Chapter 21
TWENTY-ONE
Isobel
The library found us by accident.
Or Bram found it. After the kitchen, after the holding, after Tuck pressed a kiss to my temple and muttered something about food, after Cillian squeezed my shoulder once and drifted off toward his tablet.
Cillian didn’t need to be told that what came next wasn’t for an audience.
He just went. And Bram pulled back far enough to look at me, his gray-green eyes still wet, his hands still shaking where they held my waist.
“I need…” He stopped. Swallowed. “Can we…”
He couldn’t finish the sentence. But his gaze slid sideways, toward the hallway, toward the small room at the back of my house I’d turned into a reading space years ago.
Bookshelves floor to ceiling. A deep leather sofa.
A lamp that threw warm amber light. The quietest room in a house built for quiet.
I took his hand and led him there.
The door clicked shut behind us, and everything on the other side of it went away. Tuck’s footsteps in the kitchen. The hum of Cillian’s gear. The legal packet on the counter. The people who had heard my secret. All of it gone behind wood and plaster and a wall of books.
Bram stood in the middle of the room like he’d never seen it. His gaze moved across the shelves, reading the spines, clocking the order I’d put them in, the worn patches on the leather where I’d spent a thousand evenings curled up with scripts. His hand stayed in mine. He was still shaking.
“I’ve been here before,” he said. His voice came out rough. Stripped of its usual gloss, still grainy with everything he’d confessed in the kitchen. “The script review. Third act transitions.”
“You sat in that chair.” I waved my free hand at the armchair by the window. “I made tea.”
“You made tea.” Something moved across his face. Not quite a smile. The memory of sitting in this room with four feet of professional distance between us, calling everything he felt practical. “I sat in here with you, and I went home and couldn’t sleep.”
“I know.”
His eyes came to mine. “You knew?”
“I knew you weren’t sleeping.” My voice did the thing it had only just learned to do, the low warm register I’d spent years refusing to let out in front of anyone. “Cillian mentioned it. The dark circles during pre-production.”
“Cillian.” A breath that might have been a laugh in some other life. “Of course Cillian noticed.”
The quiet that came after wasn’t empty. It was two people standing in a room that smelled of old paper and chamomile and the sharp thread of peppercorn that Bram’s scent was working into every surface.
His biology was claiming the space without asking him.
Marking it. Making it ours instead of just mine.
He was looking at me.
Not the assessment I’d gotten used to over the years of working together, the once-over that took in posture and energy and readiness like numbers to be tuned.
This was something else. This was a man who’d been listening to me in the dark for years, seeing my face for the first time without the professional frame that had kept everything safe.
His free hand lifted. Slowly. The way someone reaches for something they expect to vanish.
His fingers found the frame of my glasses.
“May I?”
I nodded.
He drew them off my face the same way he uncapped his fountain pen, slow and exact, like the object mattered.
He folded them one-handed and set them on the nearest shelf without looking, his attention already back on what was underneath.
My face, bare. Smaller without the frames.
The features fans had argued about for a decade as they tried to imagine what the person behind the voice looked like.
The pale skin. The freckles scattered across my nose that I’d never told a single person about.
The green of my eyes, different without glass between them and the world. Three small things I’d kept.
“There you are,” he said.
I barely heard it. A breath with a shape. His thumb mapped the arch of my cheekbone, then from the corner of my eye to the edge of my jaw, like he was learning a route he meant to come back to.
I held still. Not from fear. From the strangeness of being studied by someone whose attention was the sharpest thing about him.
The pad of his thumb was warm. A little rough, which I hadn’t expected from a man who mostly worked with pens and paper.
But the callus was real, worn in by years of writing, and the drag of it against my cheek lit up the nerves underneath.
“I need to tell you something,” he said.
“You told me everything in the kitchen.”
“Not everything.” His hand moved. Found the mechanical pencil still stuck in my hair, the blue one I’d shoved in before coming downstairs, and pulled it free with the same care.
My hair fell in stages, the bun coming loose into auburn waves past my shoulders.
He watched it happen with a look I couldn’t quite read.
