Chapter 11 OWEN
OWEN
The office is quiet when she pushes the door open.
I hear her before I see her. Only a few days in this house and I can already identify her by sound alone. The particular weight of her step, lighter than Reid's, more deliberate than Jace's. I don't examine what that means. I look at my screen and keep my eyes there.
She stops in the doorway.
"I made yours the way you like it." She crosses to my desk and sets the mug of tea at the corner. "Strong. One spoon of honey."
I look at the mug. Then at her.
I don't remember her asking and I never told her that.
"Thank you," I say.
This isn't tea. This is her, offering something small and specific and carefully chosen. An apology she doesn't owe.
This morning I was so certain she was going to be happy.
And then she was gone and the three of us were standing in the hallway and the house felt like it had lost air pressure. I didn't move for a long moment. Neither did Reid.
Jace went after her.
Then she came back.
Both of them cold and snow-dusted at the door, flakes still melting in her hair. I felt the relief first. Specific and physical, a loosening that started in my jaw and ran downward through my shoulders, my arms, my hands unclenching against my thighs. She was back. She was all right.
Then I registered that they were holding hands.
I know what I felt. I'm not going to dress it in something more palatable. It was jealousy, clean and brief, and it lasted four seconds before Jace caught my eye over her head and made the smallest possible gesture. A tilt of his chin. Easy. I understood. No fuss.
Reid excused himself saying he had to get to the rescue center. He touched her shoulder once on his way to the door. She didn't flinch.
I came here.
It was the right call. It was also the moment I finished making a decision I had been approaching for days. She is going through something. Jace is attracted to her. Reid too, in his way. And I can see clearly when adding my weight to a situation helps it and when it doesn't.
I will stay out of this.
She moves to the other desk. Her desk. Sets her mug down, tucks one foot underneath her, opens her sketchbook. And runs the palm of her hand once across the surface of the wood before she starts drawing.
"Is the location all right?" I ask. "I wasn't sure about the angle from the window."
"It's perfect." She doesn't look up. "The light is good."
I put my glasses on and look at my screen.
The numbers I've been working with for the past hour are still there. Acquisition projections, revenue modelling, sales targets. They were close to making sense before she walked in. I read the same line three times and it continues to mean nothing.
I move a column. I move it back.
She's drawing. I can hear the pencil, the specific rhythm of it. Short strokes and then longer ones, a pause where she stops and considers something before she continues. I keep my eyes on my screen.
I redo a calculation I already completed correctly.
This goes on. The scratch of graphite on heavy paper becomes background noise I am tracking with disproportionate precision. I know when the strokes are long and deliberate. I know when they shorten. I know when she pauses to look at whatever reference she's using.
I don't look up to see what the reference is.
At some point the rhythm changes. Shorter intervals. The pauses begin happening in a pattern that doesn't match the drawing process I've been listening to. They feel directed. They carry the specific weight of someone looking up from their work at a fixed point.
I keep my eyes on my screen. The cursor blinks on the same cell it's been blinking on for twenty minutes.
Another pause. Longer this time. I can feel the attention on me the way you feel a shift in barometric pressure. Skin-level. Precise.
I take my glasses off and press two fingers to the bridge of my nose.
"We shouldn't have done it without telling you."
She stops drawing.
I look at her. "We thought Mrs. Smith would be more receptive coming from us. We've known her a long time. That's no excuse." I set my glasses on the desk. "We crossed a line."
She's quiet for a moment. She sets her pencil down flat on the sketchbook and looks at me directly. Her eyes are green in the window light.
"You did," she says. "But it came from a good place."
She pauses.
"It's been a long time since someone was kind to me.
" Her voice is steady but the words arrive with effort, each one placed down carefully.
"I didn't recognize it. I reacted to something that wasn't there.
" She looks at the desk. Runs one finger along the edge of it, tracing the grain of the wood.
"It was a thoughtful thing to do. I'm sorry I couldn't see that this morning. "
Something that's been holding in my chest since this morning lets go. All at once, like a bolt sliding free.
"You don't need to apologize," I say.
"I think I do."
We look at each other. The light from the window catches the side of her face, and I notice the specific line of her jaw, the way it cuts clean from ear to chin.
She picks up her pencil. I put my glasses back on. We return to work.
Except she keeps looking at me.
I notice it the same way I noticed the rhythm changing earlier.
Short glances, then back to the page. Then another.
Each one holds a beat longer than the last. I can feel them landing on me, brief and focused, and each time one arrives my awareness of my own hands on the keyboard sharpens until I am conscious of every tendon, every point where skin meets plastic.
I keep my eyes on my screen and redo another calculation I've already done.
The pauses get longer. The pencil goes quiet and stays quiet and I know she is looking at me.
I take my glasses off again.
"What are you drawing?"
She looks up. "A surprise."
"I hope I'm not the reference model for one of the animals in your book." I set my glasses down. "Specifically, if it's the frog, don't tell me."
She smiles.
Not the careful version. This one gets away from her completely. It opens her face, and for a half-second I see the person underneath, the one she's been holding back since she walked into this house.
"It's not the frog," she says.
I stand up. "Show me."
She watches me come. Her body stays where it is, shoulders loose, hands relaxed on the edges of the sketchbook. I stop at the corner of the desk. She turns the sketchbook and pushes it toward me, and I lean over, and the space between us zaps.
I go still.
It's my face.
A full portrait, done in pencil with the kind of patience that requires sitting with a subject until you understand what you're looking at.
The line of my jaw, the way it sets when I'm concentrating.
The particular way I hold my shoulders, slightly forward, the posture of someone who learned young to take up less space. .
She has been watching me. The way I watch things when I'm trying to understand them, fully and without announcement.
She's been doing that to me. And I didn't see it, which means either she is better at concealment than I am at observation or I was so busy watching her that I missed her watching me back.
"Not a frog," she says.
I look at the drawing. Then at her.
"The artist was generous." My voice is level. "A frog is probably closer."
"I draw what I see."
I'm still at the corner of her desk. There's a pencil mark on her right hand near the base of her thumb, a smudge of graphite across the knuckle.
Her eyes come up to mine and stay there, and I become aware of the distance between us as a physical quantity.
Small. Measurable. The kind of distance that only holds if both people agree to maintain it.
"I think you're closer to a prince." She says it quietly.
I look at her mouth.
She looks at mine.
The sketchbook is open between us. The lamp on my desk puts warm light across the left side of her face, and her eyes are grey-green with flecks of gold near the center that catch the light like sediment at the bottom of a clear stream.
My hand is already aching for the smooth skin of her cheeks, and I think about the way my fingers would fit against the soft skin below her ear, the way her chin would tilt.
My mouth would find hers and it would take a breath, the smallest possible collapse of the agreement we have both been silently maintaining.
I straighten, and the distance returns to what it was. I pick up the sketchbook and look at the portrait for a moment longer, giving myself somewhere to land that is not her face, not her mouth.
She has given me kinder eyes than I think I have.
"It's good work," I say. My voice is level. "It's very good."
I set the sketchbook back on her desk and return to my side of the room. Five steps. Each one adds distance I'm choosing. Each one costs more than the last.
I sit down. I put my glasses on. I look at my screen. The column is exactly where I left it.
A moment passes. Then I hear her pick up her pencil.
The room settles back into the shape it had before. Same positions. Same lamp light falling across two desks. Same quiet.
Different silence.