Chapter Seven #2
I ate my pasta. It was extraordinary, because Maren’s carbonara always was.
We talked about other things after that.
Her kindergartners, who were staging what she described as a “soft coup” over the classroom hamster’s name.
A volunteer event she’d signed up for at a community garden, which she was nervous about because she’d never successfully kept a plant alive for more than three weeks.
A new cafe that had opened near her school that she wanted to try.
Normal things. Small things. The kind of things that made up a life, and that I was suddenly, acutely aware were not enough.
Not because there was anything wrong with small things. But because for the first time in twenty-seven years, I could feel the shape of something bigger, and I was starting to understand that ignoring it wasn’t the same as being realistic. It was just being afraid.
· · ·
I got home at ten.
Showered. Put on the old t-shirt I slept in. Made tea, even though I didn’t want tea, because it was part of the routine and the routine was the scaffolding that held the quiet life together.
I sat on my bed and stared at the wall and tried not to think about Kieran Ashworth.
I thought about Kieran Ashworth.
I thought about the way he looked at me, which was unlike anything I’d ever experienced or ever expected to experience.
Not with desire, though desire was there, visible in the tension of his jaw and the grip of his hands and the way his voice went rough and low when he said my name.
But underneath the desire was something else.
Something that looked like reverence. Like the man who had earned a reputation for violence and danger and barely leashed fury had walked into an office building and found something he wanted to be gentle for.
I thought about Jonah, and the way he’d looked at me across a kitchenette table and said they don’t see us the way we actually are, and how in that moment I’d felt less alone than I had in years.
I thought about Declan, who had left me out of an email and then sent a follow-up, and about what that correction meant from a man who, by all accounts, never admitted to being wrong about anything.
I thought about Rhys. The guitar I could sometimes hear faintly when I walked past his office late in the day. The nod. The nothing.
I thought about Maren saying, What if the universe got it right for once?
I thought about my mother saying, Be realistic about what’s available.
I pulled the blanket up and turned off the lamp and lay in the dark, listening to the refrigerator hum, and I tried to figure out which voice was telling me the truth.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand.
I picked it up. Unknown number. My thumb hovered over the screen for a second before I opened it.
You left your cardigan at the office. It’s safe. - Kieran
I stared at the message.
I had left my cardigan. Yesterday, draped over the back of my chair when I’d left in a hurry after the email. A soft gray cardigan, nothing special, the kind of thing you grabbed on your way out the door without thinking because the office was always too cold.
He had it. He’d kept it. And he was texting me at ten-thirty at night to tell me it was safe, like a gray cardigan from a chain store was something precious, something worth guarding, something that mattered.
I knew why he’d kept it. The realization moved through me like warm water, slow and inevitable.
He’d kept it because it smelled like me.
Because to him, it wasn’t a forgettable piece of clothing from a forgettable beta.
It was something that carried my scent, the scent that only he could detect, the scent that had stopped him dead in his tracks and rewritten his entire world.
My cardigan. Safe.
I typed a reply. Deleted it. Typed another. Deleted that one too.
Finally:
Thank you. No rush getting it back.
I pressed send before I could overthink it. No rush. Take your time. Keep it. Keep the thing that smells like me. I’m telling you it’s okay.
The three dots appeared immediately. He’d been waiting.
He’d sent that text and then sat there with his phone in his hand, watching for my response, and the image of that, of Kieran Ashworth in his penthouse, holding his phone and waiting for a message from a beta who couldn’t even buy herself a dining table, made my chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with the hum and everything to do with something much simpler and much more dangerous.
His reply came:
Goodnight, Nora.
I put my phone on the nightstand. Right next to the pen.
I lay in the dark and pressed my hand to my chest and felt the hum, steady and warm and impossible, and I thought about cages built from love and women who taught kindergarten and the terrifying, exhilarating possibility that the universe, for once in its indifferent existence, might have gotten it right.
I didn’t sleep for a long time.
But for the first time, the quiet didn’t feel like absence.
It felt like space. Space for something new to grow into.
And that was the most frightening, most hopeful thing I’d felt in years.