Chapter 6 #2
Not dramatically — not the violent tremor of fear, but a fine vibration in my fingertips.
The kind that came from holding a thing you were afraid of dropping.
She saw it. I knew she saw it because her breath caught and her eyes moved to my hands and then, with a deliberateness that nearly destroyed me, she looked away.
At the garden. At the stars. At anything except the evidence of what touching her was doing to me.
She didn’t mention it. She let me tremble and kept looking at the sky, and that mercy — that quiet, chosen mercy — was worth more than any word she could have said.
My other hand moved to her right foot without consulting my brain.
I worked my fingers along the tendon from her heel to the ball of her foot, and she exhaled slowly, her head tipping back, throat exposed to the moonlight in a way that made me acutely aware I was a man with a heartbeat and functioning eyes and a rapidly deteriorating cover story about therapeutic intentions.
“This is the part where you say something cutting,” she murmured, eyes closed. “About how my shoe choices are a public safety hazard.”
“Your shoe choices are a medical emergency and your metatarsals deserve better.”
“There he is.” She smiled with her eyes closed, and I felt it in places that had no business being affected by someone else’s facial expression.
My palm followed the curve of her ankle — slower now, following the bone — and her knee drifted half an inch closer to my thigh.
Close enough that the gap had become a measurement I was tracking with more precision than I’d ever applied to a building tolerance.
“Cameras are off,” she said quietly.
“I know.”
These little words carried more weight than anything I’d said in three weeks.
She opened her eyes and looked at me, and in the moonlight her irises were the color of aged whiskey — warm, amber, a shade I’d seen in the wood grain of restored Victorian timber, an unhinged comparison that was further evidence of contamination beyond repair.
Her gaze moved to my mouth. Then back to my eyes.
The intentionality of that movement activated every nerve I had left.
She touched my jaw. Her fingers were light, barely there, tracing the line from my ear to my chin.
My eyes closed before I could stop them — involuntary, the most honest thing my body had ever done — and I felt myself lean into her touch.
Toward her. The way a thing leans toward its center of gravity when it’s done pretending it can stand alone.
“Rhys.” Her voice was close. Warm. If I opened my eyes, she’d be right there — close enough that the slightest movement would eliminate the distance.
Her breath landed on my skin, and my body was running one calculation, only one, over and over: the force required to close the gap between her mouth and mine.
“When we kiss,” she said — when, not if, deployed with quiet certainty, as if inevitability were a given — “I want it to mean something.”
“It will.” My voice didn’t sound like mine. It sounded stripped, bare, like the protective layers had failed in sequence and this was what lived underneath. “It already does.”
The space between us was three inches. Maybe less. Her warmth reached me without contact, and the gap was somehow more charged than the touch.
She pulled back. Slowly. Her fingers trailed away from my jaw and she smiled — tender, knowing, slightly wrecked — a smile that said she understood how close that had been and had stopped not because she wanted to but because the waiting was its own kind of want.
“Goodnight, Rhys.”
“Goodnight, Sloane.”
Neither of us moved for a beat. Two. Three. The jasmine was obscene, perfuming the air between us like the universe had decided to be heavy-handed about its metaphors.
She stood, slipped her feet back into her shoes with a grimace, and walked toward the mansion. At the garden gate she paused.
“For the record,” she said, “you have good hands.”
She disappeared inside. Which was strategic, because the only response I had was the truth: my hands were still unsteady and I could still feel her ankle under my fingertips and I was in considerably more trouble than twenty minutes ago.
I sat on the bench for another ten minutes, staring at my hands, and then I texted Declan a single word: help.
He responded with a laughing emoji and a GIF of a building collapsing. Brothers.
I didn’t sleep.
I lay in bed from 1:17 AM until 6:30 AM and tried to think about load calculations for the Tribeca project, about the seismic retrofit proposal I’d left on my desk, about literally anything besides the sound she’d made when I found the knot in her arch.
