Chapter 37 Andrea
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Andrea
He asked at breakfast. Same question he’d been asking every morning since Whitebrook, delivered the same way, casual, no pressure, fork in one hand, coffee in the other.
“Date?”
I looked at him across the table. Grandma’s tea was in my mug because he still ordered it, had it shipped to the estate every two weeks without being asked.
The peonies on the counter were fresh because he replaced them every Monday.
He was in a t-shirt with his hair messy from sleep and he was asking the question he already knew the answer to because he’d been getting the same answer for months.
Except this morning I woke up and realized I didn’t want to say no anymore.
I’d been saying it out of stubbornness, out of principle, out of the need to prove to myself that I was in control.
But the truth was I hadn’t been in control since the night he read to me in the reading nook and I fell asleep on his shoulder and woke up with his arm still under me, not moving, holding still so I could rest.
“Okay,” I said.
His fork stopped. He looked at me.
“Okay?”
“Yes. Okay. One date. Don’t make it weird.”
“I’m not making it weird.”
“You’re staring at me like I just told you the sun is purple.”
“You said yes.”
“I’m aware of what I said. Eat your eggs.”
He ate his eggs. I could see him fighting the grin and losing.
His whole face was doing the thing where it tried to stay neutral and failed completely, half surprise, half barely contained joy, and I looked away because if I kept watching his face I was going to take it back just to regain the upper hand.
That evening he set up dinner on the estate grounds.
Fairy lights strung between the trees near the garden, a table for two, candles that flickered in the warm air.
The dogs from the rescue wing were wandering the lawn because nobody had closed the gate, and Buddy was lying under the table with his chin on my foot like he’d appointed himself chaperone.
Finneas was nervous. I could tell because he kept adjusting the silverware, lining up the knife edge with the plate, moving the candle an inch to the left, moving it back. His knee was bouncing under the table hard enough that I could feel it through the ground.
“You’re nervous,” I said.
“I’m not.”
“Your knee is shaking the table.”
He put his hand on his knee. It stopped. “I want this to go well.”
“It’s dinner. We’ve eaten dinner together hundreds of times.”
“Not like this.”
He was right. Not like this. Not with fairy lights, candles, a deliberate yes between us. A date I agreed to, a choice I made with my eyes open, my walls cracking, my heart doing things I couldn’t pretend were co-parenting.
He’d made the food himself, which I didn’t expect. Pasta, simple, with a sauce that was actually good. I took a bite and stared at him.
“You can cook?”
“I learned. In Whitebrook, at the hotel. Got tired of takeout every night.”
“You learned to cook because you were bored?”
“I learned to cook because I was eating alone in a hotel room every night staring at an ultrasound photo. Turns out that’s motivating.”
I didn’t have a sarcastic response for that one. The image of him alone in a hotel room teaching himself pasta hit me somewhere I wasn’t ready for.
“This is good,” I admitted. “Genuinely good. I’m annoyed about it.”
“You’re annoyed that I can cook.”
“I’m annoyed that you added it to the list. The list of things that make it harder to stay mad at you, which was already too long.”
He didn’t say anything to that but the corner of his mouth twitched and I saw the satisfaction in it and I pointed my fork at him.
“Don’t look smug.”
“I’m not looking smug.”
“You’re looking extremely smug.”
“I’m looking at you. If that happens to look smug, that’s your interpretation.”
We ate. The conversation drifted to the baby, to names. I’d been turning it over for weeks, trying on different ones, saying them out loud in the shower to see how they felt in my mouth.
“I want to name him Alexander,” I said. “It was my dad’s middle name. Michael Alexander Grey.”
He was quiet for a second, his fork resting against his plate, letting the name settle. “Alexander. Alex.”
“If that’s okay with you.”
“It’s perfect, Andrea.”
The way he said it, quiet, certain, like there was no other possible answer, made my throat tight. I took a sip of water and changed the subject before my eyes did something embarrassing.
“What kind of father do you want to be?”
He was quiet for a while, longer than I expected. The fairy lights caught the line of his jaw, the stubble he hadn’t shaved, the small scar on his eyebrow.
“Present,” he said finally. “My father was a King first. He was good at it, fair, the pack respected him. But I can count on one hand the number of times he was at dinner when I was growing up. He was always somewhere else, handling something, being needed by someone who wasn’t me.”
I watched him trace the edge of his glass with his thumb, the gesture he did when he was thinking hard about something he didn’t want to say out loud.
“My mother filled the gap with pressure, expectations, plans she made for my life before I was old enough to disagree. I grew up with a schedule instead of a childhood.”
“Finneas...”
“I don’t want your sympathy. I’m telling you so you understand.” He looked at the candle flame. “I don’t want that for Alex. I want to be there. At breakfast, at bedtime. I want him to know what my voice sounds like when I’m not giving orders.”
“You give a lot of orders.”
“I’m working on it.”
