Chapter Fifteen — Sienna
Izzy is already in the corner when I push through the door, coffee waiting, coat still on like she ran the whole way.
Never once been late. The café is on Broome Street, halfway between the Garment District and her apartment.
A straight shot for both of us, no detour required.
That's why it's been ours for six years.
Nothing here belongs to him. No Kensington crest on the door, no doorman who reports back, nothing that's ever touched Adrian's world.
I need that today. Somewhere that isn't his.
"You look terrible," she says, when I sit down.
"Good morning to you too."
"I mean it in the kindest possible way." She slides a coffee across the table. "You look like someone who hasn't slept in two days and is holding it together with spite and good posture."
"Three days," I say. "The posture is doing a lot of work."
I drink half the coffee before I say anything else.
She wraps both hands around her own cup and looks at me with the expression she's been using on me since we were twenty-two. The one that means she already knows most of it and is giving me space to get there myself. Izzy has always been the kind of person who makes silence feel like a question.
"He's pulling away," I say. "Three days of — I don't know. Closed doors. Calls he takes somewhere else. He's present and he's not, and I don't know what changed."
"Did something happen?"
Last night happened. The studio, the table, what I said to him while I was angry enough to mean it. What he said back. The one button he fixed on my blouse after, quietly, like it was the only thing left he could offer me.
"By the time I finally came up to bed, he was already asleep," I say.
"Or good enough at faking it that I couldn't tell the difference.
Either way I didn't wake him to ask. I told myself he needed the sleep.
" I look at my coffee instead of her. "Mostly I was afraid of what would happen if I asked and he still didn't have an answer.
He was gone before I woke up this morning. That's twice now."
"You went back to bed?" Izzy says. "After all that, you just, went to sleep?"
"What was I supposed to do? Wake him up and demand answers at midnight?"
"Depends on the answers."
I don't have a response to that.
"Something's been happening for a while," I say. "Longer than three days." I turn the cup on the table. "There was a man at market week. Came through the fabric houses asking questions about me. Had a list of every mill I've ordered from in three years and worked all the way down it."
Izzy doesn't say anything.
"Vane told me. He assumed I'd sent him." I look up. "I didn't send anyone."
She's very still. Not shocked. Still. The stillness of someone who has just recognized something and would rather not have.
"Izzy."
"It's not another woman," she says. "If that's where you're going with it. It isn't. I'd know."
"That's not where I was going."
"I know." She turns her cup. "I'm saying it anyway."
She looks at me. "He's been like this before. When things get complicated. He goes quiet and he handles it alone and he thinks that's protecting the people around him." A pause. "It's not. It's just lonely."
I know. I know that, the way you know a fabric by description before you've held it. Last night I held it. Last night he looked at me and I saw all of it. The wanting and the fear and whatever he's been keeping behind the closed doors. And I let him back in anyway.
"I called him last night," I say. "After. We were in the studio, something happened, I called him and he watched it ring."
Izzy puts her cup down. "Sienna."
"I'm not angry. I came here because I needed to decide what to do with it."
"What are your options?"
I look at her. "I go to him. Or I don't."
She looks back at me for a long moment. "You already know which one you're going to do."
I do. I've known since I walked in.
"He doesn't get to go quiet," I say. "Not after last night. Not after everything. He wants to handle things alone, fine. But he's going to have to tell me that to my face."
Izzy doesn't pick up her cup.
"Can I say something selfish," she says.
"You've never once asked permission."
"I'm asking now." She looks at the table, then at me.
"I've had two people my whole life who talk to me like I'm a person and not a Kensington.
You're one. He's the other." A breath. "If this goes well, I'm the third person in a room that used to be mine.
If it goes badly, one of you stops calling me.
There's no version where I get to keep this exactly how it is. "
I don't have anything for that.
"So I'm not going to tell you to be careful," she says. "I'd be saying it for me."
She picks up her cup and finishes it.
"Go. Make him say it out loud."
***
The elevator opens at forty-four the way it does every night.
Same entryway. Same city light through the floor-to-ceiling glass.
The only thing different tonight is me I came up from the Sanctuary two hours early, and I'm not leaving this kitchen until he tells me something true.
