Chapter Eighteen
Max
Cal’s penthouse is white.
Not warm white, not the white of linen or plaster or something that has been lived in and softened at the edges.
Cold white. Clinical white. The white of a room that has been designed by someone who cared more about photography than livability.
All sharp angles and reflective surfaces and a kitchen that looks like it belongs in a magazine about kitchens rather than a place where a person makes pancakes and drinks their coffee while sorting their mail.
It’s not Cal at all, and I have to work hard to wipe the grimace off my face.
I run my hand across the stark white marble counter. It’s cold under my palm and absolutely flawless—and deeply, profoundly sterile.
“Not for you, is it?”
Cal is leaning against the corner of the room watching me with his arms crossed. It’s not a question because he has been in my past apartments.
“It’s not my penthouse, so…” I say.
He smiles. Just a small one, just the one corner of his mouth lifting. He paces forward to come to lean on the counter across from me, arms still crossed.
“What would you do to it?”
“What?”
“If it were yours. What would you change?”
I look at him. He looks back. He’s serious.
After everything we have talked about today, this is exactly the conversation we have the capacity for at this moment, and I love it.
I look around the kitchen. Then the living room. Then back at the kitchen.
“Okay,” I say. “The floors first. All of it. Whatever this is—” I tap my foot against the white tile, “—gone. Dark hardwood or light natural wood, one or the other, not this because this is gross. And the kitchen cabinets are too white. I’d want dark cabinets with gold handles, maybe some intricate beading around the edges of them, and with a marble counter that actually has some character in it, a gold vein or something warm running through.
And a real fireplace, not—” I gesture at the sleek electric insert in the living room, “—whatever that is. And plants. There are no plants anywhere in this apartment which is actually a crime because did you know that plants help absorb bacteria and make your air better?” I’m rambling but can’t stop myself.
“And the couch needs to be soft, like genuinely soft, not whatever this expensive thing is because as pretty as it looks, it’s probably just a very polished rock.
And I’d want a reading chair in the corner—velvet, in teal or eggplant, something moody.
With a good lamp behind it, and shelves, actual shelves with actual books on them that actually get read and—”
I stop.
Cal is looking at me like he might burst out laughing.
His cheek is pulled in slightly like he’s biting it, his lips twisted to the side.
His eyes are warm. And his eyes are sparkling with happiness, and I feel it too—being in his space, even though it doesn’t feel like him, being here together is something.
“What?” I fold my arms across my chest.
“Nothing,” he says. “Nothing at all. Come on, I’ll show you the guest room.”
The guest room is also white, but it has a large window and a bed that looks like it might be soft and I am choosing to be grateful for both of these things.
I’ll take the natural light and a nice soft duvet over a hard leather sofa.
There’s an attached bathroom with a gorgeous black tiled shower. I can’t wait to shower in it—
And that’s when I realize all I have are the clothes on my back.
I whirl around towards Cal, who is leaning in the doorway at the entry to the room and pinch my shirt between my fingers.
“I can have Gio bring you some clothes in the morning,” he says it so sure, because he can predict my thoughts, before he disappears.
He comes back fifteen seconds later with a folded gray t-shirt.
I take it. It’s soft and it smells like cedar and leather and metallic, burnt salt—just like Cal. I run my hand across the cotton.
When I look up, he’s looking somewhere else very deliberately.
“I’ll be down the hall,” he says. “If you need anything.”
He shows me his room on the way out—a door left open, light bedding, a window that looks out over the city, nothing personal on the surfaces except a watch on the nightstand and a book face down on the pillow. The room of a person who travels and comes back and leaves again.
I think about that on the way back to the guest room. I shower, letting the water run over every inch of my body and take a creeping discontent with it down the drain.
I change into his t-shirt. I sit on the edge of the bed. Try to relax. But I’m chewing on my bottom lip.
Calogero Renzetti—who is apparently the head of a mafia family—is Callan Reed.
His sisters and mom showed me pictures of him as a kid and told me funny stories about him. Nothing crazy or earth-shattering, but enough to paint the picture that I already knew existed—a happy, serious Cal as a fiercely protective boy. Sitting with them in the kitchen felt so easy.
I had looked back at Cal and a man who looked similar to him—I assume his brother—who were talking near the guest house.
They looked serious and Cal’s face was doing the frowny, unhappy thing it does sometimes.
He said he had to come here to fix a mess.
All I want right now is to know everything, but the lore dump from the plane is still swirling in my brain.
Through the wall I can hear him moving—the soft sounds of drawers, a closet, footsteps crossing the floor. Then quiet. Then footsteps again, and I wait to hear them recede from the bedroom.
Curiosity killed the cat. But cats have nine lives.
I open my door.
The hallway is empty. The staircase at the end is dark but I can hear his voice drifting up from below—low, controlled, the tone he uses when he’s at work and talking to someone he doesn’t want to talk to. I take three steps toward the stairs and stop.
His voice is clearer here and I can hear his pacing footfalls.
“—they’re already inside the northern boundary; we can’t wait another week—”
A pause.
“I don’t care what it costs, I care what happens if we don’t move first.”
Another pause.
His voice drops and his footsteps stop. “Interrupt me again and you can be the bait to intercept them on their way out tomorrow, how’s that sound?”
My eyes go wide and I swallow down a squeak.
He starts moving again, and I hear a door open.
I can’t make out the words anymore, but the weight of the ones I did hear carries up the staircase anyway.
Whatever the reason is for coming back, it isn’t a business dispute; it’s not something that gets handled in a conference room with a mediator and a settlement offer.
My hand finds the wall to steady myself.
I think about the car trunk with the biometric lock.
I think about Gio and Rudi, who I assume are bodyguards from the car, going very still in their seats.
I think about the way the men at the guest house—when I glanced out of the kitchen earlier today—had arranged themselves around a big table inside—arranged themselves around Cal.
I think about what it means that he’s here, in this city, in this penthouse, and I’m wearing his t-shirt at the top of his stairs.
I tiptoe back to my room.
I close the door, turning the handle so the door doesn’t click.
And I lock it—not because I’m afraid of him—I’ve never been afraid of him—but because I need the click of the latch to feel like I have some control over this situation when I absolutely have none.
But I do.
I could go home.
The idea of leaving sounds horrible.
I get into the bed and pull the covers up.
I stay still with my eyes wide open for a while then roll over.
There’s something on the pillow.
I smile because it’s a chocolate mint. Just like the ones hotels leave on your pillows.
I unwrap it and it melts in my mouth as I melt into the comfortable bed.
The t-shirt smells like Cal, the mix of smells that is just him, plus something underneath all of it that I have been trying to name and can’t. Something that isn’t a scent exactly but more like the feeling of a feeling, like walking into a room and exhaling air you didn’t know you’d been holding.
It smells like the library at two in the morning when the heat was on and snow was falling outside. It smells like the parking lot YMCA dance. It smells like every moment I felt completely fine in a year where I didn’t feel completely fine anywhere else.
It smells like something I lost and didn’t know I was still looking for until it was in front of me again.
I close my eyes. It smells like safe. Like home.
I am not leaving.