Impulse Control (Elusive: Love in Focus #1)

Chapter 1

Chapter

One

RACHEL

The first night in my Paris apartment smelled like garlic, cheap red wine, and the very specific kind of fear you get when something you’ve wanted forever finally shows up and asks you what you’re going to do with it.

I kept thinking: This is it. This is the beginning.

And also: Oh God, I’m not ready.

Frankie was barefoot in my kitchen like she owned the place.

Which, technically, she did. She’d kicked off her boots by the door, hair twisted up with a pencil because she couldn’t find a hair tie—classic—sleeves rolled, already halfway into reorganizing my drawers like muscle memory had taken over.

“You put the knives in the wrong spot,” she said, peering into a drawer.

“It’s my wrong spot,” I said, pouring wine into two mismatched glasses we’d found at a flea market that morning. One had a crack in it. It gave it character and felt honest.

“You’ll thank me later.” She grinned.

That was kind of our whole relationship in one sentence.

The apartment itself still felt like a borrowed coat.

Exposed beams. Tall windows that let in the kind of Paris light everyone lies about—soft, gray, cinematic.

Downstairs were three empty studio spaces and two other apartments that Frankie labeled income potential that I kept calling terrifying.

One of them was already earmarked in my head for a darkroom.

A real one. Not the half-assed bathroom setup I’d been hacking together since I discovered I loved taking pictures.

I leaned against the counter and watched her cook like it was a private performance.

Frankie moved the way she always had when she was in her element—fast, instinctive, a little chaotic but somehow landing on her feet every time. She chopped without measuring. Tasted straight from the spoon. Swore at the stove like it had personally offended her.

She looked exactly like she had the night we stayed up until three a.m. senior year, mapping out escape plans from a town that never quite fit either of us.

Like she had the first time I’d dragged her to an open mic and dared her not to hide in the back row.

Like she had when she admitted she was in love with four guys and they were going to make it work.

Like she had when she’d told me, fiercely and without hesitation, that I deserved more than being someone’s secret.

Efficient. Certain. Like she knew exactly what she needed to do—even when she didn’t.

It was infuriating.

It was adorable.

She was adorable.

And she made everything better.

I had loved her once in a way that had nothing to do with friendship. In a way that had kept me up at night, that had convinced me staying near her might someday magically transform us into a possibility.

It never had.

She had never looked at me like that.

And somehow that had made loving her as my best friend both easier and harder.

Being her person—her constant—had become the thing I held onto instead. The thing that felt permanent when everything else shifted.

I loved her for that so damn much.

I hated myself for loving her for that.

I’d made peace with it years ago.

Mostly.

“You’re quiet,” she said without looking up. She was chopping onions, eyes watering, pretending not to notice.

“I’m trying to remember this,” I said. “So I don’t romanticize it later and get it wrong.”

“You romanticize everything.” She laughed. “Didn’t you once write a paragraph about a laundromat?”

“It was a good laundromat,” I said on a snort. “Very moody.”

We clinked glasses. The wine was too acidic. I drank it anyway.

Thirty-six hours. That’s what we had left. Frankie would fly back to the States, back to New York, back to her boys and her college classes and her impossibly full life.

I would stay. Alone. On purpose.

That part still surprised me when I said it in my head.

I’d told everyone this move was about school. Which was true. Mostly. Paris for photography made sense in a way Texas never had and New York no longer did.

Faces were my thing. Always had been.

Not landscapes. Not architecture. Not the grand sweep of a skyline.

Faces. The small, flickering betrayals. The way someone’s mouth tightened before they lied.

The way their eyes softened when they forgot they were being watched.

I liked the quiet honesty of them. The moment right before a performance reassembled itself.

Fashion and advertising were just the cleanest excuse I’d found to get close enough to look.

A camera made staring legitimate. A campaign made obsession marketable. No one questioned why I lingered over cheekbones or the slope of a collarbone or the way someone’s expression shifted when they thought no one important was paying attention.

It was never about the clothes.

It was about closeness.

It was about wanting to understand people without having to risk being understood back.

But I was also running. From my family’s expectations, from the version of myself that existed too comfortably in other people’s narratives.