I failed. I opened the Notes app on my phone and started drafting an email to my project manager about the foundation assessment, and somehow — somehow — it turned into a list of things I’d noticed about Sloane that I had no professional reason to know.
I deleted it at 4 AM. Rewrote it at 4:07.
Deleted it again at 4:12. At 4:15, I wrote “STOP” in all caps at the top of a blank note, which lasted until 4:16, when I added “she smells like jasmine and bad decisions” underneath it.
The Notes app had never been weaponized against a grown man’s dignity this effectively.
I caught my reflection in the bathroom mirror at 6:45 AM and understood, with clinical objectivity, why Mason would later tell me I looked like shit.
The circles under my eyes had circles. My teeth were clenched so tight they could have cracked walnuts.
I looked as if I’d been in a fight, accurate — I’d been fighting myself for five hours, and I’d lost badly.
The confessional interview that morning was an exercise in deception. The producer — sharp eyes, predatory instinct, bonus dependent on manufactured drama — positioned me in the chair.
“So, Rhys. Anything happen last night? Garden cameras are off, but you were seen heading that direction. And you weren’t alone.”
“Nothing happened.” My face gave nothing. “I went for a walk. The east terrace railing has an issue. I ran into Sloane. We discussed anchor bolts.”
“Anchor bolts.”
“Limestone erosion can destabilize a—”
“Sure.” Her smile held steady. Her eyes were already composing the footage reel. “Anchor bolts. Got it.”
Declan called at 9 AM. I knew it was coming how you know a storm is moving in — the pressure shift, the inevitability. I stepped onto the balcony.
“Little brother.” Declan’s tone said he was about to enjoy himself at my expense. “The internet is losing its mind about you.”
“I don’t have internet access. That’s the point of being locked in a televised prison.”
“Yeah, well, there’s a clip of you at the cooking challenge with four million views.
There’s a fan account called ’PieDaddy.’” He was grinning through the phone — I could hear it, the exact quality of amusement only an older brother could produce.
“Twitter is calling it ’the most romantic thing ever broadcast,’ and someone made an edit set to Gracie Abrams. You’d hate it. I’ve watched it eleven times.”
“The internet needs a more proportionate response to baked goods.”
“There’s a tweet that just says ’THE WAY HE WATCHES HER TAKE THE FIRST BITE’ in all caps with forty thousand likes. You’ve gone viral, Rhys. My little brother. Viral for feelings.” The glee in his voice was indecent. “Mom would be so proud. Dad would need a drink.”
The mention of Dad landed quietly, how it always did between us — a small detonation disguised as a joke. We’d learned that trick from him, actually. Disguising everything as something else.
“Rhys.” His voice dropped to a lower register — the one he used for serious things, the frequency that meant the teasing was over. “What’s going on with you and this woman?”
“Nothing.”
“You made her grandmother’s apple pie from memory.”
“I have a good memory. It’s not a character flaw.”
“It is when you use it to bake pies for women you claim not to care about.” A pause. “I talked to Mason.”
My spine straightened. “Mason called you?”
“We’re Instagram friends, apparently. He DMed me.
Said he was ’concerned about my emotional wellbeing,’ which is hilarious from a guy who cried during a pizza commercial last week.
” Declan paused. “He said you came back from the garden looking like someone had taken you apart and reassembled you wrong.”
“Mason has a flair for the dramatic.”
“Mason has eyes, Rhys.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You’re doing the thing.”
“I don’t have a thing.”
“You’ve had it since you were eight years old and Dad told you that crying was for women and you decided the safest move was never feeling anything again.
” His voice was quiet now — gentle-brutal, the honesty only Declan could deploy without it feeling like an attack.
“You get mean when you’re scared. You’ve been mean to her since day one. You are terrified.”
The word landed like a controlled demolition — an impact that doesn’t just cause damage but reveals what was already rotting underneath.
I thought about the first night: she’d stepped into the light in that crown and her eyes had found mine across a room full of men performing for her, and a tension behind my ribs had said oh no with the certainty of an engineer spotting a flaw before the tests come back.
