QUINN
We’re in the kitchen.
It’s Dorian’s kitchen. Or my kitchen. I mean, I think it’s Dorian’s?
But it doesn’t look like the kitchen in Dorian’s house.
It’s bigger, brighter. And instead of Ms. Beaumont doing the cooking, I’m the one standing at the stove.
I’m wearing an apron over a turtleneck and jeans, and Lillie is doing homework at the marble-top island behind me, sitting on a stool.
She asks questions about geography, and I can actually answer them because I always liked geography.
Math was always a little tricky for me, but geography?
Locations don’t change around. They pretty much stay in one place.
There’s coffee brewing, and I’m flipping pancakes, and Dorian walks in, asking Lillie if there was some reason she couldn’t get her homework done last night when she was supposed to.
I give him a look over my shoulder—loving, but maybe a little disapproving.
Sometimes he’s too hard on her, and we can clash about that, but it’s always with love at the forefront. Love for each other. Love for our girl.
“And how is my boy?” He comes up behind me, wraps his arms around my middle, and rests his hands on my belly. Now that he mentions it, it is kind of… swollen. Like I’m pregnant.
A baby. I’m going to have his baby. “Be careful with my little brother or sister,” Lillie warns from behind us.
This is my life. There’s sunlight everywhere, and Lillie starts singing softly; the pancakes are ready to be plated up, and I live in this life.
I’m not a visitor. I’m not the nanny. There’s a great big diamond ring on my left hand, and I’m swollen with life inside me, and the man I love has his arms around me while he kisses the nape of my neck.
And then I smell something.
It starts faintly. Like a suggestion.
But then it gets stronger. Much stronger. So strong that the kitchen flickers, and the sunlight goes wrong, and Dorian lifts his face from where it rested against my neck and murmurs, “Something’s rotting.”
Slowly, I open my eyes.
To find Poptart’s face approximately three inches from mine.
His enormous brown eyes are locked on me with the unblinking stare of an animal who has absolutely no concept of personal space, and his breath—his breath—is a living thing, a creature in its own right. Hot and damp, and smelling like something crawled into a bag of grass clippings and died there.
What does a girl do at a time like this? When she’s woken from maybe the nicest dream she’s ever had to find an animal invading her personal space?
If you’re me, you scream.
Not a cute scream, either. It’s not the kind of scream that happens in movies where the girl gasps and puts her hand over her mouth.
I’m talking about a full-bodied, top-of-my-lungs shriek of primal terror, because there is a horse in the bedroom, and I’m naked, and for approximately three seconds, I don’t remember where I am or why I’m here or how any of this happened in the first place.
Dorian comes up off the pillow like he’s been electrocuted. “What? What happened?” He’s reaching for the nightstand before his eyes are fully open, and I don’t have time to think about what he was reaching for because Poptart chooses this moment to exhale directly into my face, and I fully gag.
“There is a horse in your bed!”
“It’s not—” He blinks. Processes. He looks at me, looks at Poptart, then looks back at me.
Then his face changes. It goes from confused to alert to absolutely furious in about a second and a half. “Lillie!”
He’s out of bed before I can say anything else, yanking on a pair of shorts from the chair, and he moves toward the door with the energy of a man who is about to have a very serious conversation with a five-year-old. Then his bare foot comes down on something, and the sound it makes is…
Well. It’s wet. And squishy.
He stops. Looks down. Closes his eyes. I crane my neck, holding my breath—both out of necessity and out of nerves. Sure enough, he’s standing there with one foot planted in what is unmistakably a pile of horse manure on the hardwood floor of his bedroom.
I watch as he takes a single, controlled breath through his nose.
Given the smell, it’s a bold choice. “Lillie,” he says again, quieter this time, which is somehow much scarier.
He scrapes his foot on the edge of the bathroom doorframe—an image I will take to my grave—before disappearing into the hallway.
I’m sitting up in bed, clutching the sheet to my chest and staring at Poptart, who is looking deeply pleased with himself. Out of nowhere, Lillie appears in the doorway.
She’s in her pajamas. Her hair is wild. She wears the expression of a child who has done absolutely nothing wrong and can’t imagine why anyone would suggest otherwise. “Good morning,” she says sweetly.
“Good morning, sweetie. How did… how did Poptart get up here?”
“The elevator,” she says, as if this is the most obvious answer in the world. Like, of course you put a pony in the elevator that hardly ever gets used. That’s why the elevator hardly gets used—there was no pony in the house until now. “He wanted to come see me. He was lonely.”
“The pony told you he was lonely.”
“I could tell by his face.”
I look at Poptart’s face. It communicates nothing but vague interest in continuing to chew. I don’t have time to argue the point, because Lillie’s attention has shifted from the pony to me. I watch her little brain recalculate in real time. “Quinn?” Her head tilts. “Why are you in Daddy’s bed?”
Oh, no. I would much rather talk about the pony.
“I… we were… it was late, and—”
“Did you have a sleepover?”
“Sort of. Sure. A sleepover.”
“Why don’t you have pajamas on?”
“I didn’t have any with me. I was wearing—it doesn’t matter what I was wearing.
” I’m going to die in this bed. This is where it ends.
Not in a car crash, not of old age. Right here, interrogated to death by a kindergartner while a miniature horse witnesses the entire tragedy.
“Honey, can you go find Ms. Beaumont for me?”
But she’s already on the bed, bouncing hard enough that her locket bounces against her chest. Poptart startles sideways and knocks something off the nightstand.