From Dominic Walsh, who wanted a future I couldn’t see myself in without feeling like I was holding my breath underwater.

Even as he raised his head in my memories, I shoved his ass back out.

Not now.

Not—

Just not now.

Yes, I was running from all of that, but also from Frankie herself.

She knew about the “scholarship.” Or rather, she knew that I knew it was her. The whole myth was thin and polite and mutually agreed upon, like not naming the thing because naming it might make it heavier. I needed to believe I’d earned this. She needed me to take it without drowning in gratitude.

Independence was such a strange thing. You can want it desperately and still feel guilty when someone hands it to you wrapped in a bow.

“You don’t have to keep thanking me,” Frankie said suddenly, like she’d read my mind. She slid pasta into a pan, steam rising. “I want to do this. I want you here. Doing this.”

“I know,” I said. “I just—”

“Rach.” She finally looked at me then. Soft, serious. Those green eyes were so damn sober. I swore there was even a gleam of tears hinted in them. “Let me be good at this.”

I could almost hear the words she didn’t say. Let me let you go.

No way in hell could I tell her no.

So I did. I let her.

We ate standing up because I hadn’t bought a table yet. The pasta was too salty. The bread was perfect. The wine went down smooth and fast. We talked about everything except the goodbye. That was what she asked for, and honestly, it was what I needed. We danced around it like it might bite.

She told me the new songs she and Bubba were working on.

I told her about the girl I saw smoking on a fire escape and that looked like she belonged in a Godard film.

She brought up Jake’s flying lessons and I snorted.

Putting that hot head in the cockpit of a plane didn’t seem like the best idea.

Frankie disagreed. Because of course she did. She was so crazy about them.

When she asked if I was nervous about school, I said no and meant yes.

After we finished eating, we opened a second bottle of wine and drifted through the apartment like we were touring it for the first time instead of living in it. Frankie narrated ideas for art on the walls, where a bigger table could go, how we’d host people once we both “settled.”

Outside of the massive sofa in the living room—the one we bought our first day here, dizzy on ambition and too much espresso—and the bedroom furniture Frankie insisted on because “you aren’t going to sleep on a mattress on the floor,” the place was still very much a work in progress.

I probably should have pushed back on the bedroom set. Should have insisted on something temporary. Practical. Neutral.

But for a little while, I let myself pretend.

Pretend “we” were building something permanent.

Pretend I wasn’t still half in love with her in the quiet, leftover way that lingers after hope expires.

Pretend this was a shared beginning instead of a midpoint before one of us went home.

I let the furniture feel like we’d established a base.

I let the wine blur the lines between best friends and something softer.

I let the future look and feel simple.

“Office in here?” She studied the bedroom nearest the living room space. It was a little too small for anything more than a desk and some shelves.

“Maybe,” I said. “Need to check the light in here—and the other rooms, really.” I’d picked out the master suite I wanted. It had good windows and views, but I liked the way the morning sun had slanted across the floors. So yeah, that was mine.

“Oh,” Frankie murmured with a nod. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

I laughed, and downed my wine after giving her back a comforting rub. “It’s okay, sometimes it’s better to bat the ideas out aloud. Don’t always know what I’m thinking until I do.”

At some point, we wandered out of the apartment and down the curving staircase to the next floor. There was an empty studio space on one side, and another apartment on the other. The building had that old converted chateau vibe. History poured into its walls.

It wasn’t difficult to imagine all the stories it could tell. The stories I could find while I was here. Frankie shook the big keychain she held with the ancient looking keys on it. The doors had all been converted, but the keychain was a gift that made me laugh.

We unlocked the door then took a good long look at the empty studio space while finishing our glasses of wine.

She did a slow twirl. “Can you imagine it?” She called, her voice echoing off the empty walls.

“Prints everywhere. Chemicals. Red light. Photography set ups. Space to store props. You in your element.”

Oh, I could see it. That was the problem. I could see it too clearly. Me alone with my work. Me in a quiet apartment, figuring out who I was when no one else was looking. No expectations. No mirrors held up by someone else’s eyes.

“Come here!”