5. FIVE
FIVE
Emily
Iwoke to the sound of pages turning.
For several seconds, I remained still beneath unfamiliar sheets, trying to work out why my body ached pleasantly and why the room was darker than my apartment ever managed to be after sunrise.
Then I remembered Alex — his mouth, his hands, the quiet, slightly demanding way he had asked me to stay after spending most of the night behaving as though asking for anything might kill him.
I opened my eyes.
He sat in the chair beside the windows wearing dark trousers and the shirt I had removed several hours earlier. It was unbuttoned at the throat, the sleeves pushed carelessly to his forearms. A book rested open in one hand. He wasn't reading it.
His attention was on me.
"How long have you been watching me?"
Alex glanced at the book as though it might provide a defense. "I was reading."
"Oh yeah? What was it about?"
He closed the cover and set it on the table.
"That's what I thought."
Morning light filtered through the blinds behind him, drawing narrow silver lines across the floor.
The room looked different now that I could see it properly.
Larger than I had realized, though still far less elaborate than expected — the bed, the chair, two lamps, and a dark wooden dresser.
No photographs. No decorative objects. Nothing left on display that might encourage a question. Even his bedroom kept its distance.
I sat up, bringing the sheet with me. Alex's gaze dropped to the place where it crossed my chest, and he didn't attempt to hide it.
"You're staring again."
"Yes." No apology in the word.
I found my blouse on the floor near the foot of the bed. One sleeve was stuck under his belt, and three of the pearl buttons had given up completely.
“My clothes didn’t survive the night.”
“I’ll buy you new ones.”
“That’s not the answer I was looking for.”
"What is?"
"An apology."
"Yeah, I'm not sorry, sweetheart."
I laughed and reached for the blouse. Alex was on his feet before I could even sit up. He gathered everything himself, untangling the sleeve from his belt and checking the buttons with way more care than he’d used when he ripped them open last night.
“They’re fine.”
“Thanks for the professional assessment.”
He handed it over, but didn’t let go right away. His fingers stayed on the fabric, and the look he gave my mouth made it very clear what he was thinking about.
It would have been stupidly easy to pull him back down.
The thought had barely crossed my mind before he leaned in and kissed me—not the desperate way he had last night, but slower, like he’d been thinking about it since the second he woke up.
His hand slid into my hair while his mouth moved over mine.
I grabbed the front of his shirt and kissed him back.
Alex pulled away first, breathing a little less steady than before. “You need to eat.”
I stared at him. “Wow. Smooth transition.”
“You barely ate dinner.”
“I was distracted.”
“I noticed.” He sounded extremely pleased with himself.
I grabbed the nearest pillow and threw it at him. He caught it without even trying, then just looked at it for a second like no one had ever thrown something at him for fun before. Then the corner of his mouth lifted—a real smile, short but unmistakable. It completely changed his face.
“There,” I said.
The smile vanished. “What?”
“That. You should do it more often.”
“No.”
“You’re really attractive when you smile.”
“I’m attractive when I don’t.”
The sheer arrogance of it made me laugh again.
Alex placed the pillow beside me and held out his hand. "Breakfast."
"You don't have to feed me every time I'm here."
His eyes found mine. "You stayed."
And the way he said it — not smug, not possessive, just this quiet fact that still seemed to surprise him — did something warm and inconvenient to the center of my chest. I took his hand.
My clothes had been gathered and folded on the dresser. All of them. Even my underwear, tucked neatly beneath my skirt like someone had tidied a crime scene, which felt absurdly formal considering how they'd come off. I picked up his discarded shirt instead.
Alex watched me pull it on. "That's mine."
"Mm-hmm." I let the collar settle around my neck. "Mine has about fifteen buttons and I can barely see straight, so this is what's happening."
His gaze moved down the length of me — slow, unhurried, the kind of look that made me forget I was standing barefoot in a billionaire's bedroom wearing a shirt that fell to the middle of my thighs. "You can keep it."
"I'm borrowing it."
"Keep it." Same voice he used to deny people access to his floor. Like it had already been decided and my opinion was a formality.
I fastened the middle buttons. "You can't just give me everything I touch."
That should have reassured me. Instead it opened a door I wasn't ready to walk through — what else had he already decided to give me, and how much of it had he decided before I woke up?
