Chapter 7 #2
She couldn't sleep. The storm was still howling outside, rattling the windows and making the condo creak in ways that were probably normal but still kept her jerking awake every few minutes.
The guest room was fine, more than fine, but it wasn't hers, and she'd never been great at sleeping in new places.
She ended up wandering into the living room. She found herself standing in front of the thermostat, staring at the digital display that read "64°F" and feeling an unholy urge.
Don't adjust it, he'd said. The thermostat is programmed to a specific schedule. Her fingers hovered over the buttons.
She imagined she could hear him breathing in the master bedroom down the hall, steady and even. He probably slept in a perfect symmetrical position with his sheets tucked in at regulation angles.
She pressed the up arrow. Once. Twice. Four times.
The display changed to "68°F" and she felt a rush of petty satisfaction that was entirely disproportionate to the act. Then she went to the kitchen and left her water glass in the sink.
At approximately six the next morning, she woke up to find a stack of extra blankets outside her door - three of them, folded with military precision. A small note on top said, in neat block letters, "I adjusted the system."
She stood in the doorway holding the note, reading it three times, feeling something complicated and inconvenient twist behind her ribs.
He'd noticed. He'd noticed that she'd been cold, even though she hadn't said anything, even though she'd turned up the thermostat herself, and he'd brought her blankets. He'd left them outside her door rather than knocking. He'd given her warmth without asking for acknowledgment.
Damn it.
She was trying to keep him in a box. An annoying, uptight, control-freak box where he couldn't affect her. But he kept doing small, quiet, thoughtful things that didn't fit the narrative she was building. The box was developing cracks.
She went back to bed and pulled all three blankets on top of herself, burying her face in fabric that smelled faintly of cedar and expensive detergent, and pretended her chest didn't feel tight.
Breakfast was an ambush.
She stumbled into the kitchen around eight, still wearing the oversized sweater and leggings she'd slept in, her hair a chaotic explosion of red curls, her brain not yet online enough to form complete sentences.
He was standing at the stove. Again. He was wearing different clothes so he must have slept at some point, but he looked more alert than anyone had a right to look this early.
—a grey henley and dark jeans that fit extremely well.
Not that she was paying any attention to how they clung to his muscular legs and cupped the massive—No.
"Coffee's ready," he said without turning around. "Mugs are in the cabinet above the machine. Second shelf. Blue stripe."
She grunted something that might have been thank you and shuffled towards the state-of-the-art coffee maker. The mug cabinet was, predictably, organized by color and size. She grabbed one from the wrong shelf just to see if he'd notice.
He noticed. His shoulders twitched.
She poured him a cup but before she could pour her own, she realized there was already a cup sitting on the counter. A cup containing...
"Is this tea?"
"Hmm."
"Is this chai?"
She picked it up and sniffed it. Her eyes went wide.
"This is chai with oat milk and honey. How did you—I never told you—"
"You leave your cups everywhere." He still wasn't looking at her, focused on whatever he was cooking. Eggs, from the smell of it. "I noticed what you drank."
She stared at the back of his head. At the neat ponytail keeping his long black hair contained. At the broad shoulders and the controlled movements and the complete absence of any indication that he'd just done something incredibly, unfairly sweet.
"You noticed," she repeated.
"Yes."
"You noticed my tea order. From the cups I leave around the arena."
"You leave them everywhere. It wasn't difficult."
The box cracked a little more.
She took a sip of the chai. It was exactly right. The proper ratio of spice to sweetness, the oat milk frothed just enough, and the honey subtle but present.
"Thank you," she said softly.
He finally turned around, spatula in hand, his expression carefully neutral. "You're welcome."
They stood there for a moment, the kitchen island between them, steam rising from her cup, something unspoken thickening the air. Then she deliberately set the cup down on the counter without using a coaster, and watched his eye twitch.
"Where are the plates?" she asked innocently.
The mural sketches were, admittedly, a war crime.
She hadn't planned to work on them. She'd planned to stay in the guest room, read one of his color-coordinated books, and wait out the storm like a reasonable houseguest who respected boundaries.