A glass shatters on the floor. Lillie barely notices.
“Are you and Daddy boyfriend and girlfriend now? Is that why you had a sleepover? Can you have a sleepover every night? Can Poptart have sleepovers too?”
“I think Poptart should sleep outside,” I manage, holding my sheet in place while trying to get a hand on her to make her stop jumping before she falls off the bed. All we need is a concussion or worse to complete this morning’s bingo card.
“But he gets lonely!”
From somewhere down the hall, I hear Dorian’s voice, low and tight, talking to Ms. Beaumont about the pony and the elevator and the poop and, from what I can gather, the need for some kind of locking mechanism on the elevator a five-year-old cannot defeat.
Ms. Beaumont’s voice is calm and unflappable because I’m starting to believe the woman has seen everything that can possibly happen in this house and nothing surprises her anymore.
Lillie takes one last, epic bounce before flopping on the bed with her head on the pillow next to where mine was. She kicks her feet in the air. “Your hair is messy.”
I touch a hand to it. Sex hair. I have it. “I know.”
“It looks pretty like that, though.”
“Thank you.”
“Daddy’s hair was messy, too. He looked grumpy.”
“Well, honey. He did just step in poop.”
“Poptart says he’s sorry.” She looks at the pony, who does not look the least bit sorry. “I told her sorry for you,” she whispers to the horse.
I love this kid so much it physically hurts.
Ms. Beaumont arrives with the efficiency of a woman who’s been managing disasters in this household for longer than I’ve been alive. She takes one look at the room and simply nods. “I’ll have this sorted in fifteen minutes,” she says. “Lillie, come with me. Poptart is going back outside.”
“But—”
“Now, please.”
Lillie goes, but not before throwing her arms around my neck and squeezing hard enough to relocate several of my vertebrae. “Bye, Quinn. Tell Daddy not to be grumpy.”
And then it’s just me, alone in Dorian’s bedroom, wrapped in his sheet, with the distinct smell of horse manure lingering in the air. Last night I was in an emerald dress being kissed against a wall. This morning, I smell like a barn.
I find one of his T-shirts in a drawer—dark, soft, enormous on me—and a pair of his sweatpants that I have to roll at the waist three times.
I pull my hair back with a band from my clutch and brush my teeth with my finger and the fancy toothpaste in his guest bathroom since he’s showering in his.
When I look in the mirror, I see a girl wearing a man’s clothes after spending the night.
That’s exactly what I am. I don’t know how to feel about it.
Happy? Terrified? Something in between that doesn’t have a name yet?
I find him in the hallway, freshly showered and in a clean shirt, smelling like soap instead of horse. He looks at me in his clothes, and something moves across his face—something warm, maybe possessive—before he shuts it down.
“I should probably go,” I murmur, because I don’t know what the protocol is. What do you do the morning after you sleep with your boss? Is there a handbook? There should be a handbook.
“No.” He says it simply. “Stay. Have breakfast.”
“Are you sure? Because I can—”
“Quinn.” He steps closer. His hand comes up and pushes a strand of hair behind my ear. The gesture is so gentle, so ordinary, so much like something a boyfriend would do instead of a boss, that my throat closes. “Stay.”
“Okay,” I whisper.
Breakfast is almost normal.
Almost, because Lillie is narrating the entire Poptart adventure to anyone who will listen. “And then he got in the elevator, and he pressed the button with his nose, Daddy!”
Dorian is alternating between cutting her toast into triangles and pinching the bridge of his nose.
I’m sitting across from them in a T-shirt that reaches my knees, once again eating the best scrambled eggs I’ve ever had.
It feels so much like the dream I was having before the horse showed up that I’m afraid to look at it directly, in case it disappears.
But something else catches my attention.
Through the kitchen window, I count four men on the east lawn.
I’ve been coming here for months. I know the routine.
There are usually two. Sometimes Paul and Buttercup on the east side in the mornings.
Today there are four, and none of them is Paul, and they’re not walking.
They’re standing, positioned, like they’re covering sight lines.
There’s another one by the gate. I can see him from here.
And when I came down the stairs, there was a man in the front hall I’ve never seen before.
He was wearing an earpiece, and he nodded at me the way Marco nods at me, but he wasn’t Marco.
There was something in the way he nodded that felt less like good morning and more like noted.
“There are a lot of people outside today,” I mention, keeping my voice light. Casual. Like it’s no big deal.
Dorian doesn’t look up from his plate. “Mm.”
“More than usual.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
It’s not what he says. It’s how he says it. Flat. Final. The voice he uses when he’s decided something isn’t my business. The fact that he’s using it now—the morning after he had me in his bed and told me to stay—sends a small, cold prickle down the back of my neck.
“Okay,” I reply with a smile, and I eat my eggs.
But I’m watching.
There’s something he’s not telling me. I’ve felt it for a long time.
The phone calls he takes in the other room.
The way Tristan appears and his whole face changes.
The guards and the cameras. The wall that I’ve been explaining away with words like finance and investment and important people need security.
I’ve been very good at explaining things away.
I’m starting to wonder if that’s all I’ve been doing.
Just explaining. Telling myself a version of the story that lets me stay in this kitchen, eating these eggs, wearing this man’s clothes, and feeling like I belong in a life I haven’t actually been invited into.
Keep your guard up, I tell myself. It feels strange, thinking it here in this sunny kitchen, with Lillie’s laughter, and the man who held me like I was the only thing in the world that mattered.
But I think it anyway.