Chapter 4
The first bottle went down easy, curled up on opposite ends of the couch with the fire going and the storm doing its worst against the windows, the kind of easy that came from two people who’d decided, without exactly saying so, to stop pretending this was an inconvenience and start treating it like an occasion.
“Okay,” Dani said, refilling both their glasses without asking, which Alex noted and did not object to. “Rules. If we’re doing this, we’re doing it right. No phones, no pretending we have somewhere better to be.”
“There’s nowhere better to be. There’s a blizzard.”
“Details.” Dani settled back against the arm of the couch, glass balanced on her knee. “Tell me something true. Something you wouldn’t tell a stranger.”
“You are a stranger.”
“I’m aware. That’s the point.” Dani’s smile went a little softer at the edges, less performance than the version Alex had gotten all day. “Strangers are easy to be honest with. No history to protect.”
Alex turned her glass slowly, watching the wine catch the firelight, and found, somewhat to her own surprise, that she wanted to answer.
“My wife left me for a woman she met on a business trip,” she said, and the words came out steadier than she expected, worn smooth by however many times she’d said some version of them to herself in the dark.
“Three years ago. Packed up, moved to Chicago, married her within the year. I found out about the affair from a mutual friend who assumed I already knew.”
Dani didn’t flinch, didn’t do the thing people usually did, the wince, the too-quick sympathy. She just watched Alex with a kind of steady attention that felt, somehow, more respectful than pity would have.
“That’s a lot worse than ‘we grew apart,’” Dani said finally.
“It really is.” Alex took a drink, let the second bottle’s opening feel inevitable rather than decided. “I used to think I was good at reading people. Good at knowing what someone actually wanted, even when they said something different. Turns out I read her completely wrong for about six years.”
“Or she got good at hiding it. That’s not the same as you being bad at seeing.”
Alex looked at her properly then, surprised by how much that landed, how it rearranged something she’d been carrying as a verdict on herself for three years and turned it, briefly, into something else entirely.
“Your turn,” she said, before she could sit with that too long. “Something true.”
Dani was quiet for a moment, turning her own glass, and when she spoke her voice had lost some of its easy performance too.
“I’ve had an apartment exactly once in the last six years.
Eight months, right after college, with a girlfriend who wanted the whole thing, the lease, the joint furniture, the five-year plan.
” She said it lightly, but there was something underneath it Alex recognized, the careful lightness of someone handling something sharp.
“I left before she could. Told myself it was because the relationship wasn’t right, and maybe it wasn’t, but mostly I think I just panicked the second it started looking permanent. ”
“And the job.”
“The job’s perfect for someone who panics at permanent.” Dani smiled, but it didn’t fully reach her eyes this time. “New house every few weeks. Someone else’s life to step into and out of. Nothing to lose because nothing’s really mine to begin with.”
“That sounds lonely.”
“It sounds free,” Dani said, too quickly, and then, quieter, more honest, “Sometimes it’s both. Depends on the week.”
The fire popped, and outside the wind threw another gust of snow against the glass, and Alex found herself studying Dani in the low light, the loose bun coming undone at the edges, the firelight catching gold in her hair, the guardedness under all that unbothered ease that Alex recognized because she wore a version of it herself, just in a different shape.
“For what it’s worth,” Alex said, “you’re the one who thought to ask if anything in this house worked without a signal. First hour, before I’d even thought of it myself. I don’t think someone who’s actually running from everything stops to ask questions like that.”
“Maybe I just like being useful.” But Dani was watching her now too, something shifting in the air between them, softer and more dangerous than the banter they’d been trading all day.
“Maybe,” Alex agreed, and didn’t look away.
Neither of them reached for the wine again. The second bottle sat forgotten on the coffee table, half empty, condensation gone, while the space between them on the couch seemed to shrink without either of them technically moving.
“This is a bad idea,” Dani said, not moving away.
“Which part.”
“I don’t know yet.” Dani’s eyes dropped, briefly, to Alex’s mouth, and back up. “Ask me again in the morning.”
Alex should have laughed that off. Should have made a joke, refilled her glass, put a safe six inches of couch cushion back between them and called it a night. Instead she found herself leaning in, slow enough that either of them could have stopped it, and neither of them did.
The kiss was soft at first, careful, both of them testing whether this was real or just the wine talking, and then it wasn’t careful at all.
Dani’s hand found the back of Alex’s neck, and Alex heard herself make a small, helpless sound against her mouth, and for one long, unguarded moment there was nothing else in the world but firelight and the taste of wine and the particular relief of being wanted by someone who had absolutely nothing to gain by lying about it.
It was Dani who pulled back first, breathing hard, eyes wide in a way that looked less like regret and more like genuine surprise at herself.
“Okay,” she said, a little unsteady. “Okay, that was—”
“Yeah.” Alex sat back too, heart going too fast, the warmth of the fire suddenly doing nothing at all against the cold rush of her own thoughts catching up to her. “That was the wine.”
“Right. The wine.” Dani nodded, too fast, already reaching for something to do with her hands, straightening a blanket that didn’t need straightening. “Definitely the wine.”
Neither of them said anything else for a long moment.
Outside, the storm kept coming, indifferent to either of them, and the fire burned low, and Alex sat very still and tried to remember exactly when this stopped being about proving she belonged in this house and became something she had absolutely no idea how to walk back.
“I should go to bed,” she said finally.
“Yeah.” Dani was already standing, not quite meeting her eyes. “Me too. Big day. Lot of, um. Wine.”
“Lot of wine,” Alex agreed, and neither of them moved toward the stairs for another few seconds, caught in the particular paralysis of two people who both knew exactly what had just happened and had no idea what to do with it.