9. Reid
— ? —
Reid
Scarlett’s apartment is the size of my closet and I have never wanted to be anywhere more.
It’s a fifth-floor walk-up with a radiator that knocks like it owes someone money and a window that looks out on a brick wall, and she’s made it warm anyway, books stacked two deep on a shelf she clearly built herself, a couch that’s seen better decades, a kitchen so small we keep colliding in it. Which I am not complaining about.
“You’re in my way again,” she says.
“I’m aware.”
“That’s the third time.”
“I’m beginning to think the kitchen’s too small for two people.” I reach past her for the wine I brought, brushing her shoulder, and I feel her go still for half a second before she keeps stirring. “Or the perfect size. Hard to say.”
“Pour the wine, Vanderbilt, and stop narrating.”
I pour the wine. I brought a bottle that cost more than her rent and she hasn’t said a word about it, which I appreciate, because the whole point was that she’d drink it without thinking about what it meant.
She handed me an apron when I walked in, a faded thing with a cartoon lemon on it, and I’ve been wearing it for an hour like it’s a tuxedo.
“You look ridiculous,” she told me when I put it on.
“I look domestic.”
“You look like a hostage.”
She’s making pasta from a recipe she clearly knows by heart, no measuring, just her hands moving with the easy confidence of someone who learned to feed herself when no one else would.
There’s a smudge of flour on her jaw. I have been not-mentioning it for twenty minutes because the longer it stays the longer I get to look at her.
“So,” she says, handing me a wooden spoon and a pot to stir. “We’re celebrating.”
“We’re celebrating.”
“What exactly are we celebrating? Be specific. I want it on the record.”
“We’re celebrating the fact that your sister got escorted out of an art gallery by two men in matching jackets while screaming threats at the ceiling.”
“God.” She laughs, and it’s a real one, surprised out of her. “When you say it like that it sounds unhinged.”
“It was deeply unhinged. It was the best thing I’ve watched in a decade.” I taste the sauce off the spoon, and it’s so good I make an involuntary noise, and she points at me with a knife.
“Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You made a sound. The sound is worse than words.” She takes the spoon back, tastes it herself, and nods like a general approving a battle plan. “Okay. That’s good. That’s annoyingly good.”
“You’re annoyingly good at a lot of things. I’m building a list.”
“Are you flirting with me over marinara?”
“I’m flirting with you over everything. The marinara’s incidental.
” I lean against her two feet of counter space and watch her work, and the wanting in my chest has stopped being a problem I manage and started being a thing I just live inside now.
“Your phone’s been dark all night, by the way. That’s new.”
Her hands pause on the pot.
“I turned it off.”
“I noticed.”
“My father’s going to call.” She says it to the sauce, not to me. “When he sees the video. He’s going to call, and he’s going to use that voice, the disappointed one, like I’m the one who did the shameful thing. Like Margot’s the wronged party and I humiliated the family for sport.”
She stirs harder than the sauce requires. “I’m not ready to hear it tonight. So the phone’s off. Tonight I get one night where I don’t have to defend myself to a man who decided which daughter mattered twenty years ago.”
I don’t reach for her. I want to. But I’ve learned the shape of her over these weeks, and I know that when she hands me a piece of the real thing, the worst possible response is to grab.
“Then it stays off,” I say. “And he can be disappointed at a closed phone.”
She looks up at me, and there’s a thing in her face I’m still learning to read, soft and careful and a little disbelieving, like she’s waiting for the catch in the kindness.
“You’re easy to be around,” she says, almost like an accusation. “I didn’t expect that. I thought you’d be... I don’t know. More work.”
“I’m a tremendous amount of work. I’m just saving it for later.”
“There it is.”
We eat on her couch because the kitchen has no table, plates balanced on knees, the wine breathing in glasses that don’t match.
She puts on a movie neither of us watches, some old comedy she’s seen a hundred times, and she narrates the good parts before they happen, and I learn that Scarlett Ashworth, who can dismantle a person in a single sentence in front of a packed room, quotes screwball comedies with her whole heart.
Somewhere in the second act she ends up tucked against my side.
