6. Sayer
SAYER
She’d been gone for forty minutes.
I was sitting on the couch where we’d been together an hour ago, elbows on my knees, staring at the city through the windows. The food containers were still on the table. Her pen was on the floor next to the couch, half under the frame. I hadn’t picked it up.
I didn’t call her. Didn’t text. I’d watched her step into the elevator with her wet hair and her sharp jaw and her eyes already rebuilding every wall I’d spent the last six hours taking down, and I’d let her go.
Because I recognized the look.
I’d worn that look for thirty-five years. The set jaw, the squared shoulders, the stubborn streak that says I don’t need anything from anyone.
I knew what it felt like to build your whole life around self-sufficiency and then have someone reach past it like it wasn’t there.
It was terrifying. Not because the other person was wrong, but because they were right, and being right meant everything you’d built to protect yourself was just a more complicated version of being alone.
She’d figure it out or she wouldn’t. I couldn’t chase her into it.
If she came back, it had to be because she chose it.
Not because I was convincing. Not because I showed up at her door with some speech about how I could see the real her underneath the surface.
She’d gut a man who tried that, and she’d be right to.
So I sat on the couch and waited. Not patiently. I wasn’t patient. I was just still, the way I’d learned to be still when everything in me wanted to move. Feet on the floor, hands on my knees, jaw tight.
The pen on the floor was black. Fine tip. The cap was three feet away, near the table leg. She’d been chewing on it all night, pulling it from her teeth to make a point and then putting it back when she was done talking. I’d watched her do it for three hours before I’d touched her.
I should’ve told her.
Not the sex. Before that, during the conversation about kitchens and double shifts and rice in March.
I should’ve told her that when she’d looked at me and said, Ten, maybe younger, something in me had come apart that I didn’t know how to reassemble.
That nobody had ever sat on my couch and told me the truth without flinching.
That I’d built Forge because nobody in my life had ever expected anything from me, and that was a different wound than hers, but it ended up in the same place.
Both of us, alone in rooms we’d designed to prove we didn’t need anyone.
I should’ve told her this wasn’t one night.
That I didn’t request her on the deal because she was smart.
I requested her because she was the first person who’d looked at me and seen something other than the money or the title or the arms or the ink.
She’d seen the number I got wrong. She’d seen the ordinary man behind the extraordinary outcome. And she hadn’t looked away.
My phone lit up on the desk.
Three words. Still at Forge?
My heart rate jumped into double-time. I’m here.
I stood up. Walked to the door. Opened it and waited in the hallway. The elevator was audible from the top floor at this hour, the building empty enough to hear the mechanical hum through the walls.
The doors opened. She stepped out. Blazer back on, hair still damp, keys in her hand like she’d walked out of her apartment still holding them.
Her face was open in a way I’d never seen. Unguarded. She’d stripped everything down and come back without it.
She stopped three feet from me. “I’m not good at this. Any of it. Needing someone. Being taken care of. I don’t know how to do it without feeling like I’m losing something.”
I leaned against the doorframe. Kept my arms at my sides. Open.
“You’re not losing anything.”
“I know.” Her voice cracked. “That’s what scares me.”
I looked at her. Copper hair, green eyes, the sharpest woman I’d ever met standing in my hallway at midnight telling me she was afraid. Not of me. Of how much she wanted to stay.
I reached out and took her hand. Her fingers were cold. She let me wrap them in mine.
“I should’ve told you before you left,” I said. “This isn’t one night for me.”
Her breath caught. “It wasn’t one night for me either. That’s why I ran.”
I pulled her through the door. She came.
Not because I convinced her. Not because I chased her. Because she’d stood in her own kitchen and chosen to come back. Because she’d done the bravest thing she’d ever done.
She’d let someone in.
I closed the door behind her and didn’t let go of her hand.