6. SIX #2
Her fingers closed around my tie. The kiss was supposed to be brief — just a quiet thing, a private reassurance before she stepped in front of the room.
But Emily leaned in, and I forgot the room existed.
Her mouth softened under mine, and for a few seconds the only thing that registered was the warmth of her body beneath my hand and the small catch in her breathing when my thumb moved along her waist.
Someone cleared their throat.
Emily smiled against my mouth. "That's probably Danny."
"I don't care."
"I'm about to present his register."
"He can wait."
She kissed me once more — softer, briefer — and stepped back. "Wish me luck."
I looked at her mouth, still flushed. "Come back to me when you're done."
The words came out before I thought about them. Emily's face changed — warmer, surprised, like I'd said something she wasn't expecting and liked more than she wanted to show. "I will."
She turned toward the display. I stayed where she'd left me, watching her walk away and already counting the minutes until she came back.
"You're being obvious."
JJ Clark had materialized beside me. "That's what makes it fun."
I ignored him.
The restored register sat inside a low display case, open to the page recording the club's first official gathering. Emily had built the support cradle herself, testing the angle three times to make sure the pressure on the binding was right.
She looked toward the back of the room. Straight at me. The smile was immediate, and I felt it somewhere beneath my ribs.
JJ caught the look. "You should go stand with her."
"No."
"You've been staring at her for twenty minutes."
"I can see fine from here."
"Yeah. And everyone can see you seeing her. It's not subtle, Alex."
I turned to look at him. He raised his glass and walked away.
Emily started her presentation without notes.
She explained the register's condition and the restoration work in language that actually made people pay attention — not the polite, vacant attention you give someone at a charity event, but real interest. She was precise without being cold, warm without downplaying how much the work mattered.
Gerald interrupted once. Emily answered him and kept going. She didn't look toward me for rescue, and I stayed where I was because Danny had been right — she didn't need me to step in for her. I hated that realization nearly as much as I respected it.
The room applauded when she finished. Emily accepted it with a smile, though I caught the long breath she let out afterward — the one nobody else would've noticed. I crossed the room before anyone else could reach her.
"You've terrified at least three trustees just by standing near a wall."
"They'll get over it."
She smiled at that, then reached for my hand and pulled me toward the bar without asking if I wanted to go. The gesture was casual and familiar — the kind of touch that assumed I'd follow. She was right.
Matteo poured drinks for both of us without being asked.
"You look great," he told Emily.
"Thank you."
"You look like you're about to ruin someone's evening," he told me.
"I'm being social."
Emily patted my arm. "He's trying."
By the time the crowd thinned, Emily had kicked off her shoes under the bar and was deep in a conversation with Teller about why his handwriting corrections in the first register actually constituted a more reliable founding record than Danny's original entries.
Teller looked delighted. Danny less so.
I'd spent the whole evening beside her — not talking much, not touching, just staying close while she filled a room with people and warmth and an ease I'd never manage if I lived a hundred years. It should've made me feel smaller. It didn't.
She looked back at me after the last guests left. "You survived."
"Barely."
She followed me into the library barefoot, the green dress brushing her calves. Her suitcase was sitting beside the sofa — she'd brought it up earlier and left it there for the morning train.
I hated the sight of it.
Emily noticed. "One day."
"I don't want to argue tonight."
"What do you want?"
I touched the bare skin at her back where the dress dipped low. "You."
Her hands went still at my collar. "That's becoming your answer to everything."
"It's always the answer."
Emily kissed me. I held her face between my hands and kept it slow even though the urgency beneath my skin was making that difficult. We had tonight. Not enough time, but time.
When she pulled back, her eyes drifted to the glass cabinet near the fire. The one she'd promised not to touch. Inside it sat a slim green book with a dried rose pressed beneath the cover.
"You noticed that on your first day in here," I said.
"I notice it most days."
"But you never asked."
"You told me the cabinet was private."
Most people treated privacy like a dare — a closed door just made them more curious. Emily had looked at the book behind the glass every day for weeks and never once asked to open it.
I took the key from my pocket. Her gaze came back to me.
"You don't have to."
I opened the cabinet and lifted the book out. The binding was soft with age, the gold title almost gone. My mother's name was still written inside the front cover in blue ink. Nancy Black.
Emily took it with both hands. She didn't open it until I nodded.
A pressed rose lay between the first pages, darkened and fragile but still whole.
"My mother kept it," I said.
"Where did it come from?"
"I gave it to her. When I was eight."
Emily looked down at the flower for a long time. "She sounds like someone who loved beautiful things."
"She loved books."
Emily's fingers hovered near the page without touching it. The care in the gesture — the instinct to protect something old and breakable — was so natural to her that I don't think she knew she was doing it.
"What happened to her?"
The question was careful. Not careful in the way people usually were — the tiptoeing, the pre-emptive softness that always felt more like protection for themselves than for me. Emily asked it the way she handled damaged manuscripts. Gently, but without pretending the damage wasn't there.
"She died when I was twenty-one."
"I'm sorry."
She didn't push for more. No follow-up questions, no soft explanations about grief, no attempt to fill the silence with something comforting. She just stood beside me holding something my mother had loved, treating its value as obvious.
"The rose is starting to fracture," Emily said after a moment. "I can stabilize it."
I looked at the darkened petals. "Will it look different?"
"A little. I'd need to move it onto archival paper and seal it properly. But it would still be the same rose."
The same, but changed. Preserved because someone had finally been allowed to touch it.
"Okay," I said.
"You're sure?"
She closed the book carefully and held it against her chest the way she held everything that mattered — with both hands, close to her body, like she was making a promise with her whole self.
"I'll take care of it."
I believed her. With the book. With the room. With the parts of my life I'd been keeping behind glass for so long I'd forgotten they could survive the air.
Emily placed the volume on the desk, well away from the edge. Then she came back to me.
"One day," she said again.
I wrapped my arms around her. "That's too long."
"I'll be back tomorrow night."
Her hand slid into my hair. "You could miss me a little," she said softly.
I looked at the suitcase over her shoulder. A little had never been an option.