Chapter 10 #3
His breathing slowed. Mine followed, syncing to his rhythm without permission — and intimate, the same reflex that makes your heartbeat match a song.
I felt the shift when his consciousness softened, the imperceptible change in the weight of his breathing, and I stayed awake a few minutes longer, listening to him in the dark, counting the seconds between his exhales — pointlessly, devotedly, because the counting itself was the point.
I woke up in a place I’d never been.
Specifically: the curve of Rhys’s body, which had reorganized itself during the night with a single-minded purpose, and that purpose was apparently holding Sloane.
His arm was heavy across my waist, his legs curled behind mine, his face in my hair — actually in it, nose against the back of my head, breathing me in with the slow rhythm of hours spent holding me without waking.
As if his body had decided independently of his brain that this was where it belonged.
His heartbeat pulsed through the silk, a steady percussion against my shoulder blade, and the heat of him was extraordinary — a closed system, self-contained and wildly efficient.
I was wrapped in him like a burrito in a thermal blanket.
I didn’t move.
This was a choice I made with full awareness and zero regret.
Thirty seconds. I was giving myself thirty seconds of this — thirty seconds where I was just a woman lying in the arms of a man who’d held her in his sleep like she was something he’d been reaching for his entire life.
I counted. Mississippi one. Mississippi two.
The silk of my pajamas against his forearm.
His exhale stirring the hair at my temple.
The weight of his hand curved over my hip, not gripping, just resting — like he’d found something in the dark and was keeping it safe.
His arm tightened. A slight contraction, pulling me closer by a centimeter, and I felt the exact moment he crossed from sleep to waking — the slight catch in his breath, the microsecond of tension through his whole body as his brain came online and registered the data.
The full-body press of her. The silk under his forearm.
That their sleeping selves had negotiated a new arrangement and filed the paperwork while the conscious versions slept.
Neither of us spoke. Neither of us moved.
The thirty seconds became sixty, became ninety, became a stretch of time I stopped measuring because measuring it would mean acknowledging it had to end.
An ache had started at the center of my ribs and was radiating outward, terrifying and completely incompatible with the person I’d spent twelve years becoming.
He exhaled slowly. His thumb moved — a single stroke, one tiny arc against the silk over my hip, so small it could have been involuntary except that nothing about Rhys was involuntary, and that single stroke was the loudest thing I’d ever heard.
Then he let go.
Carefully. Gently. Extracting his arm, pulling his body back, restoring the three feet of no-man’s-land with the patient care of a man undoing something he hadn’t meant to build.
I felt the absence immediately — the room went cooler, the mattress shifted, and between one breath and the next I was alone on my side of the bed with the imprint of him fading against my back — a handprint on glass.
“Morning,” he said. His voice was rough. Rougher than I’d ever heard it, scraped raw by whatever his sleeping self had felt while holding me.
“Morning.” I didn’t turn around. If I turned around and looked at his face right now — at whatever unguarded, early-morning, sleep-stripped version of Rhys existed before he’d had the chance to reassemble — I was going to do something unrecoverable on camera.
The test ended at noon, and I lasted until twelve-fifteen before Derek cornered me.
I was walking toward the lounge, still carrying the phantom weight of Rhys’s arm across my ribs — a belt buckle I’d forgotten to remove — when Derek materialized at the junction of the east and north corridors with a smile and a calculated step into my path that looked casual and felt — a chess move.
“There she is.” His voice had that honeyed, conspiratorial quality he deployed when he wanted you off-balance — intimate without earning it.
His hand landed on my upper arm before I’d registered he was near, and everything about it was technically fine — light pressure, friendly placement, a touch you’d see at a networking event and never think twice about.
Except the timing was wrong and the pressure stayed a beat too long.
A touch that said I can reach you whenever I want dressed up as hey, friend. “How was your night?”
“It was fine.” I smiled. Standard. Professional. The voice I used when a date was going badly and I was calculating the distance to the nearest exit. “Pretty uneventful.”
“Uneventful. With Callahan?” His hand was still on my arm.
He hadn’t removed it, and the weight of it was measured with a care that made my skin crawl — light enough to seem friendly, firm enough that pulling away would require a visible, obvious motion that would look, on camera, like an overreaction.
He’d built this moment with deniability on every surface and intent underneath. “I find that hard to believe.”
“Pretty uneventful,” I repeated. “Excuse me, I should—”
“Hold on.” His grip adjusted — a micro-correction, a slight tightening that brought his body half a step closer. The physical equivalent of hearing the word no and pretending you’d heard maybe. “I wanted to talk to you about something. About us. About where I stand.”
