
I want to tell him I can’t believe I am finally away from my family and not immediately calculating the cost. That sitting here feels dangerous because some part of me feels secure, and secure is a word my body distrusts on principle.
My first therapist used to call it paranoia when I brought up how my family made me feel.
Not in a cruel way. She had kind eyes. She had degrees on the wall.
She had no idea that kind eyes could still be wrong.
So I stopped telling her.
It was easier to let everyone believe I was fine.
It was easier to be controlled than to keep explaining why control felt like a hand over my mouth.
Creed sets his hands on his knees, palms down, like a man instructing his own body not to reach.
His hands are big. Not elegant in a soft way.
Athlete’s hands. Working hands. The knuckles look as if they have met boards, gloves, sticks, and other men’s bones.
There is a small white scar along the second knuckle of his right hand that I want, with a suddenness that embarrasses me, to put my mouth on.
I look away from his hands.
I look at his face instead.
Fuck that’s worse.
“I don’t know where to begin,” I say.
“You don’t have to begin.”
“That’s not—” I stop and set the glass on the low table because my grip has become too firm. “I have an hour. I have to begin somewhere.”
“Not tonight.”
He says it quietly, as if he has learned that carefulness can sound like handling.
“Begin isn’t what we’re doing tonight,” he says. “We’re just in a room. For me, that’s enough—everything.”
His mouth moves like he almost adds more—he doesn’t.
Then his hand lifts from his knee by an inch.
Only an inch.
He stops himself before the movement becomes a reach.
“If I could . . .” The words end there.
I look at him.
Something inside me responds before I can name it. A low note in a room I thought had been emptied.
“Let’s just be in a room,” I repeat.
His jaw works once. His eyes stay on mine. Then the corner of his lip lifts slightly into almost a smile. “This reminds me so much of the time Liv spent a semester in Paris.”
“How?”
“She was afraid we would’ve moved on,” he explains. “We were afraid she wouldn’t want to be with us anymore.”
“That’s—” I don’t know what to say, because I can’t remember the moment, but I feel the missing. I’ve felt the missing for years. I just didn’t know who was absent until now.
“Irrelevant,” he says. “This is much different. I missed you so fucking much.”
The sentence hurts in ways I can’t explain immediately.
The pain in his voice is soaked through, not poured on. It has lived in him long enough to become part of his breathing. He says it like a man who has carried the sentence for ten years and hates that the first thing he gives me is the wound.
My fingers curl against my thigh.
I want to apologize.
I want to ask for proof.
I want to say, ‘I missed you too,’ except I don't know if memory is required for missing or if the body is allowed to file its own testimony.
For a long time, neither of us tries to fill the air with language.
The room makes its small sounds. The refrigerator’s low hum in the kitchen. Rain ticking softly against the glass. A pipe somewhere inside the walls. The city beyond the windows, dimmed into a living blur. Two men breathing in the same room after ten years of not.
We are together.
And still, I feel the absence of someone else.
Her.
Livia.
But she is in the room because she is missing from it.
I find that I don't need to talk.
I find that I don't want to.
The part of me that has been performing language since I was old enough to be told that being Halston Saint Claire meant speaking well has gone quiet.
In this apartment, the quiet is not a failure.
It is permission. It is sitting in a room with another person and not having to make myself presentable to him before I am allowed to exist.
Creed lets me have that.
He doesn't ask what I remember.
He doesn't ask what I feel.
He doesn't ask whether I hate him for knowing me better than I know myself.
After what might be three minutes or forever, he leans forward slightly.
His right hand lifts from his knee.
He holds his palm up between us, low, at the level of the cushions.
I look at his hand.
I look at his face.
His expression does something I don't have language for. There is a small line between his eyebrows. His mouth is set, not unhappy, not hopeful, and not resigned. He looks like a man who has decided that whatever I do next will be the answer, and he will accept it even if it kills something in him.
That is when I realize I am afraid of hurting him.
Not because I don't care.
Because I might.
My hand moves before I can talk myself out of it.
I place my wrist in his palm.
The trinity knot faces up between us.
Creed inhales, and it breaks somewhere halfway through.
His fingers close around me with such care that the care itself feels unbearable. His thumb comes to rest beside the tattoo. Not on it. Beside it. As if touching the mark without permission would be taking too much.
For a second, his eyes close.
This time, fully.
His face changes when he doesn't have to guard it.
There he is, I think, and the thought terrifies me because I don't know what it means.
His thumb moves once along the inside of my wrist.
My body recognizes him with an intensity my mind can't keep up with. The apartment feels smaller than it is, as if the city has leaned its whole face against the windows to watch.
Suddenly, without planning to, I say, “Have you spoken to her?”
Creed’s thumb stills.
The air changes.
I force the rest out. “Livia.”
His eyes open.
“Yes,” he says. “She’s in Florence.”
Florence.
The word is a door I'm not ready to open.
“When can I—” I stop because the rest arrives too fast. When can I see her? When can I ask what I did? When can I tell her I am sorry for crimes I can't remember committing? What if I hurt her? What if I already did? What if the sight of me costs her more than I deserve to be forgiven for?
“Fuck,” I say. “She might not want to see me.”
Creed looks at me for a few beats. “She’s coming,” he announces. “She’s coming for you.”
My lungs forget what they are for.
His thumb resumes that small, minute motion beside the tattoo.
Something in me makes a sound that doesn't leave my mouth. It is three syllables. The only three syllables my body has any business making in this room tonight, and I will not let them out.
My phone vibrates once in my pocket.
The alarm.
A ten-minute warning.
Creed’s thumb has not left my wrist.
“I have to go soon,” I say.
He nods.
Only once.
“Aren will be downstairs.”
I look at him.
“He was your driver before . . .” Creed’s voice trails. “They fired him and changed his line of work slightly.”