Chapter 22
Elena
The woman behind the counter, her name tag says Jada, is still smiling, patient, clearly very accustomed to this exact moment.
“I’ve never,” I say to him, quieter. “I genuinely walked in here thinking it was a, I don’t know what I thought it was. A very nice candle shop.”
“A candle shop.”
“The aesthetic is very candle shop.”
He looks at me for a second, and then he actually laughs, which is a different thing from the sounds he makes that are almost laughs, and I feel it somewhere in my chest that I’d rather not identify.
Jada walks us through their new botanical blend with the thoroughness of a sommelier. She talks about terpene profiles, notes of lavender and pine. She uses the word microdose three times and explains it’s perfect for people who want to relax without losing control.
“We’ll take it,” Patrick says.
“We absolutely will not.”
“Think of it as research.”
“Into what?”
“Into relaxation. You seem like someone who could use it.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Maybe I do.”
Jada packages it beautifully. Patrick pays. We walk back out into the April afternoon and he holds the small paper bag like a foreign policy document, with the absolute composure of a man who has just purchased something he finds privately hilarious.
“We’re not using that,” I tell him.
“No,” he agrees.
He asks if I want to go somewhere for dinner or if I want him to cook.
“You cook?”
“Occasionally.”
“You cook.”
“Is that surprising?”
“Everything about today is surprising.”
He takes us back to his house and it hits me all at once: Erick.
He is everywhere. Drawings on the fridge.
A stack of picture books on the coffee table with a T-Rex on top.
A wooden puzzle with six big pieces scattered on the floor that someone has carefully not stepped on.
We’ve been corresponding stories back and forth.
But seeing the evidence of him woven into every corner of Patrick’s life, is different from the polite distance of the office.
“His room is upstairs,” Patrick says, watching me look. “He’s with his grandparents this weekend.”
I nod. I don’t ask more because there are rooms in this man I haven’t been invited into yet and I can feel the edges of them, the places where questions would land wrong.
He cooks the way he does everything, with quiet concentration, without fuss. Scallops and rice. He moves through his kitchen with an ease that tells me he does this regularly, and it smells extraordinary.
I sit on the counter and watch him aware with a clarity I can’t argue with, that I am in serious trouble.
“What’s the recipe?” I ask.
“There isn’t one.”
“You’re just making it up?”
“I’m adding ingredients.” He glances at me. “Butter, garlic, lemon. It’s not complicated.”
“But you don’t measure anything.”
“No.”
“How do you know how much to use?”
He turns the scallops. “I taste it. I adjust. I know when it’s right.”
I watch him move through the kitchen, confident, unhurried, adding things without checking anything.
“You’re very controlled,” he says, not looking at me.
“I’m not controlled. I’m a disaster. You’ve seen my inbox.”
“That’s not the same thing.” He turns the scallops. “You’re chaotic on the surface. Underneath you control everything you let anywhere near you.”
“I don’t know where you’re getting that from.”
“The terms.” He says it simply, still not looking at me.
“That was practical.”
“It was a perimeter. You decided exactly how close I was allowed to get and then you built a fence around it.” He plates the food and turns. “I’m not saying it’s wrong. I’m saying that’s what it was.”
I get off the counter. “You’re describing someone who knows what she wants and is clear about it. That’s not the same as being controlled.”
“You’re right. It’s not.” He brings both plates to the table. “But can you tell me you didn’t choose acting because you know the script. Just as you wouldn’t take the ramble, you want to know your character. You know every beat before it happens.”
I sit down. I am, in this moment, somewhat surprised, but I’m not going to say that. “Not everyone who likes to know what’s coming is damaged.”
“I didn’t say damaged.” He sits across from me and looks at me steadily. “I said controlled.”
“I grew up in foster care. Planning ahead was how you survived.”
“I know.”
“So don’t make it sound like a character flaw.”
“I’m not.” He picks up his fork. “I’m saying it’s who you are.
And I’m saying the reason you’re here, the reason the arrangement works for you, is that you hold all the terms. You can walk away whenever you want.
You know exactly what this is.” A pause.
“You’re not actually letting me in. You’re letting a controlled version of me in. The one that exists inside the fence.”
I stare at him.
“That’s not true,” I say. The words come out before I’ve thought them through, faster than I’d like, which tells me something I’d rather not examine right now.
