6. Elara
Elara
I get the door shut and put my back against it like he might try to follow me in.
Breathe.
“The jaw on him,” I tell Gerald, who has nothing to say about it, because he is a plant, and because there is genuinely nothing to say.
There is no defense. I asked a grown man if his bone structure required a membership.
I said the words is it a club to his actual face.
In an elevator. Out loud. With the mouth I use for professional writing.
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes until I see colors.
“Okay,” I tell the colors. “Okay. We’re going to be normal about this.”
We are not going to be normal about this.
I can feel it already, the way the whole interaction is loading itself into the part of my brain that keeps things forever and replays them at three in the morning.
The other tenants get a polite nod. I get to relive do you practice that on a loop until I’m dead.
It’s fine. People say things. Drunk people say more things, louder, with hand gestures.
That’s just biology. It means nothing that I can still feel exactly how close he stood, like the air over on his side had felt different and it did things to me I’m definitely not talking about.
It means nothing that I keep thinking about the spot at the small of my back where he almost touched me and didn’t.
And yeah, I shouldn’t even know it’s there, because he didn’t, and it’s not…
Nothing happened there.
There is no there.
That’s the wine. Wine does that. Wine makes everything seem easy, too easy. Like blurting out things that absolutely should have stayed unsaid. Famous for it.
I push off the door.
And that’s when I see it.
A piece of cream paper on the floor, just inside the threshold. Folded once. Shoved all the way under — not slipped, not poking out where a draft could’ve nudged it. All the way under. Far enough that whoever did it got down low and meant it.
That’s not…
But I know what it is before I bend for it. I’ve got its twin propped up on my desk, where it’s been being a problem at me for days.
I do not open it.
I am not, at midnight, in a dress that’s been betraying me since the elevator, with one shoe gone and a head full of cheap wine and a man’s jaw I did not ask for, going to start making decisions about a second handwritten note that arrived under my door like a threat or a valentine, I genuinely cannot tell which.
I have a policy. The policy is no mysterious-paper analysis after ten p.m. or two drinks, whichever comes first, and tonight I’ve blown straight past both gates.
So I pick it up. I don’t read it. I carry it with me down the hall, which is not the same as keeping it, it’s just not leaving litter on my own floor. There’s a difference. I’m too tired to explain the difference but it’s load-bearing and it’s there.
My other shoe comes off somewhere between the living room and the bedroom, one of those mid-stride kicks where you just decide a shoe is over now.
I leave it where it lands, abandoned like evidence at a scene.
I’m not drunk-drunk. I’m the functional kind, where walking has become a series of individual small decisions I’m making one at a time, and I’m landing most of them. The rest are between me and the floor.
At least that’s the hope.
I make it to the bed and go down face-first, fully clothed, makeup intact, the green dress doing absolutely nothing for either of us at this angle.
Tomorrow’s problem. The dress, the makeup, the elevator, the jaw, the note.
All of it gets put away for tomorrow, which is a magical place where a more capable woman handles everything I’m currently choosing not to.
The note is still in my hand.
I could set it on the nightstand. The nightstand is right there. I keep holding it instead, loosely, like it’s keeping my hand company, like letting go of it is one more small decision I’ve decided not to make tonight.
What are you doing, Elara. It’s not even for you.
Probably.
I close my eyes on probably, and the room tips, slow and warm and forgiving, and somewhere in the tipping I stop holding anything at all.
Warm.
That’s the first thing, before there’s a me to notice it.
Warm everywhere, the deep kind, the kind that doesn’t come up off a blanket.
A body at my back — big, solid, the whole length of it lined up against the whole length of mine like it was measured for the job.
An arm comes across me, heavy, a forearm dark with ink, and it draws me back into him slow, no question in it, like I’m already his to gather up. A mouth, close to my ear.
“I’ve got you. Nothing’s getting near you tonight.”
Xaviar.
Obviously. I’ve had my face buried in that book for three weeks straight and he says things exactly like that — low and certain, the kind of sentence that ruins you a little to hear.
The brain takes what you feed it and I have fed it nothing but him.
Dreams don’t have to make sense and this one is under no obligation. It just has to keep going.
So I stop poking at it and let myself lean back into all that warmth.
His arm tightens, pulling me in until there’s nowhere left to go and nowhere I’d rather be than gone.
His mouth finds the side of my neck, open and unhurried, and the first slow drag of his lips sends heat pouring down my spine and pooling low and heavy, and my whole body softens back against him before I’ve signed off on any of it.
And he wants this. I can feel it everywhere he’s touching, he’s not rushing.
There’s no agenda but me, like he’s got the entire night and the only item on it is how good he can make me feel.
He isn’t taking. He’s giving, patient, like he’s done it a hundred times and plans to do it a hundred more.
And the part of me that lives at a low boil of overthinking just — goes quiet. Gives in. Lets him.
His hand spreads flat and warm over my stomach, and everything underneath it pulls tight and aching before he’s even moved it lower. Then he drags down, past the waistband, no hesitation anywhere in him, like he already knows the exact place I want him.
