13. Soleil
THIRTEEN
SOLEIL
I woke to the sound of a knife on a cutting board.
Not the lazy scrape of someone making toast. A rhythm — quick, precise, the blade hitting wood in even intervals. I stretched beneath the dark sheets and blinked at the ceiling.
His apartment was different now. Not dramatically.
Not in ways a stranger would catch. But my rosemary plant sat on the windowsill beside his single thyme.
My book leaned against his lamp on the nightstand.
My burnt sienna scarf hung over the back of the chair where he read case law at midnight.
Small things. Living things. Evidence that something in this space had veered to make room for me.
I padded barefoot down the hallway. The kitchen smelled like garlic and butter and something green — herbs, fresh, sharp enough to cut through the richness.
Nolan stood at the counter with his back to me.
Black shirt, sleeves rolled to his forearms, a dish towel thrown over his shoulder.
Two pans on the stove. A cutting board covered in finely diced shallots.
It was 7:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, and this man was making a meal that belonged on a restaurant plate.
I hopped onto the counter beside the cutting board. The granite was cold under my bare thighs. I reached across and stole a piece of roasted pepper — warm, sweet.
He didn't turn around. "Don't touch the cutting board."
I took another piece.
His hand caught my wrist. His fingers wrapped around it — loose, warm, his thumb pressing against my pulse.
He turned his head. The look he gave me was unhurried, focused, the faintest pull at the corner of his mouth.
That ghost. The one I'd been tracking for weeks.
This morning, he let it live a beat longer than usual.
"You're a thief," he said.
"You're a really good cook." I popped the pepper into my mouth. "Your fault."
He released my wrist and went back to the shallots.
I swung my legs against the cabinet and watched him work — the economy of his movements, the knife rotating in his hand, how he wiped the blade on the towel without breaking rhythm.
He plated without fanfare. Two plates. The dish rack that used to hold one of everything now held two.
After breakfast, I pulled a pencil from my bag.
"Sit for me."
He looked at the pencil. Looked at me. "No."
"I wasn't asking." I grabbed a takeout menu from the stack on his counter — the Thai place, the back was blank — and sat cross-legged on the couch. "Sit. Don't move. Five minutes."
He sat. He didn't like it. His jaw was tight, his posture rigid. The discomfort of a man who controlled every version of himself that left the room and was now being asked to hold still while someone studied the original.
I drew fast. The line of his jaw first. Then the set of his shoulders.
The hands resting on his thighs, fingers slightly curled, the only part of him that didn't look controlled.
His eyes were the hardest. They held things the rest of his face had learned to hide.
I traced the shape of them, the depth beneath the brow, and something came through on the paper that stopped my pencil.
Sadness.
I looked at the sketch. Looked at him. He was watching me with an expression I couldn't catalogue — guarded, yes, but underneath it, something reaching toward the surface.
I didn't mention it. I signed the corner and held it up. "Not bad for a takeout menu."
He studied it for a long moment. "You see too much."
I set the sketch on his coffee table and stood. "Come somewhere with me."
My apartment was fifteen minutes by cab.
I let us in and walked past the kitchen, past the living room, into the room I used as a studio.
It was small. One window. The afternoon light fell through the glass in a warm rectangle across the hardwood.
Canvases leaned against every wall, face turned away.
I stood in the doorway. My pulse was in my throat.
"These are the ones I don't show," I said. "I've never let anyone in here."
He moved past me. Turned the first canvas. A garden — not mine, my mother's. The rosemary climbing to the windowsill. He looked at it for a long time. Set it down. Turned the next.
He stopped at a figure sitting in an empty room. No face. Just the posture — the curve of the spine, the hands in the lap, the weight of a body holding something too heavy for too long. The light in the painting came from a window that wasn't visible.
He stood in front of it without speaking. I was barely breathing.
"The light source is outside the frame," he said.
"You can't see where it's coming from, but the figure is turned toward it.
She's not reaching for it. She's not moving toward it.
She's just sitting with the knowledge that it's there.
" He traced the air in front of the canvas.
"That's what makes it honest. She's not pretending the room isn't dark. She's choosing to face the window."
My exhale shook. I pressed my fingers to my mouth and held them there until the trembling stopped.