“Isn’t it?”
“No.” I put my fork down. “You think I spent the last two months letting myself want something I didn’t want to want, hiding an audition I was terrified you’d fire me for, driving myself insane trying to figure out what Wednesday meant to you, because I felt safe?
That wasn’t control. That was the opposite of control. ”
He looks at me for a long moment. Something in his expression shifts.
“Okay,” he says quietly.
“Okay?”
“Okay. You’re right.” He picks up his fork again. “Then prove it.”
“Prove what.”
“That you can let go of it.” He meets my eyes. “The control. Just once. Let something happen between us that you didn’t write the script for.”
“That’s not how people work.”
“It’s how some people work. When they trust someone enough.”
The word hangs there. Trust. I look at him across the table and I think about the audition, about standing in that room and saying Masha’s lines, about how the only time I stop bracing is when I’m playing someone else.
I think about the terms and the fence he just described and the fact that I can’t actually argue with any of it.
“I can trust you,” I say.
He stands in front of me and says, very quietly: “Come with me.”
He takes my hand and walks me to his bedroom.
The walls are dark blue, the bed is huge.
There’s a painting on the wall, a faded beach sunset, all soft colors.
The whole place feels warm, like it’s meant to calm you down.
The rug is one of those antique silk ones, and it’s so soft I can feel it even through my shoes.
He finds a scarf in a drawer in the walk-in closet, long, silk, deep blue. He holds it up and raises an eyebrow, and I understand immediately and every muscle in my body goes tense simultaneously.
My cheeks burn. Heat crawls up my throat and I’m glad he’s not looking at my face right now because whatever is on it would give me completely away.
He’s daring me. I know that. He knows I know that.
The thing is, I want to. I want to find out what’s on the other side of it. I want to stop being careful. I want to be his, just tonight, terms be damned, I wrote them and I can set them aside, and I want him to know it.
“Okay,” I say.
He looks at me, reading whether I mean it.
“Okay,” I say again, steadier. “Let’s run your experiment.”
I let him lead me to the bed.
He ties the scarf slowly, checking twice that it’s not too tight. The dark comes in and my pulse spikes immediately. My hands find the edge of the mattress.
That’s just biology, I tell myself. That’s just the nervous system doing its job. This is fine.
“I’ve got you,” he says. His voice is close and low. “I’ve got you. Breathe.”
I breathe. Not because he told me to. Because it’s a reasonable thing to do.
His hands are on my shoulders, not moving yet, just there, just weight and warmth, and something in my chest stays pulled tight but the very bottom edge of it starts, very slowly, to let go.
“Talk to me,” he says. “Tell me what you’re feeling.”
“Curious,” I say. Which is true. “Also the adrenaline, but that part is interesting too.”
He makes a sound that might be a laugh. “Good.” His hands move to my collar, and I feel his fingers find the first button of my shirt. He doesn’t undo it. He just rests there. “I’m going to take your clothes off. Slowly. You’re going to feel everything. You don’t get to brace for it.”
“That’s not—”
“I know.” His voice is low and close. “That’s the point.”
My hands are gripping the edge of the mattress hard enough to whiten my knuckles.
He undoes the first button.
One. Just one. And then his hands move away entirely, and he does nothing.
I sit in the dark waiting for the next thing and it doesn’t come, and that waiting is its own specific torture, my whole body straining toward the next sensation while my brain tries and fails to predict where it will come from.
His mouth finds my neck. Below my ear, just his lips, no pressure at all, barely contact. I go very still. He stays there, just breathing against my skin, and I feel my pulse in my throat and I feel him feel it too, his lips curving the smallest amount.
“Second button,” he says against my neck, and undoes it. His fingers brush the skin of my sternum as they move away and I exhale sharply.
“Stay,” he says. “I’ve got you.”
He undoes the third button. This time his hands don’t move away. They slide the shirt open, not off, just open, and his palms rest flat against my ribs on either side, warm and still, and I can feel the heat of them through the fabric still on my shoulders.
“You’re fighting it,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Stop.”
“I’m trying.”
“No you’re not. You’re trying to manage it. That’s different.” He tilts my chin up with one finger. I can’t see him. I am entirely dependent on what I can feel and hear and that dependence is the most frightening thing I have ever voluntarily agreed to. “Let the shirt go.”