Chapter 3
BLISS
The lift ride up to the fourteenth floor is the longest forty-five seconds of my life.
I stand next to Olog, who takes up approximately sixty percent of the available floor space, and stare at the gold-trimmed doors with the focused intensity of someone trying to astral-project out of their own body.
The keycard is in my hand. The keycard to a suite with one bed.
One California king bed that the clerk had described with the kind of reverent enthusiasm usually reserved for religious experiences, and which I am now imagining in vivid, unhelpful detail.
I chew my bottom lip until I taste lipstick.
"You're catastrophising," Olog says, without looking at me.
"I'm not catastrophising, I'm strategising."
"You've been silent for four minutes and your jaw is doing something concerning."
"My jaw is fine."
"Bliss."
I exhale through my nose. "It's one bed."
"Yes."
"That we both have to sleep in."
"Technically, only you have to sleep in it."
I turn to look at him fully for the first time since we left the reception desk, which is a mistake because he is standing approximately eight inches away from me and takes up the entire peripheral edge of my vision.
Up close, the suit is even more absurdly well-made.
The dark charcoal fabric pulls taut across his shoulders in a way that should probably be reported to someone.
"You are not sleeping on the floor," I say.
"I sleep on the floor regularly. I find it beneficial for lumbar support."
"That is insane."
"It's a very nice floor. Marble, by the look of it. Five-star establishments typically source premium stone."
The lift doors open, and I stride out into the corridor before I can say something genuinely unhinged, like offering to share the bed in some carefully negotiated, pillow-barricaded arrangement. I find room 1404 halfway down the hall, press the keycard against the lock, and push the door open.
The suite is, objectively, stunning. Floor-to-ceiling windows frame a panoramic sweep of the Atlantic, all hammered silver light and dark water, and the afternoon sun cuts long gold rectangles across the cream carpet.
There's a sitting area with an actual chaise longue, a bathroom I can see through the open door that contains a freestanding soaking tub, and in the centre of the far wall, framed by linen curtains the colour of sea foam, the bed.
It is enormous. It is also very much one single bed.
I set my clutch on the console table and allow myself precisely three seconds of staring at it before I turn away and focus on the practical.
"Right," I say, pulling my phone out and scrolling to my emails.
"The welcome mixer starts at six. It's on the south patio, which means Aunt Susan will arrive twenty minutes early to claim the best sightlines and a tactical proximity to the bar.
We need to be there before she establishes a perimeter. "
Olog sets his overnight bag on the luggage rack with the unhurried efficiency of a man who has never once rushed anywhere in his life. He unzips it, and removes a folded suit carrier, a small leather wash bag, and what appears to be a compact, military-grade sleeping mat still in its thermal roll.
I point at it. "What is that?"
"Standard kit."
"You brought a camping mat to a five-star resort."
"I bring it everywhere." He unrolls it along the length of the floor beside the bed with the practiced ease of someone running a well-rehearsed drill, then straightens up and smooths the front of his jacket.
"Floor sleeping is not a punishment, Bliss.
I've slept in significantly worse conditions on a client booking. "
"Olog—"
"The floor arrangement is non-negotiable.
" His silver eyes meet mine directly, and there's something in the steadiness of his gaze that is somehow both deeply professional and completely unreadable.
"My rating reflects consistent boundary maintenance.
I will keep it that way. You take the bed.
You sleep. You wake up rested and confident for whatever social combat your aunt has planned for tomorrow morning. That is what you're paying for."
I open my mouth, close it again, and decide that this is a battle I will revisit later when I have more bandwidth.
"Fine," I say, turning toward my suitcase. "But if your back is ruined by Sunday, I'm leaving you a four-star review and you'll have no one to blame but yourself."
"Noted." A pause, and I think I catch something fractionally close to amusement in his voice. "I'll survive the four stars."
I give myself twenty-five minutes to get ready, which is not enough time given that my cousin Petra has essentially weaponised this entire weekend as a showcase for how perfect her life is.
The welcome mixer is "casual," which in Vance family language means everyone will be dressed like they're attending a fashion week after-party while aggressively discussing investment portfolios.