“You told the waiter to adjust the candle placement when we sat down.”
“That was a suggestion.”
“It was an order delivered at suggestion volume.”
His mouth twitched. I was deflecting with humor because what he’d just said, the rawness of it, the image of a little boy eating dinner alone while his father ran a kingdom, had hit me somewhere I wasn’t ready to examine.
My parents died when I was fifteen, but before that, before the accident, every single night was dinner together.
My dad’s terrible cooking, my mom’s laughter, the porch swing afterward.
I grew up knowing what love looked like because it was at the table every night.
Finneas grew up knowing what duty looked like and learning that it meant being absent.
I reached across the table and took his hand.
His breath caught. I felt it in his fingers, the way they went still and then closed around mine, careful, like he was afraid of holding too tight.
His palm was warm, calloused at the base of his fingers from all the repairs he’d done at Grandma’s house, and I laced my fingers through his and didn’t let go.
We stayed like that through dessert. His thumb traced slow circles on the back of my hand and I let him because it felt good and I was tired of pretending things that felt good were dangerous.
Buddy snored under the table. One of the rescue dogs wandered over, rested its head on Finneas’s knee.
He scratched its ears with his free hand without breaking eye contact with me, without letting go of my hand, without missing a beat.
This man learned to cook pasta, named our son after my father, built me a shelter, and now he was scratching a rescue dog’s ears while holding my hand under fairy lights.
I was so far past trouble it wasn’t even visible in the rearview.
We walked back to the house together. Slowly, neither of us rushing, the gravel crunching under our shoes.
The estate was quiet, lights warm in the windows, the sky clear enough to see stars.
Our hands weren’t touching but our arms were close, close enough that I could feel the heat of his skin through his sleeve, and neither of us closed the gap or widened it.
“You know what I keep thinking about?” I said.
“What?”
“Two years ago you couldn’t say more than three words to me at the office. Now you’re cooking pasta and stringing fairy lights.”
“People change.”
“You didn’t change. You just stopped hiding.” I glanced at him. “The grumpy CEO thing was always the disguise, wasn’t it? This is who you actually are.”
He didn’t answer right away. The gravel crunched under our feet.
“You’re the only person who ever saw through it,” he said quietly.
“I didn’t see through it. I complained about it to your dog form for two years.”
“And I listened to every word.”
“Which is creepy.”
“Which is devotion.”
“Fine line.”
He walked me to my door. The guest room, separate bedrooms, my terms that he’d never once argued with even though I could feel how much they cost him every night when he said goodnight and walked the thirty feet to his own door.
“Thank you for tonight,” he said.
“Thank you for cooking something that wasn’t burned.”
“Low bar.”
“You cleared it. Barely.”
He smiled, soft, reaching his eyes for once, and said goodnight and started to turn away.
I grabbed his collar.
I didn’t decide to do it. My hand moved before my brain could intervene, catching the fabric of his shirt, pulling him down to me. I kissed him.
For a split second he was frozen, surprise locking his body in place.
Then his hands went to my hair, both of them, fingers sliding through it, tilting my head back, and his mouth opened against mine.
Everything I’d been holding back for months crashed through me at once.
The wanting, the missing, the anger, the love, the fear.
All of it flooding through a crack that had been widening since the porch in Whitebrook, since the ultrasound, since the night I fell asleep on his shoulder in the reading nook.
I kissed him hard and he kissed me back harder, my back against the doorframe, his body pressing close.
His hands tightened in my hair. I gripped his shirt with both fists.
The baby kicked between us, right against his stomach, and neither of us stopped.
He tasted like the wine from dinner and his mouth was warm and I was drowning in the scent of him, cologne, warmth, something underneath that my body recognized on a level I couldn’t explain.
My brain was screaming at me to think, to be careful, to protect myself.
The rest of me told my brain to shut the hell up.
I pushed him back. Both hands on his chest, feeling his heart hammering under my palms. He was breathing hard. I was breathing hard. His hands were still in my hair, mine still fisted in his shirt, six inches of charged air between us.
“Goodnight, Finneas.”
His jaw worked. I could see him fighting every instinct telling him to close the gap again. His hands slid out of my hair slowly, fingertips trailing along my jaw, and the loss of contact made me ache.
I stepped backward into my room, closed the door, leaned against it with my heart hammering so loud I was sure he could hear it through the wood.
Through the door, I heard his exhale. Long, shaky, like he’d been holding his breath for months and finally let it go.
I pressed my forehead against the wood with my eyes closed, my lips tingling, the ghost of his hands in my hair still burning against my scalp.
The baby was kicking, hard, like he had very strong opinions about what just happened.
I smiled. Pressed my palm flat against the door. On the other side I heard his footsteps, slow, reluctant, moving down the hall toward his room.
I stayed against the door, smiling, my hand on the wood where his back might have been.
The walls were cracking. I could feel them going. I wasn’t shoring them up this time.