He was standing in the most private part of my life. And he had just told me — in specific, precise, real terms — exactly what I'd been trying to paint.
He turned from the canvas. His eyes found mine.
I kissed him first.
My hands on his face, pulling him down. He caught my waist and I walked him backward toward the bed, pulling his shirt free, my fingers finding warm skin. He lowered me onto the sheets and I pulled him down with me. No urgency. No collision.
His mouth moved from mine to my collarbone, tracing a slow path down while my fingers worked the buttons of his shirt. I pushed the fabric off his shoulders and traced the scar on his left side — old, faded — with my thumb.
He watched my face while I touched it, and the openness in his eyes undid me more than any kiss.
He undressed me slowly. His hands moved down my body with the patience of someone unwrapping something precious, his mouth following — my ribs, the dip of my waist where I shivered.
I held his face.
My eyes stayed open, so did his. We looked at each other while he moved inside me and the looking was the most naked thing I'd ever done — more than the skin, more than the sounds.
His forehead pressed to mine. My fingers in his hair.
His name in my mouth like a sound I'd invented, stretched thin until it was only breath, only heat.
Until it was only the two of us in a room full of paintings I'd never shown anyone and afternoon light that wouldn't last.
We lay tangled in my sheets. His arm across my waist, his thumb moving in absent circles on my hip. The light had shifted — warmer and golden. My head was on his chest. His heartbeat under my ear was slow and steady.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand. Daddy.
"Hi."
"Sol, I had Catherine reach out to the Whitfield Foundation! They have a new arts funding initiative, and I thought it would be perfect for the gallery. She's arranged an introduction for next week."
My hand stilled on Nolan's chest. An introduction arranged without asking. A door opened I hadn't requested.
"I appreciate that, Daddy. But I've got it. I'm handling the funding myself."
A pause. "Of course you are. I just thought — "
"I know. And thank you. But I've got it."
"Alright, sweetheart."
I hung up. A small clearing. A tiny space I'd made for myself. The air inside it was mine.
I dialed Rhys. He picked up on the fourth ring.
"Little one." His voice was loose. Not relaxed — unmoored. The consonants sliding into each other.
"Hey. I've been trying to reach you."
"I know." Ice against glass. A swallow. "Things have been busy."
"You don't sound busy. You sound like you've been drinking since noon."
A laugh. Wrong. Hollow, a performance that didn't reach past his teeth. "Some things you can't take back, Sol. That's all. Some things just stay with you."
The words sat between us, too heavy for the phone line. I wanted to push, but the warmth of the afternoon pulled me back — Nolan's arm, the sheets, the light.
"Call me tomorrow," I said. "Sober."
"Sure, little one." He hung up.
I looked at the phone for a long moment. Filed it.
Nolan was watching me from the bed. His arm still extended across the pillow where my head had been.
"Rhys?" he asked.
"Drinking again." I set the phone down and climbed back in. His arm closed around me. "We have dinner at Declan's tonight."
"A few more hours of this first."
I smiled against his skin.
Declan had called that morning while Nolan was cooking.
"Bring Soleil. Thea's making lamb. Julian's bringing wine he stole from a client's dinner.
" A pause. "It's important." He didn't say why.
Everyone knew Declan as someone who never gave reasons.
He just expected people to show up when he asked, and they did, because when Declan Hale told you something was important, you believed him.
We arrived at the brownstone at 8:00 p.m. Thea opened the door in a cream sweater with Lena on her hip. The baby's fist wrapped around a strand of her dark curls. The house smelled like rosemary and slow-cooked lamb and the red wine Julian had already opened.
"She won't let go," Thea said, gesturing at Lena's grip. "I've been cooking one-handed for an hour."
I reached for the baby. Lena studied me with enormous blue eyes, decided I was acceptable, and released her mother's hair to grab mine instead.
Thea disappeared into the kitchen. I carried Lena into the living room where Julian was already pouring.
His sleeves rolled, his tie gone, a cracker in one hand and a wine glass in the other.
"Soleil." He kissed my cheek. "You look radiant. Nolan, you look like Nolan. Consistent, if nothing else."
Nolan took the wine Julian offered without responding. Julian grinned at me and went back to his crackers.