I finished the last button and looked up to find him still watching me with that same focused attention he gave rare manuscripts and security footage. "What?"
"You're wearing my shirt."
"We've been over this."
He stepped closer. "I want to kiss you in it."
It hit me low in my stomach, warm and sudden, because Alex didn't flirt. He just said things. And the lack of performance made it ten times worse. "You don't usually ask first."
"I'm learning."
"Slowly."
His hand found the back of my neck, thumb resting against my hairline, and he just — waited. Close enough that his breath touched my cheek. Close enough that I could smell coffee and the clean scent of his soap. But he didn't pull me in. He held the distance and let me decide.
I liked making Alex wait. Possibly more than was kind.
"Go ahead," I said.
His eyes narrowed. "Go ahead?"
"What, do you need an engraved invitation?"
He kissed me before I could enjoy that, and it wasn't hurried — his lips moved over mine with this sleepy patience that undid me more than urgency would have, one hand warm against my neck while the other found my waist beneath the loose hem of his shirt.
The kiss tasted like coffee and had none of last night's desperation in it, which almost made it more intimate.
Last night had been hunger. This was just morning.
Him. Rain on the windows and his thumb moving absently against my hip bone.
When he pulled back, I followed without meaning to. He noticed. Of course he did. His thumb brushed my lower lip. "Again?"
I caught his wrist. "Breakfast first."
"You said to feed you."
"I did."
"I can order more."
"That's — that's not how time works, Alex."
He kissed me once more anyway — brief but thorough enough that I lost my train of thought entirely. "Breakfast," I said again, less convincingly.
Alex took my hand and led me toward the kitchen looking entirely too pleased with himself.
The kitchen was bigger than I'd expected — dark cabinets, marble island, tall windows overlooking the wet gray city — and a covered breakfast tray was already sitting beside two cups. Of course it was.
"You already ordered this."
"Yep."
"How did you know when I'd wake up?"
"I didn't."
"What if I'd slept until noon?"
"I would've ordered it again."
I sat at the island while he uncovered eggs, toast, fruit, and a stack of pancakes that had clearly been ordered for me. His plate had eggs and nothing that might reasonably qualify as enjoyable.
"You got us different breakfasts."
"You like sweet stuff in the morning."
My hand stopped near the coffee. "How do you know that?"
"You buy pastries before work."
"Sometimes."
"Every day except Tuesday."
"What happens on Tuesday?"
"You bring tea and a banana."
I stared at him. Alex poured coffee into my cup — small amount of milk, no sugar — and set it in front of me. Exactly right. Exactly, precisely right, like he'd been studying for a test I didn't know I was giving.
"You know what I eat on Tuesdays."
"You were late."
"I was four minutes late because the coffee cart had a broken machine."
"You seemed annoyed."
"I hadn't had coffee."
Any reasonable person would've been unsettled by this.
And part of me was — the part that understood Alex watched people from a distance because distance kept him safe, that he'd been collecting details about me long before he decided he wanted a conversation.
But there was nothing smug about the way he made my coffee.
No sense that knowing meant owning. He just paid attention because I mattered to him, and I could feel myself rearranging around that fact like furniture making room for something that was going to stay.
I cut into the pancakes. "You know you could use these skills for something besides monitoring my diet."
"I do."
"Like what?"
"This."
I shook my head, but I couldn't stop smiling.
Alex sat across from me with his coffee and barely touched his food. His eyes kept drifting back to where the collar of his shirt hung against my collarbone, and every time they did, the air shifted in a way I was trying very hard not to act on at the breakfast table.
"You're going to have to learn to function while I'm dressed," I said.
"You're barely dressed."
"I am covered from throat to mid-thigh."
"In my shirt."
"You keep saying that like it explains something."
He leaned back. "I like it." Low and plain and completely without pretense — not designed to seduce me, though it managed that perfectly well.
We ate in comfortable quiet after that. Not empty silence — Alex's quiet didn't feel empty anymore.
It made room for the rain against the glass and the warmth of his foot resting beside mine under the island and the strange tender fact of two people eating breakfast on a Saturday morning like it was something they'd been doing for years.
My phone buzzed from somewhere in the bedroom. I ignored it. It buzzed again.
"That might be Lola," I said.
"It's Saturday."
"Books don't take weekends off."
He looked spectacularly unimpressed.