Chapter 10 #2
His arm reaches past me easily. Without even fully extending. His forearm passes close enough to my shoulder that I feel the warmth of his skin through the rolled sleeve.
A suggestion of contact, which is somehow worse than the real thing.
His hand closes around the chocolate bar on the top shelf and brings it down. For a moment — one second, maybe two — his chest is inches from my back, and I feel the heat, the sheer physical mass of him.
A flush starts at the base of my spine and climbs. There’s a tightening low in my stomach. A sudden, vivid awareness of every place where his body is almost touching mine but isn’t.
He holds the chocolate out to me.
I take it. Our fingers don’t touch, but his eyes meet mine as I take it. Up close, his eyes are more than pale blue. They’re layered. Ice over water.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
He steps back and returns to his side of the island. He takes a sip of vodka and says nothing.
The whole interaction took less than five seconds. But it feels like my body will be processing it for a lifetime.
I face the stove and pour the milk into the pot. I turn the heat to low. My hands are trembling. Not in the way they trembled outside my apartment when Landon’s hand was on my throat but with a sensation that starts in my chest and radiates outward.
Stop it, I tell myself. Stop it right now. He’s your employer. Your boss. He pays your salary. There can be no impure thoughts.
Too late for that.
I break the chocolate into pieces and add them slowly, the way Dad taught me.
One piece at a time, letting it melt before adding the next.
The rhythm helps. The familiarity of the motions, the click of the spoon against the pot, the smell of chocolate warming in milk.
It brings me back to myself. Back to the reason I’m here.
Not for the man behind me. For the girl upstairs.
I add a pinch of sugar and a dash of salt, stirring until the color deepens to a rich, dark brown that Dad would have approved of.
I pour it into a mug, a simple white one I find in the lower cabinet, thank God, and turn around.
The space where Rolan was standing is empty.
His glass is on the counter, rinsed, and set upside down on a towel to dry. No mess. No trace. As if he’d never been there.
I exhale. It comes out shaky.
I take the chocolate and go upstairs.
Anya’s room is four doors down from mine on the same floor.
This struck me as strange when I first arrived.
I expected to be housed in a staff wing or a separate corridor.
Somewhere appropriately distant. Instead, Mikhail led me to a room in the main residential hallway.
Close enough that I can hear Anya’s door if it opens.
Close enough that tonight, a different noise bled through.
I wasn’t sleeping. I haven’t been sleeping well since I got here. Not because of the bed, which is obscenely comfortable, but because my brain won’t turn off. It cycles through the same loop every night: the debt, Landon, the next payment, the one after that.
So, I was awake, staring at the ceiling, when I decided to take a walk. I padded into the hallway in my socks, and that’s when I heard it: a whimper, muffled by a pillow.
Anya’s door was open. The crescent moon nightlight painted the room in pale gold.
She was curled in a tight ball in the center of her enormous bed — a beautiful thing, white frame with a canopy. Fit for a princess.
She was shaking, and Mr. Whiskers was crushed against her face. Her knees were drawn to her chest, arms wrapped around her shins.
I almost didn’t go in. She’s not my child. It wasn’t my place. There were boundaries, professional and personal, that I knew I should respect. But I couldn’t hear that and walk away.
I knocked softly on the open door. “Anya? Sweetheart, are you okay?”
She shook her head. A tiny, fierce motion, her face still buried in the rabbit.
“Did you have a bad dream?”
A nod.
“Can I get you some hot chocolate? My dad used to make it for me when I had nightmares. It’s the best in the world. I promise.”
She breathed a soft yes , her eyes red-rimmed and enormous, and that was enough.
Now I’m back, standing in her doorway with the mug warm between my hands, watching her in her princess bed. She’s still curled tight, still holding the rabbit, but her shoulders have stopped shaking.
I sit on the edge of the bed carefully .
“Here,” I say, holding out the mug. “It’s still a little hot. Small sips.”
She takes it with both hands. They’re so small they barely wrap around the ceramic. She takes a sip. Her eyes widen slightly.
“Good?”
She nods, taking another sip.
“Do you want to talk about the dream?”
She shakes her head.
“That’s okay. You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
I start to stand to leave. To give her space. She needs to know the door is open, but she needs to be the one to walk through it.
“Ellie?”
Her voice is so small it almost isn’t there. A whisper that barely disturbs the air.
I turn back.
“Yes, sweetheart?”