“Derek, this isn’t—”
“When is the time, Sloane?” His voice dropped. Intimate. Conspiratorial. Like they were sharing a secret instead of him refusing to let go of my arm in a corridor with cameras twenty feet away. “I’ve been patient. I’ve been respectful. I’ve waited while you—”
“She said excuse me.”
Rhys’s voice came from behind me, and the temperature in the hallway dropped.
Not a shout. Not raised. The opposite — it had gone lower, quieter, into a register I’d never heard from him before, flat and calm, a man whose conclusion was already reached and who had no interest in discussing alternatives.
Three syllables delivered with a stillness that makes you understand why people describe silence as dangerous.
Derek’s hand fell from my arm. Not because Rhys had touched him — he hadn’t.
He was just there. Six-two of absolute certainty planted between me and the corridor, so that his presence was the statement, far enough to deny Derek an inch of ammunition.
Feet planted. Shoulders squared. Hands at his sides in a way that was technically relaxed and fundamentally not.
Derek’s smile held, but his eyes recalculated — a quick, sharp computation behind the charm, the look of a man recategorizing an obstacle. “Just having a conversation, Callahan.” Smooth. Light. The voice of innocence itself and making sure the cameras confirmed it.
“That means the conversation’s done.” Rhys hadn’t raised his voice.
The words landed with the finality of a door closing, and I watched Derek process the fact that there was no angle here — no overreaction to exploit, no jealousy to weaponize, nothing but a man who had heard a woman say excuse me and decided that was the end of it.
Derek held Rhys’s gaze for three seconds.
I counted. The smile on his face didn’t waver, but behind it an adjustment was working — a recalibration, a filing of data for future use, patient, strategic — a long game.
Then he took a step back, smooth and unrushed, and turned down the corridor with the easy stride of mission accomplished.
The hallway went quiet.
Rhys stood beside me, and we watched Derek disappear around the corner with an identical awareness that what had just happened was not a confrontation. It was a first move.
“You okay?” he asked. Low. For me only.
“I’m fine. He was just—” I stopped. Because fine was the word women used to paper over moments like this, to smooth the edges so everyone could move on, and Rhys had no interest in accepting it. “He blocked my path. It was calculated.”
“I know.”
“You don’t have to do that. Intervene.”
He looked at me. Steady, clear, no performance in it, just the plain fact of what he’d done and why.
“I know,” he said. “I choose to.”
I choose to. Three words that landed harder than anything else he’d said in six weeks, including a story about an eight-year-old boy and a dead dog and a father who checked his watch.
Not obligation. Not instinct. Decision, with his eyes open and his options clear.
He chose it how he chose everything — to stay on the show, to sit in a garden at midnight, to hold my foot in the dark and find the ache.
“Thank you,” I said. “For not making it a thing.”
“It shouldn’t need to be a thing.”
“No,” I agreed. “It shouldn’t.”
We stood in the hallway for another few seconds, two people side by side in the aftermath of a small, important thing, sharing a silence that held more information than any dialogue the cameras had captured.
Then he went one way, and I went the other.
I lasted until I reached the Queen’s Suite before I pressed my back against the door and slid to the floor.
My hands were steady. My breathing was even.
Everything visible about Sloane was composed, functional, fine — and I sat on the floor of my private room in silk pajamas that still carried the lived-in scent of being held in his sleep and let myself feel the full, staggering weight of what the last twenty-four hours had done.
His arm across my waist. His hand steady on my hip. The quiet, devastating simplicity of I choose to — a sentence that rewired everything I thought I knew about what it looked like when someone stood beside you because they wanted to be there.
My phone buzzed. Tessa. One word: Okay?
I typed back: We survived the night without touching.
She replied instantly: And?
I stared at the screen. Thought about the morning. The three feet we’d drawn and the gravity that had erased it. His hand on my hip that was louder than anything.
And I don’t think I’m going to survive another one.
Because I knew — with bone-deep certainty, the professional kind that still couldn’t predict my own — that whatever line we’d been approaching since the garden and the Patience Test and a dark room where he asked me to say two words, we were going to cross it.
Soon. Inevitably. With the same force that had pulled us toward the center of that mattress and called it physics when it was actually a force that had no name, because naming it would mean admitting that every wall I’d built since a Tuesday night and a carry-on suitcase had already come down.
The line was going to break. And I was done pretending I wasn’t the one reaching for it.