Chapter Fifteen
I took the house back room by room, and I saved the studio for last, on purpose.
The rest had been work. I’d had the locks changed and the cameras rekeyed to me alone. A crew had come through and boxed every trace of Karl for the lawyers, and a second crew had cleaned the whole place to the studs.
I walked the pale stone floors afterward and made one decision per room.
The wine fridge went. The staged art Karl had bought by the square foot went.
Dara’s little command station in the kitchen, the charging dock, the label maker, and the pharmacy drawer had been cleared by the detectives already.
I scrubbed the empty drawers and left them open to air out.
Standing there, I understood the house would be fine.
It had never been the problem. It had only been occupied.
The studio door, I opened slowly. I braced for the video to be waiting in there – Karl’s hands, Dara’s balance, my violated worktable – and for a few breaths in the doorway, it was.
Then it wasn’t. Thirty years of my own work looked back at me from every wall.
Pip in a hundred poses, Luma mid-leap, the Glass King in his hall, doors upon doors upon doors, and one bad hour couldn’t stand against all of it.
This room was mine before them, and it had caught them, even.
The room had been on my side the whole time.
I cleaned the worktable myself, oiled the wood, and set it with fresh paper. Then I positioned the camera, checked the frame, and pressed record.
“Session one,” I said to the lens. “Millie Olson. New piece.”
I drew for two hours and recorded everything.
My hand held every line I asked of it. Dr. Parks had warned me honestly that some of the nerve damage might take a long time and might even stay, but drawing had come back to me the way my appetite had, quietly, week by week, until one day it simply worked again.
I drew Pip standing in a doorway with light coming through, and it wasn’t for the movie, or the archive, or for anyone else.
When I finished, I walked to the camera and turned it off, deliberately, with one finger. I smiled at it while I did it.
Nick came at seven, and I met him at the front door with my hair down.
That was the first thing he noticed. I watched him notice it, though he didn’t say anything about it. My hair had been coming back for a while, new growth filling in, curls doing their chaotic work. Tonight, for the first time since the bad year started, I wore it loose because I finally could.
“You found the house,” I said.
“Big gate. Hard to miss.” He held up a bottle of wine and a paper bag. “I also brought backup dinner in case you burned dinner, which I want noted as an act of faith in reverse.”
“I ordered dinner from the place you like and put it in my own dishes. I know my stuff, okay?” I laughed and gave him a peck on the cheek.
We ate in the kitchen, not in the dining room, at the table by the window, where I’d always liked to sit.
It was easy. That was the thing I kept catching all evening – the ease between us.
No case updates to trade. Nothing to gather, seal, or forward.
Just a man and a woman, food and a conversation that wandered wherever it wanted, the movie, his terrifying niece, Reyes’s first recording session, and under all of it, in every glance across the table, the other conversation, the one we’d put off for months, patient, and present, and finally allowed.
After, I gave him the tour. I ended it in the studio, because it was the truest room, and he knew what it meant that I wanted to show it to him. He walked the walls slowly with his hands behind his back, reading twenty years of my work, stopping longest at the new piece on the table.
“Session one,” he said, reading my note in the corner.
“Recorded and everything.” I leaned against the worktable. “I turned the camera off before you came, though. In case you were wondering.”
“I wasn’t wondering.” He turned from the wall and looked at me. The look had a question in it that he was too careful to ask.
“Nick,” I said. “Come here.”
He came. I reached up and kissed him. This time, I didn’t stop it at soft, and he understood in about a second and a half. His arms came around me properly at last, and the restraint I’d felt in him on the garden path, all those weeks of it, loosened.
“Stay tonight,” I said against his mouth. “I’m free, I’m healthy, the papers are signed, the gate is locked, and I want you. I’ve wanted you for so long I’ve gotten organized about it. Stay.”
“Say the part after ‘stay,’” he said. “I want to hear you say it.”
“Take me to bed.” I laughed, giddy with it.
He took my hand and let me lead him up the stairs, into my room.
At the edge of the bed, he slowed everything down.
I learned the first thing about Nick Quinn as a lover was the attention he gave me.
