Chapter Twenty-Four #2
Taddeo's expression changed slightly at that, but she did not let him interrupt.
“When I let you take control, it worked because I knew I could stop it. I could say no. I could change my mind halfway through and you would stop before I'd even finished the word.” Her voice softened despite the anger beneath it. “You understood that perfectly.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know why?”
He frowned. “Because you chose it.”
“Because recently I have been choosing things you also wanted.”
The realization moved slowly across his face.
Isolde nodded once. “Yes, you can kiss me. Yes, you can touch me. Yes, I'll sleep in your bed. Yes, I'll work beside you. Yes, I'll tell you what I found in those documents. Yes, I'll give you control for a few hours because I know I can take it back.”
Taddeo's jaw tightened.
“The first time I say no about something that actually matters to you, you don't know how to accept it.”
“That isn't fair.”
“Isn't it?”
“I accepted plenty of things I didn't like.”
“You accepted privacy as long as you believed the information wasn't dangerous enough.
You accepted me sleeping in my own room because it didn't threaten anything. You accepted my professional judgment because it helped the investigation.” Isolde shook her head.
“This was the first time my no meant you had to remain afraid and ignorant.”
Taddeo stared at her.
She saw the moment he understood.
Not agreed.
Understood.
“And you couldn't do it,” she said.
His face became very still.
Isolde looked toward the phone. “You asked once. I said no. You asked again. I still said no. You explained why you were right, and when I wouldn't give you the answer you wanted, you used the access you had because I am inside your house and you have more power than I do.”
“Isolde.”
“The relationship has only felt different because I have been agreeing with you lately.”
That landed.
She saw it in the way his shoulders shifted as if she'd physically struck him.
“The moment I don't,” she continued, quieter now, “when my choice costs you something or scares you or might take me somewhere you don't want me to go, you become my captor again.”
Silence filled the room.
Taddeo had always been good at silence. He could use it to intimidate people, make them speak too soon, or establish that an argument did not deserve further response.
This silence contained nothing strategic.
He had no defense.
His hand lifted slightly toward her.
Isolde stepped back.
“Don't.”
He stopped immediately.
The obedience hurt more than the attempted touch would have.
“Don't touch me,” she said, making the instruction clearer because clarity had become painfully important. “I mean it.”
His hand lowered to his side. “All right.”
There was no qualification.
No unless.
No security exception.
Isolde looked at him for several seconds before turning toward the closet.
She pulled down the overnight bag she'd left on the upper shelf after moving pieces of her life into his room gradually enough that neither of them had ever called it moving.
Taddeo's expression changed. “What are you doing?”
“Going back to my room.”
“You don't have to.”
“I do.”
“Isolde.”
She opened the bag on the bench and began gathering her things. “I'm not leaving Northglass, so nobody needs to tackle me in a hallway. I'm moving thirty feet.”
“I know where your room is.”
“Then we're finally agreeing on something.”
The bitterness in her own voice made her pause.
She did not want to become cruel simply because she was hurt.
Taddeo remained several feet away while she collected what had migrated into his space over the previous days.
A toothbrush and skin cream from his bathroom.
Her laptop charger beside his desk. Two books stacked beneath his on the nightstand.
A blouse folded over the back of his chair because she had taken it off there after dinner and never carried it back. There was very little.
That was somehow worse.
They had never formally decided she lived in this room.
Her presence had accumulated through choices so ordinary that neither of them had needed to name them.
She came here after working late because she wanted him.
She fell asleep and stayed. One shirt became two, one book became several, and eventually her toothbrush sat beside his without ceremony.
Now dismantling the arrangement took less than five minutes.
Isolde reached for another blouse and caught sight of herself in the mirror.
Taddeo's black shirt hung almost to mid-thigh.
She went still.
Taddeo followed her gaze.
Neither spoke.
Isolde carried clean clothes into the bathroom and closed the door behind herself.
Changing felt absurdly intimate now that she did not want intimacy.
She pulled his shirt over her head, folded it carefully on the counter, and dressed in her own long-sleeved sleep shirt before looking at herself in the mirror.
Her face was pale, eyes bright with unshed tears, hair loose around her shoulders.
She did not look like someone who had stopped loving a man.
That was the problem.
When Isolde returned, Taddeo stood exactly where she'd left him.
She placed the folded black shirt on the edge of his bed.
His eyes dropped to it.
“Don't,” he said quietly.
Isolde looked at him. “Don't what?”
“Turn everything between us into something I took.”