But the light in the dining room was incredible.
The floor-to-ceiling windows faced east, and even with the storm still swirling outside, the overcast sky created a soft, diffused illumination that was perfect for detailed work.
Her fingers had been itching since she woke up.
She'd been working out the central composition, the piece that would tie everything together, and inspiration didn't wait for convenient timing.
So she retrieved her art supplies from the bags he had carried in and spread her sketches across his dining table.
She gradually added her pencils, her erasers, her reference photos, her charcoal sticks, her loose sheets of tracing paper, and her crumpled notes about team history.
Within an hour, his immaculate twelve-seat dining table looked like a tornado had swept through an art supply store.
He walked in around noon and stopped so abruptly she heard his shoes squeak on the hardwood.
She looked up from the sketch she was working on—a detailed study of crossed hockey sticks framing the Emerald Enforcers boar logo—and smiled brightly.
"Good light in here," she said cheerfully.
His eyes traveled across the table at the scattered papers and the charcoal smudges on the wood surface. He silently studied the pencils rolling precariously close to the edge and the reference photo that was definitely going to leave a mark because she'd pinned it in place with a piece of tape.
Tape on his table. The irony was not lost on her.
"This is..." He didn't finish the sentence. His face had taken on that fixed quality again, the one that meant his brain was trying to process chaos and failing.
"It's organized," she said cheerfully. "I know where everything is."
"How?"
"It's a system."
"It's—" He gestured helplessly at the explosion of creativity. "There's charcoal on my table."
"I'll clean it."
"There's tape on my table."
"I needed to hold down the reference. Would you prefer I drilled holes and installed a corkboard?"
His jaw worked. No sound came out.
She felt a flicker of something that might have been guilt.
She was pushing him, she knew. Testing the limits of his tolerance, and poking at his need for control like a kid poking a bee's nest. It was petty.
It was also deeply, profoundly satisfying in ways she probably needed to unpack with a therapist.
"I'll be done in a few hours," she said, more gently. "And I'll put everything back. Promise."
He nodded stiffly, turned on his heel, and walked away without another word.
She went back to her sketch and told herself the weird feeling in her stomach was just hunger.
Later that afternoon she found him studying the drawings. She'd taken a break to stretch her legs and was wandering towards the kitchen for more tea when she heard the rustle of paper coming from the dining area. She pressed herself against the hallway wall and peeked around the corner.
He was standing at the table, but he wasn't staring at the chaos in horror, like she would have expected.
Instead, he was studying it. His massive frame bent slightly as he examined one of her larger sketches—the concept for the main focal wall, with the Emerald Enforcers crest exploding into a dynamic scene of players in motion, the lines radiating outward to create a sense of energy and movement.
He picked up another sketch—one of the individual player portraits, stylized and bold, designed to line the corridor leading to the locker room. His huge fingers were surprisingly gentle with the paper, careful not to smudge the charcoal.
His expression was... soft. That was the only word for it. The rigid control was gone, replaced by something almost tender. He traced the lines of a figure with his eyes, following the movement she'd captured, the dynamism she'd tried to convey.
He looked like someone seeing art for the first time, really seeing it, and her chest ached as if something was pressed against it.
She must have made a sound because his head snapped up, and he caught her watching.
For a moment they just stared at each other across the chaos-strewn table.
Then his face closed off. The mask snapped back into place.
He set down the sketch he'd been holding, positioning it exactly where it had been, and straightened to his full terrifying height.
"I was checking for damage," he said. "To the table."
"Uh-huh."
"The charcoal. It smudges."
"It does."
"I wasn't—" He stopped. Swallowed. Started again. "The drawings are. Adequate."
Adequate. Coming from Tarmek, that was practically a standing ovation.
"Thank you," she said sincerely.
He gave a sharp nod and walked past her towards the kitchen. She watched him go—watched the tension in his shoulders and the way he very deliberately did not look at her as he passed.
The box in her mind, the one where she'd been trying to keep him safely contained, developed another crack. Then another. Then it started to fall apart entirely, and she realized she might be in very serious trouble.