It was the thing I’d fallen for across script meetings and hospital waiting rooms. Now it arrived in my bed completely intact.
He undressed me carefully, but not cautiously, and he looked at me the whole time.
At me – my eyes, checking, and then at my body as it came bare.
He didn’t hurry past any of it. My body had been a crime scene for a year.
It had been discussed in labs and reports, measured, charted, testified about, handled by professionals in gloves, and I had braced, somewhere deep, to feel some echo of that clinical distance the first time a man’s hands were on me again.
There was no echo. Nick touched me the way I touched good paper, with respect and appetite at the same time.
“You’re staring,” I said.
“I’m memorizing. Complain louder.”
“I’ve been sick. There’s less of me than there was, and my hair’s still…”
“Millie.” He said my name and waited until I looked at him. “You’re the most beautiful thing that’s ever been in a room with me, and I’ve worked all my life with people that build beauty for a living. Now stop arguing and let me make my case.”
He made his case with his mouth, starting at my throat.
He was thorough about it. He kissed my shoulders, my breasts, and when his mouth found my nipple, I heard myself moan, and the sound didn’t embarrass me.
He worked lower, unhurried, murmuring against my stomach, my hips, telling me what he was doing and what he wanted in a low voice that kept asking if I was okay.
I kept saying yes, then he settled between my thighs and stopped asking altogether.
He licked me slowly at first, learning me, then picked up the pace.
He was good at it for the same reason he was good at everything: he paid attention.
He found what worked and stayed with it, reading every sound I made, one hand spread warm on my belly, and when I got close, I told him… actually told him:
“Don’t stop, right there, I’m going to come.” Out loud.
He hummed against my clit and didn’t stop. I came with my fingers in his hair and my whole body finally, completely on my side.
“Okay,” I said, when I had words. “Get up here.”
I pulled him up and pushed him onto his back.
Because I’d promised myself this part, and I took my time the way he’d taken his.
I kissed my way down his chest and wrapped my hand around his cock, watching his composure, that steady producer calm, come apart under my fingers.
I loved it, the power of it, how mutual it was.
I took him in my mouth, and he groaned my name.
One big hand landed gently in my curls, just resting, and when he got close, he pulled me up instead.
“Not like that,” he said, rough. “The first time, I want to be looking at you.”
“Then look at me.”
I straddled him, took him in my hand, and sank down slowly, watching his face while he stretched and filled me. We both went still for a breath, forehead to forehead, just feeling it, the fact of it, months of waiting resolved into one long, deep ache of relief.
“Millie,” he said, wrecked and reverent.
“I know,” I said. “Me too. Now move.”
We moved together. I rode him slowly at first, setting the pace because he let me set everything, his hands on my hips following instead of steering.
Then his thumb found my clit and stayed there, patient and exact.
When slow wasn’t enough anymore, Nick rolled us over and gave me the rest of it, deep and steady, watching my face the whole time, adjusting to every sound until I was gasping his name into his shoulder.
I came again with him inside me, harder this time, and I felt him lose his rhythm, groaning into my hair, my name again, then his weight settled onto me, careful. We lay there tangled and damp.
“Well,” I said to the ceiling of my bedroom.
“Give me a minute,” Nick said into the pillow. “I’ll have adjectives.”
I laughed until my stomach hurt. He lifted his head to watch me do it, grinning, hair wrecked. He pushed a curl off my face and let his hand stay there.
“You’re back,” he said. “You know that? I watched it happen this whole year in pieces, but tonight, all of you is here, with me. It’s a hell of a thing.”
“I’m not back.” I turned my head and kissed his palm. “The woman from before let people manage her. I’m someone new. You’re going to like her, though. She’s pushy about mirror scenes, and she has an enormous house.”
We raided the kitchen at midnight in various states of undress, ate the cold backup dinner straight from his paper bag, and went back to bed.
The last thing I registered before sleep was the calm feel of it. Nick’s breathing beside me, slow and even. My studio dark and clean below us, fresh paper on the table, session one in the archive, the next drawing already forming somewhere behind my eyes, waiting for morning.
And me in the middle of all of it, healthy, loose-haired, well loved, sleeping the whole night through in my own bed, in my own house, in my own name.