If he's surprised by that, good. Surprise is honest.
He's not surprised.
He's standing in the kitchen in a white shirt, sleeves rolled, a half-empty glass of water on the counter beside him.
He looks up when I walk in and something in his face does a complicated thing.
Relief and dread arriving simultaneously, which tells me everything I need to know about his state of mind.
"Sienna."
"You didn't answer." I set my bag on the counter between us. "Last night. I called you. You watched it ring and you didn't answer."
He doesn't deny it. He wouldn't. "I know."
"That's not an answer."
"No." He sets the water glass down. "It's not."
The kitchen is very quiet. Below us the windows are full of other people's lights. In here the air is sandalwood and something else. Something that used to be both of us and is now just him. I notice the subtraction the way you notice a seam that's been let out.
"I need you to tell me what's going on." I keep my voice level. I practiced this the whole ride up. "Not the version where you protect me from something. The real version. Because I'm standing here and I'm asking you directly, and if you tell me 'I can't' again I am going to—"
"I know," he says. Quietly. "Sienna."
"Stop saying that." My voice is not as level as I practiced. "I know, I know, I know — it's all you say. You know everything and you tell me nothing and I am so tired of—" I stop. "Don't say my name like that, either. Like you're sorry and that's enough."
"I am sorry."
"I know you are." And I do. I can see it on him the way I can see everything on him now, now that I know how to look.
The weight of whatever he's carrying, the way it sits in his shoulders, the thing behind his eyes that isn't distance, it's something much worse than distance.
"I can see that you're sorry. I can see that you're, something.
You're something, Adrian, and you won't tell me what, and last night I thought—"
I stop. He waits.
"I thought something shifted," I say. "Last night in the studio. I thought whatever you've been holding back, you—" I shake my head. "And then I called you and you didn't answer and I'm standing here trying to figure out if I made the whole thing up."
He crosses the kitchen. Not fast. Slow, like he's giving me time to change my mind, to tell him to stop. I don't tell him to stop.
He puts his hand on my face. Just his hand, his palm against my jaw, his thumb at the corner of my mouth. The touch is so careful it makes something crack open in my chest.
"You didn't make it up," he says.
"Then tell me—"
"Soon." His forehead drops to mine. "I promise you. Soon."
It's not enough. I know it's not enough. I also know that I came here to fight. I am standing in his kitchen with his hand on my face and the city behind him. The thing in his eyes is not distance. Has never been distance. It's something I have been trying not to name for weeks now.
I am so tired of being afraid of it.
"Soon," I say.
"Yes."
I stop being afraid of it and kiss him.
This is different from the studio. The studio was anger. This is something quieter and more frightening. The kind of wanting that doesn't have an argument attached to it, the kind that just is, that doesn't need a reason or a fight to justify itself.
He kisses me back against the kitchen counter, his hands in my hair, slow and unhurried like he has something to say and this is how he's saying it.
His mouth tastes like black coffee and something darker underneath.
His hands move to my waist. Then under my shirt.
His palms flat against my skin, warm and sure, and I inhale sharply at the contact.
"Okay?" he murmurs against my mouth.
"Yes." I pull him closer. "Don't stop."
He doesn't stop. His mouth moves to my throat, my collarbone, the curve of my shoulder where he pushes my shirt aside and presses his lips to bare skin. I grip the counter behind me and let my head fall back and stop thinking about what I'm afraid of.
He takes my hand. Leads me down the hall without a word.
He lays me down on the bed. His bed. Dark sheets, his pillow, the smell of him everywhere. He looks at me for a moment, just looks. His weight braced above me, his eyes doing the thing where they take me apart. I feel myself flush under it, which has never happened before.
"What?" I say.
"Nothing." He traces the line of my collarbone with one finger. "I just want to look at you."
It should feel like too much. It doesn't. I reach up and pull him down.
He undresses me slowly, his mouth following every inch of fabric he moves aside.
The inside of my knee. The curve of my hip.
He hooks his fingers in my underwear and pulls it down and off and he works his way back up my body.
His lips dragging across my stomach, my ribs, my throat, until I pull him up to me by the collar and kiss him hard.