I don’t know how it happened. I know I didn’t engineer it, because I’ve been holding so still I’ve barely breathed, and at some point she just folded herself into the space under my arm like it was hers, and now her head is on my chest and her hand is flat over my heart and I am having a religious experience over a thirty-year-old film about a runaway bride.
“Your heart’s going fast,” she murmurs.
“Is it?”
“Mm.” She tilts her face up, and we’re close now, closer than we’ve let ourselves be since the storm, her mouth a few inches from mine and her eyes doing that thing where the edge goes out of them and the want comes in. “Why’s that, Vanderbilt?”
“You know why.”
“Say it anyway.”
I bring my hand up to her jaw, thumb finding the flour she never wiped away, and she doesn’t pull back.
The whole night has been moving toward this, slow and inevitable, and I lean in, and her breath catches, and I am one inch from kissing Scarlett Ashworth in her tiny warm apartment with a lemon apron still hanging off my neck.
The pounding on the door hits like a gunshot.
She jerks back. The moment shatters. The fist comes down again, three hard blows that rattle the frame, and then the voice, and the voice ruins everything.
“Scarlett! I know you’re in there. Open the fucking door!”
Vincent.
She’s on her feet before I am, arms wrapping around herself, and I watch the warmth drain out of her face and a decade of conditioning flood back in to fill the empty space.
“How does he know where I live?” She whispers.
“Scarlett!” Another slam. “Open this door right now. We need to talk, and you’re going to listen, because you owe me that much! After everything. After everything I did for you.”
“Don’t,” I say, low, when she takes a step toward the door. “You don’t owe him a conversation through a door at ten o’clock at night.”
“I just want him to stop.” Her voice has gone thin. “If the neighbors hear...”
“You think this is what a sane person does?” Vincent’s voice climbs, ragged, the morning-show warmth burned all the way off.
“You destroyed her. My God, you watched your own pregnant sister get dragged out of a building and you smiled. There’s a sickness in you, there’s always been a sickness in you, cold all the way through, just like I told everyone. ”
“That’s enough.” Scarlett’s at the door now, hand flat against it. “Go home, Vincent. You’re drunk and you’re making a scene.”
“I’m making a scene? You put me on every screen in this city!”
A bitter laugh comes through the wood.
“And for what? For him? You think Vanderbilt’s in there because he cares about you?
” His voice drops, and somehow that’s worse, the venom finding its aim.
“He’s in there for the waterfront, Scarlett.
The land your mother left you, the one thing in your name.
That’s the prize. That’s the whole prize.
He’ll smile and play house and wait you out, and the second he’s got the deed he’ll drop you exactly where I found you. Used up and grateful for it.”
I’m watching her face when it lands. That’s the part I’ll remember.
Not Vincent’s voice, not the words, but the way they hit Scarlett, the way some old wound under her ribs cracks open and the doubt floods in, because she spent ten years being a thing men used and discarded and he knows it, he knows exactly which scar to press.
“And he’ll be cleaner about it than I ever was,” Vincent says. “He won’t even have to lie. He’ll just stop. And you’ll tell yourself you should have known.”
I’m done.
I cross the apartment and pull the door open, and Vincent’s standing there in the hallway with his tie loose and his eyes wild, smaller than he’s ever looked, a man whose whole kingdom turned to smoke in forty-eight hours. He blinks at me like he forgot I’d be real.
“You need to leave,” I tell him.
“Or what?” But he steps back as he says it.
“There’s no ‘or.’ You’re leaving.” I move into the hall, putting my body between him and the doorway, and he retreats another step, because cowards always do the math.
“You don’t come to her home. You don’t pound on her door.
You don’t get to stand in a stairwell and try to break what you already threw away. ”
“That’s rich.” He laughs, and it cracks.
“You’re going to lecture me about throwing her away.
You’ll do it too, Vanderbilt. You’ll do it slower and you’ll call it by a kinder name, but you’ll do it.
” His eyes find Scarlett over my shoulder, and he aims the last one at her, soft and cruel.
“Men like us don’t keep women like you. We keep what you build.
Ask him what he wants the waterfront for. Go on. Ask him.”
A door opens down the hall. Then another.
