1. Brooke #3
His fingers start moving again. He still hasn’t glanced over.
He has no idea there’s a version of him taking shape in graphite four feet away, no idea that I’ve drawn him more times than I’ve drawn anything in this apartment, no idea that somewhere in a drawer there’s a whole sequence of him I’ll never show a single soul.
He never notices, he never does. And I’ve decided that’s fine, because the not-noticing is what lets me keep doing it. The day he catches me is the day I’ll have to explain what it means, and I’m not ready to explain what it means.
We eat on the terrace that night because the evening is warm and he suggests it himself, which he never used to do. He carries the plates out. I carry the wine.
Hollywood city goes on below us doing its glittering, indifferent thing, and for a while we just eat and don’t talk, and it’s the good kind of quiet, the kind you can only reach with someone you’d otherwise talk to for hours.
“Tell me about the house again,” he says.
I look up. “What house?”
“Your house. The one you’re always describing and never letting yourself want.”
I set my fork down. “You actually remember that.”
“I remember all of it.” He leans back in his chair, wine loose in his hand, giving me the full weight of his attention, and I have to talk myself out of the feeling that gives me. “The kitchen. Go.”
“The kitchen is the whole point,” I tell him, and I hear my own voice go warmer without permission.
“It has to be big enough to actually bake in. Not a display kitchen, not the kind people photograph and never cook in. Real counters. A double oven, because if I’m making bread and dinner at the same time I refuse to negotiate for oven space with myself. ”
“Naturally.”
“And a window over the sink that looks out on a garden, an actual garden, with dirt and tomatoes and things that die if you ignore them, so I have to pay attention. And a reading nook by the good light in the afternoon, so somebody can sit there and ruin his eyes over a manuscript while I pretend I’m not watching him. ”
“Somebody,” Adrian repeats.
“Hypothetically.”
“And where is this house?”
“On the ground,” I say. “That’s the other rule.
It has to touch the ground. Not forty floors up behind glass I’m afraid to fingerprint.
A house you can walk out of barefoot into your own yard.
” I gesture vaguely at the beautiful, cold, borrowed view around us.
“Not this. This is gorgeous and it will never once feel like ours.”
I expect him to be hurt by that, or to defend the penthouse he pays a fortune for. Instead he’s quiet, and he’s watching me, and when he speaks his voice has dropped into the register he saves for the things he actually means.
“Build it,” he says.
“Build what?”
“The house. You’re an architect, Brooke. You draw buildings for a living, or you would, if you’d let yourself. So draw that one. Really draw it. And then we’ll find the land and you’ll build the whole thing exactly the way you just described it, down to the tomatoes.”
I laugh, because it’s easier than the other thing my chest wants to do. “You can’t just buy me a house because I described a kitchen.”
“I can, actually. That’s sort of the one advantage of the arrangement neither of us likes to mention.” He says it lightly, but his eyes don’t leave mine. “But I don’t want to buy you a house. I want you to build yourself one. There’s a difference and you know there is.”
There is. He knows there is. And the fact that he knows there is undoes me more than the offer ever could.
I don’t say yes. I don’t say anything I’ll have to be accountable for in the morning.
I just look at this man across a table I didn’t choose, in a home that isn’t mine, talking to me about a house with dirt and tomatoes and a nook by the good light, and I let myself believe, fully and stupidly, that this is the version of us that gets to last. That the cold beginning was just weather.
That we’ve come out the other side of the deal into a thing no contract ever could have written.
That night he reads to me.
We’re in bed and my head is on his bare chest and his fingers are combing slow through my hair, and his voice moves low and even through whatever chapter he picked, and I feel every word of it in his ribs.
I don’t even follow the plot. I just follow the sound.
My eyes start to close and the sentences begin to blur and I’m somewhere in the warm space right before sleep, safe, held, right where I’ve decided I’m allowed to be.
“Are you asleep?” he murmurs.
“No,” I lie, already halfway gone.
“Liar.” I feel him smile against the top of my head. “One more chapter.”
He doesn’t get to the chapter.
His phone buzzes against the wood of the nightstand, once, and I feel the small hitch in his breathing, the way his attention lifts off me and reaches for it.
Through the last narrow gap of my open eyes I catch the screen light up in the dark, and I catch the name on it before it disappears.
Wyatt.
And under the name, before Adrian’s arm moves out from under me and reaches across my sleeping head to take it, one line of a message glowing in the black.
Promo opportunity just came in. This could change everything for us. Call me first thing.
As I drift to unconsciousness, I have only one thought.
He’ll probably disappear again in the morning.