“I’m not mean.” I pressed my palm against the balcony railing until the cold iron bit. “I’m careful.”
“You’re mean, little brother. And that you can’t tell the difference is exactly why I signed you up for this show.”
He said “Love you, asshole” and hung up — delivering emotional damage with the efficiency of billable hours.
I stood on the balcony for a long time after that, gripping the railing, looking down at the garden.
Our bench. The jasmine. The spot where she’d tipped her head back while I held her feet and neither of us said what it meant.
Declan was right. I was scared — of what I became near her, of the voice that roughened and the discipline that failed in ways I couldn’t reverse.
Not scared she could see it. Scared that wanting her was a force that changed the whole design.
Mason cornered me in the kitchen at noon, because Mason had the subtlety of a golden retriever who’d learned to open doors.
“Hey.” He slid into the chair across from me with a protein bar and a smoothie the color of radioactive waste. “You look like shit.”
“Thank you.”
“No, seriously. You haven’t slept, you’ve been staring at your hands for ten minutes like they personally betrayed you, and you just stirred your coffee with the wrong end of a fork.” He sipped his neon smoothie. “She’s different, huh?”
I didn’t answer. Mason studied me with an expression sharper than his sunshine-and-chaos persona typically allowed, and I was reminded that the man everyone dismissed as comic relief saw more than he let on.
You could hide a lot behind a smile that bright.
I would know — I’d been hiding behind a scowl for thirty years, and the principle was identical.
“You don’t have to talk about it,” he said, his voice losing its bounce for a quieter register. “But how you looked at her yesterday, during the pie? I’ve never seen anyone look at another person like that. And I’ve been on three dating shows.”
“That’s a concerning number of dating shows, Mason.”
“My therapist agrees. She has a whole folder. It’s labeled ’Why.’” He grinned — gentler than his megawatt version. “Just… don’t screw it up, okay? She deserves someone who sees her.”
“I’m not pretending.”
The words came out raw, completely at odds with the sardonic persona I’d been running since day one. Mason’s eyebrows rose — not surprise, but satisfaction. A trap, sprung.
“Yeah,” he said, gathering his smoothie. “That’s what I thought.”
The rest of the afternoon, the shift was palpable.
Julian studied me during lunch with the cool assessment of a man recalculating his odds.
Derek’s remarks had acquired a new edge — sharper, more pointed, aimed at the space between me and Sloane with precise, controlled pressure.
“She seems… distracted today,” he’d said at lunch, smiling at me over his water glass.
“I wonder why.” The threat wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be.
The announcement came at 3 PM. Tessa stood in the living room with a tablet and a smile that said she was about to enjoy herself, and I understood — with grim certainty — that whatever came next would test limits I’d spent the past twenty-four hours discovering I had.
“Tomorrow’s challenge is called The Patience Test.” A warning shot. “You’ll stand in front of Sloane, one at a time. She will test your composure. Your self-control. Your ability to remain… still.”
“Do not move. Do not react. Do not touch.”
Julian’s face arranged itself into professional confidence. Derek’s smile sharpened. Mason said “Oh, we’re all gonna die” with cheerful resignation.
I looked at my hands. These hands had traced the bones of her ankle eighteen hours ago, had memorized the curve where tendon met skin, had shaken afterward in the dark of my room while I held them under cold water and tried to reset them to a version of themselves that hadn’t touched her.
The cold water hadn’t worked. Nothing was going to work.
These hands had her in them now — in the muscle memory, in the nerve pathways, in whatever part of the body stores the knowledge that you’ve touched someone and you’d do it again in a heartbeat and the heartbeat is the problem.
Mason leaned over. Casual. Offhand. “You good?”
“Fine.”
“Cool, cool.” He unwrapped his protein bar with the slow, focused attention of a man building to a point. “So — and I’m just asking out of friendly concern here — she’s going to destroy you tomorrow, isn’t she?”
I didn’t answer.
Mason nodded. Took a bite. “That’s what I thought.”