A man in a robe leans out with a phone already in his hand, and a woman behind him says she’s calling the building manager, and a third neighbor, broad and unimpressed, plants himself in the hallway with his arms crossed and tells Vincent the show’s over, pal, time to go.
Vincent looks around at the audience he didn’t plan for, and the fight goes out of him all at once, and the neighbors close in and herd him toward the stairs with the brisk contempt of people who have had enough.
He goes. Still talking, still flinging it back over his shoulder, but he goes, and the broad neighbor follows him down to make sure.
I step back inside and close the door. The lock turns loud in the quiet.
When I face her, the apartment that felt like the warmest place I’ve ever been has gone cold, and Scarlett is standing in the middle of it with her arms crossed tight and a foot of new distance between us that wasn’t there twenty minutes ago.
“You should go,” she says.
“Scarlett.”
“It’s late.” She won’t look at me. Her eyes are fixed on the dark window and the brick wall beyond it. “It’s been a long night. I think you should go.”
“He wanted that.” I keep my voice even. “He came here, at night, to your home, to say exactly that, because he knew it would work. He knew it would put that look on your face and a door between us, and you’re handing it to him.”
“Maybe he’s right.” It comes out so quiet I almost miss it.
“Not about all of it. But the waterfront’s real, Reid.
It’s the one thing I have. And every man in my life has wanted me for what I could give him, my father, Vincent, all of them, and I’m supposed to believe you’re different because you cook pasta and wear a stupid apron? ”
The apron’s still around my neck. I take it off, slow, and set it on the back of the couch, and I close some of the distance she opened, not all of it, just enough.
“You want to know what I want the waterfront for,” I say.
“I don’t. You can keep it, sell it, salt the earth and build nothing on it for fifty years.
I genuinely do not care. It could fall into the river tomorrow and I’d help it along.
” I hold her eyes. “I’m not here for a deal.
I never was. The deal was the excuse you needed so you could let me back in without admitting you wanted to. ”
Her jaw tightens. “That’s not fair.”
“It’s completely fair, and you know it, which is why you’re angry.
” I take one more step. “You asked how you’re supposed to trust me.
Not because of what I say. Vincent says beautiful things, your father probably said beautiful things, they all do.
You watch what I do. I’ve never once let you carry the worst of it alone.
I’ve never put my name on your work. I’ve never made you small so I could feel large.
When you handed me a piece of the truth tonight, I didn’t grab.
Have I done a single thing, one thing, that looked like a man planning to use you? ”
She’s quiet. Her arms are still crossed, but the set of her shoulders has come down half an inch.
“No,” she says. “You haven’t.”
“And I never will. I’ve had ten years to figure out what I’d do if I ever got you back in a room. This is it. This is the whole plan.” My voice goes rough at the edges and I let it. “There isn’t a version of this where I leave.”
She looks at me then, finally, and her eyes are bright and furious and frightened and hoping all at once, and I watch her decide to believe me, watch her choose it, which is better than being talked into it.
“I hate that he got in my head,” she says.
“He’s good at it. He had practice.” I close the last of the distance. “But you didn’t open the door for him. That has to count for a great deal.”
She lets out a breath that shakes on the way out, and the fight and the doubt go with it, and she leans her forehead against my chest, and I bring my arms around her at last. She fits the way I always knew she would.
I tip her chin up. I don’t kiss her mouth, even though she’s right there and the whole night has been begging for it, because tonight isn’t the night and we both know it.
There’s a marriage to bury first and a man in the stairwell who isn’t done.
Instead I press my lips to her forehead and hold them there, and I feel her melt into it, all that armor going soft under one gentle thing.
“I don’t want what you built,” I tell her, mouth still against her skin. “I want the woman who built it. I have wanted exactly that since before, and I have gotten very good at waiting.”
She makes a small sound against my chest, half a laugh, half a thing breaking open.
“Don’t make me cry in the lemon apron’s presence,” she whispers. “It’s seen enough tonight.”
“It’s a witness now. It can’t unsee.”
I hold her in the middle of her small cold warm apartment while the radiator knocks and the city hums and somewhere below us Vincent Kensington is being walked to the curb by a man in a bathrobe. And I make myself a promise I’ve made before and will keep this time.
I’ll wait for her chance.
However long it takes.