I pull on the emerald silk dress I'd earmarked for tonight, wrestle my hair into something my blowout can still support, and add enough mascara that I look awake rather than like someone who has been stress-sweating in a resort bathroom for the better part of an hour.
Olog has changed in the bathroom with the door firmly shut and emerges in a fresh iteration of the same devastating suit silhouette, dark navy this time, the jacket sitting perfectly across the breadth of his shoulders, his eyes cutting across the room to find me in the mirror.
"You look good," he says, in the same tone he'd use to confirm a scheduled itinerary item.
I turn around. "Thank you. You look—" I gesture at the entirety of him, because there isn't a concise word for what he looks like. "Extremely effective."
Something moves in his expression. Not quite a smile. The architectural suggestion of one.
"Ready?" he asks.
I check my phone. 5.48pm. Aunt Susan is already down there.
"No," I say honestly. "But let's go."
The south patio is the kind of outdoor space that gets photographed for magazine spreads and then quietly exists as a backdrop to family tension for the rest of its natural life.
White-clothed high tables clustered across sun-warmed stone, the ocean visible beyond the balustrade, fairy lights already threaded through the overhead canopy even though the sun hasn't fully set.
A string quartet plays something inoffensive near the far wall.
Waiters move through the crowd with trays of champagne flutes and artfully stacked canapés, and everywhere I look there are people I've known since childhood who will, within sixty seconds of eye contact, find a way to ask why I'm not married yet.
The Vance side of the family has a specific talent for weaponising concern.
I spot Petra first, luminous in cream, her fiancé attached to her arm like a well-dressed accessory, holding court near the balustrade with the easy confidence of someone who has never once doubted that the world was arranged specifically for her comfort. She hasn't seen me yet.
I spot Brandon second, standing near the bar looking like he's already rehearsed whatever smug, loaded comment he plans to open with when we cross paths again.
I spot Aunt Susan third, and she has already spotted me.
She is a woman of sixty-two who dresses like she's forty-five, drinks like she's twenty-two, and has the conversational instincts of a professional interrogator.
She's wearing deep burgundy and holding a very large glass of Chablis, and she is already moving in our direction with the deliberate, unhurried momentum of a ship that has identified its port.
"Incoming," I mutter, barely moving my lips.
Olog's hand finds the small of my back, warm and steady through the silk. "I see her."
"Her name is Susan. She will ask how we met, how long we've been together, whether I've been to a gynaecologist recently—"
"The gynecologist question seems unlikely."
"You don't know Susan."
He applies the faintest pressure against my spine, anchoring me in place rather than letting me drift backwards, which is what every instinct I have is currently demanding.
Aunt Susan arrives in front of us like a weather event, her gaze moving from my face to Olog with a manner that cycles through surprise, assessment, and sheer, undisguised curiosity in approximately one second flat.
She is not a woman who bothers pretending.
It's one of the few things I've always half-respected about her, right up until she turns that particular quality on me.
"Bliss." She kisses the air beside my cheek. "You look thin. Are you sleeping?"
"Great to see you too, Susan."
Her eyes have already moved back to Olog with the forensic focus of a woman who catalogues information for later deployment.
She's looking at him the way you'd look at a piece of abstract sculpture in a gallery—deeply intrigued, not entirely sure of the correct response, but absolutely committed to forming an opinion.
"And who," she says, drawing the words out, "is this?"
I feel Olog straighten beside me, just slightly, a fractional squaring of those enormous shoulders, and when he extends his hand toward Aunt Susan the movement is so smooth and deliberate that even she blinks.
"Olog Glore," he says, and his voice drops into that register that seems to physically relocate itself in the room, something that resonates slightly in the chest cavity. "It's a pleasure."
Susan looks at his hand, then up at the full reach of his height, and then she shakes it with the expression of someone recalibrating rapidly.
"My goodness," she says, which is the closest I've ever heard Aunt Susan come to being lost for words. She recovers within approximately three seconds. "Olog. That's unusual. Where is that from?"
"Northern clan name. My grandmother's side."
