Chapter 4 #2
“You are.” He held her there, gentle but immovable, watching the small furrow forming between her brows.
“I can see it happening right now.” He leaned down before she could argue further, his mouth catching the frown forming on hers, slow and deliberate, kissing it away until she felt the tension in her own face ease without her permission.
She melted into it despite herself, her hand curling into the front of his shirt, the careful distance she’d been building dissolving under the patient, certain pressure of his mouth.
He pulled back only far enough to rest his forehead against hers, his thumb brushing slow along her jaw.
“I’m not asking you to trust it today. I know you have reasons not to.
” His voice had gone quieter, rougher. “I’m only asking you to stop pretending you feel nothing when I’m standing right here. ”
She exhaled, shaky, her fingers tightening in his shirt instead of letting go. “That’s not fair. You don’t get to kiss the walls down every time I try to protect myself.”
“I’ll do it as many times as it takes.” He said it simply, no apology in it, his eyes steady on hers. “I’m not the kind of man who leaves, Sloane. You’ll see that long before you believe it.”
She studied him a long moment, something soft and unguarded slipping back into her expression despite every careful instinct telling her not to let it.
She didn’t fully believe him yet, not in the deep, settled way that came from time rather than words, but she let herself feel the warmth anyway, just for now, just standing in this hallway with his hand cradling her jaw like she was something worth being patient for.
“Okay,” she said again, softer this time, no flattening left in her voice. “I’ll stop hiding it. For now.”
“That’s all I’m asking.” He pressed one more brief kiss to her forehead, then guided her gently down the hallway toward the exit, his hand settling back at her waist, satisfaction easing into the line of his mouth as they walked.
* * *
The pattern settled in faster than Sloane expected, Draven appearing at her door most mornings just past eleven with his laptop bag slung over one shoulder and some new container of food in hand, having already put in five hours at the office before driving across town.
He never asked if it was a good time. He simply knocked, and she simply opened the door, the routine becoming its own quiet language between them within the first week.
Some mornings he found her already at her kitchen table with her own laptop open, color-coded spreadsheets from the nonprofit’s outreach programs spread across two monitors she’d insisted on setting up herself.
He’d settle into the chair across from her without a word, pulling out his own work, and for an hour the only sound in the apartment would be the soft click of keys and the occasional question tossed across the table about graduation rates in a district she was analyzing.
She liked watching him work out of the corner of her eye, the way his brow furrowed at something on his screen, the way he rolled his sleeves up the same exact two turns every single time.
Other mornings she wasn’t at the table at all, curled instead on the bathroom floor with her cheek against the cool tile, and he’d find her there within seconds of walking through the door, like some instinct in him had already known before he’d even crossed the threshold.
He’d crouch beside her, gather her braids back, press a cool washcloth against the back of her neck without being asked.
She stopped being embarrassed by it somewhere around the third week, too grateful for the steady, unbothered way he handled it to keep pretending she didn’t need the help.
He learned her stomach’s particular moods faster than she expected a man to learn anything about a body that wasn’t his own.
He started keeping ginger candies in his jacket pocket, started noticing which smells set her off before she’d fully registered them herself, started steering her gently away from the kitchen whenever someone in the building below was cooking something with too much garlic.
One Tuesday he showed up with a small electric fan for her nightstand, because he’d read somewhere that the steady airflow helped some women through the worst of the early weeks.
He set it up himself without a single word about how absurd it was that he now knew this much about morning sickness.
The hunger never fully went anywhere, even folded into the quieter rhythm of all of it.
She’d catch him watching her over the rim of his coffee cup some mornings, his eyes tracking the curve of her mouth while she talked through a particularly stubborn dataset, something dark and patient simmering behind the calm.
She felt it too, in the way her skin warmed every time his hand brushed hers passing a folder across the table, in the way she found excuses to stand closer to him at the counter than the task strictly required.
Neither of them acted on it most days. He kept his hands respectful, his kisses brief and chaste against her temple or the crown of her head, like he’d made some private decision to let the wanting simmer rather than rush it.
By the fourth week, tired of fumbling with her keys most mornings while balancing her laptop and a glass of water, she’d started leaving her door unlocked before eleven so she wouldn’t have to get up from the table when he knocked.
She didn’t think much of it, a small convenience in a routine that had started to feel comfortable rather than careful.
He noticed the first time he walked straight in without needing to knock at all, and his expression shifted immediately, the easy warmth dropping away into something sharper. “Your door was unlocked.” He set his bag down harder than necessary, his jaw tight, his eyes finding hers across the room.
“I figured it would just be easier, since you come by every day anyway.” She closed her laptop, caught off guard by the sudden change in him. “It’s not a big deal, Draven.”