Like he’s been here before.
“Let me.” Not a question. It doesn’t need to be.
The first brush of his fingers between my thighs punches the air clean out of me.
I’m soaked, embarrassingly, ridiculously soaked, and the low rough sound he makes into my neck only makes it worse, makes me throb against his hand wanting more.
He drags through me slow, spreading the wet up, taking his time like he’s got nothing but, and when he reaches my clit and circles I jerk back against him, a current going off everywhere at once, too much and not nearly enough in the same breath.
“There she is.” His voice is a low rasp against my ear. “Always so ready for me.”
Always. Something in me catches on the word — always, like there’s a history, like there’s a record of all the other times — and then his fingers push into me, two of them, and the stretch of it rolls all the way up my spine and pulls a sound out of me I have genuinely never made before, and the snag comes loose and floats off.
I let it. He curls his fingers up into the spot that makes my hips jolt, and the only thought I can hold onto is this is right, this is so right.
Better than anything I have ever gotten while I was awake and paying attention.
Some far-off, dignified part of me lifts its head to note how good this is. How his voice goes through me like it’s all I need. How his breath at my ear makes me clench down around his fingers without meaning to.
The rest of me tells that part to lie back down and be quiet.
He’s slow until he isn’t. Every drag of his hand winds me a notch tighter, the heel of his palm grinding against my clit on every push in, until I can’t hold still, can’t stay quiet, strung tight between his hand below and his chest at my back and climbing fast whether I gave permission or not.
“That’s it,” he breathes, and his fingers go deeper, faster, sure. “Come for me. I want to feel it.”
His other arm bands up across my chest, holding me up, holding me back against him, and I lose it — hips working down onto his hand, every shred of caring how I look gone, just chasing the edge that’s right there, right there, all of me narrowing down to the place where he’s got me and won’t let go.
It snaps without warning. It wrings up through me long and deep, my whole body clamping down around his fingers, and the pulse of it whites out everything — no room, no bed, no name, nothing but the throb and his arm holding me together while I come apart on his hand.
He works me through every wave of it, slow and steady, doesn’t stop, eases off only when I start to shake, until I’m wrung out and boneless and slumped back into him.
His chest rising and falling slow against my spine. His fingers still resting against me, lazy, like he isn’t anywhere close to finished. His arm heavy around me like there is nowhere on this earth he’d rather be than exactly here, holding the wreckage.
I want to see his face.
I turn—
It’s not him.
It’s not Xaviar.
Blue eyes. Pale, light, almost silver where the dark should be — nothing, nothing like Xaviar’s. The rest of his face won’t hold still, blurring at the edges like it hasn’t decided to be all the way here yet.
But the eyes don’t blur.
The eyes stay. Fixed on me. They don’t leave me for a second.
A shiver goes through me.
I have never seen this man before in my life.
And I know him. I know him the way I know my own hands. Bone-deep, no question in it, the kind of knowing that was there before I looked.
His face is going now, fading at the edges, and I grab for it anyway — my hand comes up and finds his jaw, sharper even than Erik’s, sharper than anything, and then there’s nothing under my fingers at all, just warmth and the shape of where he was. He’s saying something. I can almost—
“Starlight. Stay.”
And the stay pulls long and thin and snaps—
I’m awake.
I come up off the mattress so fast the room lurches.
Heart slamming against my ribs, body still humming everywhere, thighs clenched tight, underwear soaked through, every single nerve in me standing up to swear on its life that it happened, that it was real.
That it was thorough and unhurried and complete and every second of it was real.
My room. My bed. Streetlight through the blinds. The green dress wound up around my waist like it lost a fight, makeup wherever makeup goes when you don’t take it off. Real. Stupidly, ordinarily, disappointingly real.
Something’s crushed in my fist.
I uncurl my fingers. The note. Of course it’s the note. I don’t remember holding onto it. I don’t remember anything between probably and now except a pair of eyes that won’t quite leave the inside of my head.
My fingers move before I’ve told them to and unfold the paper.
Always listen to your heart.
Well. That’s vague. That’s deeply unhelpful. That’s a fortune cookie that took a wrong turn. I read it twice anyway, like the second time might come with footnotes.
My pulse will not come down. I sit there in the dim light in my ruined dress and wait for my brain to do the thing it always does — reach out and find the reasonable version and hand it to me, gift-wrapped.
You read too much. You drank too much. You fell asleep with the man across the hall stuck in your head and a smutty paperback in your bloodstream and your brain put it all in a blender and hit go.
That’s all this is. You know that’s all this is.
I wait for it.
I always get there. That’s the whole thing about me, it’s the one reliable trick I’ve got. I always find the boring door and I always walk through it and I always, always believe it on the other side.
I sit there and I reach for the door and there’s no door.
There’s just the eyes. And the always with a history behind it. And a body that is still, right now, certain it was touched.
I’ve got nothing.
But there’s one thing I know, all the way down to my core.
That wasn’t Xaviar.