"And you're—" She waves her wine glass vaguely in the direction of us. "Together? With Bliss?"
"Yes," he says, with a conviction so total and unhesitating that I feel it land somewhere in my sternum.
Susan looks at me with a countenance I cannot immediately decode, something between scepticism and reassessment.
"Since when?" she asks, and this one is aimed at me with the precision of someone who has noticed the pause before my inhale.
"About eight months," I say, landing on the number Olog and I had agreed on during the lift ride up. Enough time to be serious. Not so long that the total lack of prior family introduction becomes suspicious.
"Eight months." She lets that sit for a moment, tasting it. "And you haven't mentioned him once."
"I wanted to keep something for myself for five minutes, Susan. You know how this family operates."
She makes a sound that is not quite agreement and not quite disagreement, watching me over the rim of her wine glass, and then she shifts her attention back to Olog with renewed focus.
"What do you do?" she asks.
"Private security consultation," he says, smoothly, "with some specialist logistics work." Which is, I note, not technically a lie about what tonight's arrangement involves, just an extremely generous framing of it.
Susan nods slowly, filing this away. "And how did you two meet? Don't tell me it was one of those app things. Bliss, I swear to God—"
"Cliff diving," Olog says.
I keep my face entirely neutral.
Susan stares at him. "Cliff diving."
"Bliss capsized on the third rapid. I pulled her out."
A beat of silence. Susan looks at me with a guise that is, for the first time in recent memory, something approaching impressed.
"You went cliff diving?"
"I contain multitudes," I say.
"You're scared of the wave pool at Centre Parcs."
"I've grown."
Susan points at Olog with her wine glass in a gesture that conveys a complicated mixture of approval and warning. "You. You should know that Bliss is brilliant and stubborn and has terrible taste in men historically, no offence, Bliss—"
"Tremendous offence, Susan—"
"—and if you're just here for the weekend to perform—" She lets that hang, eyeballing Olog with a directness that makes lesser humans step backwards.
Olog holds eye contact without blinking.
"I'm not performing," he says, and his voice has gone quiet in a way that is completely different from his professional register. Lower. Stripped of the smooth deliberateness. The words land with a plainness that makes the back of my neck prickle.
Susan studies him for a long moment.
Then she takes a sip of her wine and says, "Good," in the tone she uses when she has accepted something as settled.
I breathe.
She turns back to me, and the interrogation light in her eyes banks down to something that almost approaches warmth.
"Your mother's been asking about you," she says. "She thinks you seem stressed."
"I'm not stressed, I'm at a wedding."
"Those are not mutually exclusive. Come find me at dinner, I want to hear about this diving incident properly." She aims one final, assessing look at Olog. "Lovely to meet you," she says, and sweeps away toward the bar.
I wait until she's out of earshot, then I turn to look up at Olog.
He is already looking down at me.
"Cliff diving," I say.
"You suggested something dangerous. Cliff diving is dangerous and plausible. I've done it."
"She believed you."
"People believe things said with sufficient confidence." He reaches out and lifts a champagne flute from a passing tray, offers it to me. "You did well. Your voice only pitched up once."
"I'm choosing to ignore that." I take the champagne. "She liked you."
"She assessed me. Whether she liked me is a separate determination she'll arrive at over the next twenty-four hours based on observed behaviour."
I take a long sip of the champagne and look out over the patio, the string quartet, the assembled machinery of my cousin's wedding weekend, all the people who have been waiting for years to catch me at a disadvantage.
None of them are looking at me with pity right now.
They're looking at me with curiosity, which is a completely different thing, and it feels, despite all the silk-and-strategy absurdity of the evening, like the first full breath I've taken all day.
"Thank you," I say, and I mean it without any of the customer-transaction layer on top.
Olog stands beside me, solid and unhurried, watching the room.
"The night isn't over," he says. "Your ex is working up to something near the bar. I've counted three attempts to make eye contact with you in the last four minutes."
I follow his eyeline without turning my head. Brandon. Of course.
"Let him," I say, and I'm surprised to find I actually mean that too.