She opens her mouth, closes it, and opens it again.
“Never mind,” she says. “It’s nothing.”
I sit back down. “It doesn’t sound like nothing .”
“It’s just…” She picks at the ear of the rabbit. “You don’t have to.”
“Don’t have to what?”
She gets smaller. She draws her shoulders in, tucks her chin, and curls around the mug and the rabbit, trying to take up as little space as possible.
“Stay,” she whispers. “You don’t have to stay.”
The words hit me somewhere I’m not prepared for. Somewhere deep and soft and unprotected.
“Anya,” I say, and I keep my voice steady even though my chest is cracking. “I would love to stay. Can I grab a pillow and a blanket and sleep on the couch?”
She blinks in surprise .
“You — you want to?”
“I really want to. That couch looks super comfy.”
It does not. It’s a small settee upholstered in velvet that will accommodate approximately eighty percent of my body, but I’ve slept on worse. I’ve slept on a hospital chair next to my father’s bed for three nights straight. A short velvet couch is a luxury by comparison.
Anya nods. A small, careful nod.
“I’ll be right back.”
I go to my room to grab my pillow and the blanket from the end of my bed. On the way back, I pass the hallway and halt.
I think about the way he appeared in that kitchen without making a noise, the way he stood behind me close enough to feel but not touch, the way he left without a word.
I think, What kind of man moves like that?
And then I stop thinking, because Anya is waiting for me.
When I come back, she’s sitting up straighter, sipping the chocolate, and her posture has changed. She’s still small, but the tight, desperate curl of her body has loosened.
I arrange myself on the settee. It’s as uncomfortable as I predicted, but I tuck the blanket around my legs and fluff the pillow.
“Perfect. See? Five-star accommodations.”
She almost smiles. I’ve never managed a full, bright, open smile, but we’re getting close.
Anya finishes the chocolate and carefully places the mug on her nightstand with both hands.
“Ellie?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.” A pause. “For the chocolate.”
I can catch the meaning beneath her words. Thank you for coming. Thank you for not making me ask. Thank you for staying when you didn’t have to.
“You’re welcome, sweetheart. Anytime. ”
She lies down and pulls the duvet up before facing the door.
Within five minutes, her breathing slows.
I lie on the velvet couch, stare at the ceiling, and think about my life.
I think about my father and the nights he came home late, smelling of whiskey, cigarette smoke, and loss.
When I’d pretend to be asleep, and he’d stand in my doorway and whisper, I’m sorry, Ellie-belly.
I’ll do better tomorrow. About the chocolate, and how it tasted the same tonight as it always does, and how some recipes carry people in them even after those people are gone.
My mind keeps returning to the debt, the payment Landon adjusted to remind me that he can do anything, anytime.
Then it drifts over to Rolan, who appeared and disappeared in the kitchen, as if he had never been there in the first place, and the way he stayed close enough to feel but not to touch.
The heat of his chest near my back. The moment his arm reached past me and the air between us turned thick and charged and alive.
His eyes gazing at me.
I push the thought away, locking it in a box.
My employer. My salary. The gate between Landon and me.
Nothing else. Nothing.
But the box floats, and the lock is cheap.
I close my eyes, and for the first time in a long time, I quickly fall asleep.
I wake to the feeling of a heavy object being crushed between my shoulder blades.
Every vertebra in my spine has apparently formed a union overnight and filed a formal complaint against the velvet settee. I’m curled in the shape of a comma, my neck at an angle that will require an exorcist to undo, and one of my legs is hanging off the edge of the couch.
I blink as the morning light spills through Anya’s curtains, illuminating the vast room.
I lie still for a moment. I was here last night, but only in the dark, only in fragments: the crescent moon nightlight, the shape of Anya curled in her bed, the outline of furniture in shadow. Now, in daylight, I see all of it.
The room is white.
Not warm white. Not cream or ivory or any of the twenty-seven shades of off-white that interior designers argue about. Just white. The walls, the ceiling, the bed frame, the dresser, the bookshelf. Even the curtains. Everything is the same flat, pristine, untouched shade of nothing.
There are toys in the corner, neatly arranged on a shelf.
Dolls still in their packaging. Boardgames with unbroken seals.
A dollhouse with furniture perfectly positioned in each tiny room, as if no small hand has ever rearranged it.
The only thing that is touched, worn, loved is Mr. Whiskers, who is currently wedged between Anya’s chin and her pillow.