Chapter 8
Vance
I was losing my mind.
Not the dramatic kind. The slow, creeping kind, where you look around one day and realize everything's different and you can't remember when it changed.
The apartment smelled like food now. Real food, cooked on purpose, instead of takeout containers and reheated pizza.
There was a plant on the windowsill that was somehow still alive despite my lack of knowledge about plant care.
Tobias had started watering it every morning, standing at the window with a small cup, talking to it in a low voice when he thought I wasn't listening.
I'd caught myself watching him do it yesterday. The way the morning light caught his profile. The gentle curve of his mouth when he murmured to the plant. The strip of bare skin at his lower back where my shirt rode up.
I'd turned away before he noticed. Poured my coffee too fast, burned my tongue.
The remote had a designated spot now. My laundry was folded. My sock drawer was organized by color.
And every night, I came home to Tobias.
He was always there. Reading, cooking, rearranging things. Sometimes just sitting by the window, watching the street below with an unreadable expression. He'd look up when I walked in, and something in his face would shift. Soften. Like seeing me was a relief.
I'd started thinking of it as coming home instead of going to my apartment.
That was the problem. That was exactly the problem.
Work was getting complicated.
Ronan had cornered me in the security office that afternoon, arms crossed, wearing his most suspicious expression. The one that made suspects confess just to make it stop.
"You've been leaving on time."
"Is that a crime?"
"It's unusual." He leaned against the doorframe, blocking my exit. "You never leave on time. You stay late, pick up extra shifts, hover until you're the last one out."
"Maybe I have places to be."
"You don't have places. You have this hotel and a sad apartment with a broken couch."
"The couch isn't broken. It has character."
"The couch is a health hazard." He studied me with those sharp eyes that never missed anything, the same eyes that made him such a good night manager, able to spot trouble before it started. "What's going on with you?"
"Nothing."
"You're lying."
"I'm not lying. I'm declining to elaborate."
He didn't push. That was the thing about Ronan. He knew when to back off. We'd worked together long enough that he understood my boundaries, even if he didn't respect them.
But I could feel his gaze following me as I gathered my things and headed out.
The hotel was still buzzing about the runaway groom. The Langford wedding had become legendary in staff gossip circles. Rumors ranged from plausible (cold feet, secret affair) to absurd (witness protection, alien abduction, elaborate insurance fraud). Nobody connected me to any of it.
Yet.
Every mention of Tobias's name made my shoulders tense. Every whispered speculation felt like a threat. I kept waiting for someone to notice that I'd been acting differently since that day, that I'd been leaving early, that my sad apartment might not be quite so sad anymore.
So far, nobody had. But it was only a matter of time.
I came home that evening to find candles on the table.
Not just any candles. My emergency candles. The ones I kept in a kitchen drawer for power outages, still in their original packaging from three years ago when I'd moved in. I'd bought them during a hurricane warning that never materialized and promptly forgotten they existed.
They were lit now. Three of them, arranged in a cluster on the table that Tobias had set with his usual precision. The plates were out. Wine glasses sat beside them. Where had he found wine glasses?
"Where did you get the candles?"
Tobias looked up from the stove, wooden spoon in hand. He was wearing an apron now, something else that had appeared in my apartment through mysterious means. "You had them. In a drawer."
"Those are emergency candles."
"It's a dinner emergency." He stirred something that smelled amazing. "The lighting in here is terrible. I've been meaning to mention it."
"You mentioned it when you bought the plant."
"The plant helps, but it's not enough. These bulbs are too harsh." He gestured at the overhead light with the spoon. "They make everything look clinical. Candles soften the atmosphere."
"You can't use emergency candles for ambiance."
"They're candles, Vance. They don't know the difference."
I stood in the doorway, caught between amusement and something else. Something that felt too much like want.
"The lighting's fine."
"The lighting is adequate. That's different from fine." He set the spoon down and turned to face me fully. "Dinner's almost ready. Go change."
"I don't need to change for dinner."
"You smell like the hotel."