“In the hotel room,” he said, setting the pencil next to my glasses. “Those hours. I tried to think my way through this. Through what I feel. Through how to hold it without building something around it that would suffocate us both.”
His fingers slid into my hair. Slow. Tracking each strand on its own, like he was reading script pages, one line at a time, nothing skipped, nothing assumed.
“I failed,” he said. “I couldn’t think my way through it. There’s no framework. There’s nothing in my whole life that prepared me for wanting something with the…” He exhaled. His hand went still at the nape of my neck. “With how completely I want you.”
The peppercorn flared, hot and wide open, broadcasting something he’d never have let loose in a production meeting, in the penthouse, anywhere the mask was still on.
I stepped closer. Into the scent. Into the heat coming off him through the wrinkled shirt like something he could barely keep behind his ribs. My palms found his chest, flat, the way I’d anchored myself to Tuck this morning, and under the cotton his heart was slamming.
“Then don’t think,” I said. “For once. Just this once.”
His breath stuttered. The hand in my hair tightened. Not pulling, gripping. His body wanted to move. His mind was still arguing terms.
“I don’t know how,” he whispered. The confession cost him. I could see it in the clench of his jaw, the brightness in his eyes that was close to spilling. “I have never once in my life stopped thinking. There’s no off switch. I don’t know how to…”
I went up on my toes. Pressed my mouth to the corner of his jaw. Just contact, for now. Lips against skin, warm and unhurried, set down with the same care he’d used taking off my glasses. I felt the muscle flex underneath. Felt his breath catch and let go in a rhythm he was no longer running.
“Then think slowly,” I said against his skin. The low register hummed where my lips touched, and I felt the shiver travel through him, chest and shoulders and down his spine. “Think about every single thing you feel. One piece at a time. As slow as you need.”
A sound came out of him. Low and wrecked, dragged up from somewhere under the baritone.
His other hand found my waist, joined the first, his fingers spreading over my shirt, learning the shape of what was under it.
The curve of my ribs. The narrow part at my waist. The warmth of skin through cotton.
He was mapping me. The way he mapped a story, a recording schedule, a character’s arc, the whole beat structure of a twenty-four-hour broadcast. Careful.
Complete. Every variable noted before he moved to the next.
Except this time the variables were the dip of my waist and the catch in my breath and the scent coming off my skin, steamed milk and honey, going warmer wherever his hands landed.
“Three years.” His mouth dropped into my hair, voice muffled in the strands, closer than skin. “I fell asleep to you for three years. Your voice was the only thing that made the silence bearable. And I told myself…”
He pulled back. Looked at me. The gray-green had gone dark, pupils blown, and the distance was gone, had been gone since the kitchen.
What was left was raw and overwhelmed. A man who’d spent a lifetime treating feeling like static, finding out in this room full of books that it was the only thing worth tuning to.
“I told myself it was the craft I admired,” he said.
“The technique. The exactness of your phrasing, the control, the…” He shook his head.
The silver-streaked hair fell across his forehead, loose, unfixed.
“It was never the craft. It was you. The person under every performance. The warmth that no amount of technique explains. I was in love with you before I ever knew there was a lie in the way.”
My chest went tight.
I took his hand out of my hair. Drew it down. Pressed it flat over my breastbone, above my heart and my pulse said everything I couldn’t put into words.
“Feel that,” I said.
His palm pressed in. His eyes shut. The lashes were dark against his cheeks. I’d never noticed that before, never been close enough to see how his whole face softened when his eyes were closed and the watchfulness dropped off it.
“Your heart,” he said.
“Beating for you. Since the penthouse. Since the honey jar. Since you read my own words back to me and made me forget how to breathe.”
His jaw clenched. The hand over my heart curled. Not a fist, but close. Like he was trying to catch the heartbeat instead of just feeling it.
“I was so careful,” he said. “So careful not to want this.”
“I know. I was careful too.”
His eyes opened. The brightness had won.
A single tear tracked down the sharp plane of his cheek and caught the lamplight.
He didn’t wipe it. Didn’t seem to know it was there.
His attention was fixed on me, all of it, my face, my eyes, my mouth shaping words in the voice he’d been falling asleep to for years.