"I work at a hotel."
"Hence the suggestion to change."
I stared at him. He stared back, chin lifted slightly, that particular look in his eyes that I was starting to recognize.
Stubborn about the oddest things—lighting, napkin folds, the proper way to wash dishes.
But somehow I didn't mind. Somewhere along the way, I had started finding his small fixations endearing rather than annoying.
I went to change.
Dinner was good. Of course, dinner was good. Everything he made was good, even when he burned things or oversalted them or had to restart from scratch. The man approached cooking like a military operation, with research, strategy, and relentless perfectionism.
Tonight was chicken in some kind of cream sauce, served over pasta with vegetables arranged artfully on the side. The wine was decent, probably cheap but drinkable. The candles flickered on the table, casting warm shadows across everything.
It looked like a date.
That was the problem. It looked exactly like a date.
But I was tired. It had been a long week, full of covering for my unexplained absences, dodging questions, and jumping at every mention of the Langford name. The careful performance was wearing me down. And the candles were bothering me in ways I couldn't articulate.
"You don't need to make everything fancy." The words came out harsher than I intended.
Tobias's hand stilled on his wine glass. "What?"
"The candles, the table settings, the wine glasses." I gestured vaguely at the whole arrangement. "All of it. You don't need to impress me."
Something shifted in his expression. The softness I'd grown used to seeing hardened into something closed off. Careful.
"I wasn't trying to impress you." His voice was controlled, level. "I was trying to make dinner nice."
"It was already nice."
"Clearly not nice enough if you're complaining about candles."
He stood abruptly, collected his plate, and walked to the kitchen. His back was rigid. The set of his shoulders was tense in a way I hadn't seen since the first night.
The silence that followed was awful. Heavy in a way silence hadn't been between us since I'd found him in that service corridor.
I'd fucked up. I knew it immediately, the way you know when you've said exactly the wrong thing and there's no taking it back.
"Tobias."
No response. The sound of water running in the sink.
I pushed back from the table and followed him into the kitchen. He was standing at the sink, not washing anything, just letting the water run over his hands.
"I didn't mean—"
"It's fine."
"It's not fine. I'm sorry." I stopped a few feet away, close but not too close. "I'm not good at this."
"At what?"
"Having someone around. Caring about..." I paused, unsure how to finish. Caring about things. Caring about him. Caring at all.
"It's fine," he said again, but his voice was softer now. Less controlled. "I understand. I'm a guest in your home. I shouldn't be changing things without asking."
"That's not—" I ran a hand through my hair, frustrated. "You can change whatever you want. The candles aren't the problem."
"Then what is the problem?"
You.The way I feel when I look at you.The way this apartment feels like a home now, and I'm terrified of what that means.
I stepped closer without meaning to. He was still facing the sink, shoulders tense, water dripping from his hands.
"Turn around."
He did. And suddenly we were too close. Close enough that I could see the pulse in his throat. Close enough to smell whatever shampoo he'd started using—mine, I realized. He was using my shampoo.
"I'm not mad about the candles," I said. "I'm mad at myself."
"For what?"
"For wanting—" I stopped. The words stuck in my throat.
His eyes searched my face. Pale green in the dim light, too perceptive, seeing things I wasn't ready to show.
"Wanting what?" His voice was barely a whisper.
The air between us felt electric. I could feel the heat of his body, inches away. Could see the slight parting of his lips, his breath shallow.
I stepped back. Put distance between us. Safe, necessary distance.
"The candles can stay." My voice was rough. "I'm sorry I snapped."
Something flickered in his expression. Disappointment, maybe. Or relief. I couldn't tell.
"Okay," he said softly.
He went back to the dishes. I returned to the table and finished my dinner alone, watching the candles flicker in the dim light. My hands weren't quite steady.
We didn't talk about it again that night. But when I went to sleep on the couch, I could still feel the ghost of his proximity. The almost-touch that hadn't happened.
Something between us had shifted. Irreversibly.
I didn't know yet if that was good or bad.