Chapter 24
ELLA
Leaving Barbados feels like peeling off a second skin.
The resort shuttle idles outside the lobby entrance while I squeeze sweet Colette Tremblay so hard she laughs into my shoulder.
Pierre shakes Alec’s hand with both of his like they’ve known each other for years.
Jess and Mike are there too, checking out at the front desk.
I hug Jess and we promise to stay in touch once we’re home.
I glance at Marina, the woman who inadvertently overbooked me into the happiest accident of my life. She catches my eye and comes around the counter to give me a warm embrace.
“Everything seems to have worked out very well,” she says, her eyes dancing as she flicks a look to Alec as he’s wrangling my luggage out the door.
“Yes, it did.” I return her smile. “Thanks for everything, Marina.”
“My pleasure. I wish you all the best, Ella. You and Alec both.”
She waves to me as I hurry out to catch up with Alec outside. With everything loaded into the shuttle, we climb in and settle into our seats for the short ride to the airport.
Before long, we’re in the air. First class, Barbados to New York, and I can’t help the grin that spreads across my face when I realize we’re in the same seats.
Same airline. Same row. The last time I sat next to this man he was a scowling, prickly grump who made conversation feel like a hostage negotiation.
He didn’t do fun. He didn’t know how to relax.
And he most certainly did not want to have anything to do with me.
Now his hand is resting warmly on my thigh. My head is on his shoulder. His thumb is tracing a lazy circle and every slow rotation sends a current up my leg that pools somewhere it has no business pooling at thirty-five thousand feet with a flight attendant four rows away.
I tilt my face up to him. “Your hand is very high on my thigh for a commercial aircraft.”
“Is it.” Not a question. His thumb doesn’t stop moving.
“The flight attendant has walked past us three times. I think she’s onto you.”
He grunts. “She can mind her own business.” His voice is low and unbothered, but the corner of his mouth is doing that thing where it almost curves. “I’m comfortable.”
He’s comfortable. Those are words I wouldn’t have imagined him saying a week ago, least of all in relation to me. I press my lips together to keep from grinning. “If you get any more comfortable, we’re going to have a mile high club situation on our hands.”
His hand shifts higher on my thigh by a fraction. Just enough to make my breath catch. “That doesn’t sound like a bad idea.”
I press my smile into his shoulder. Ten days ago this man was a stranger who wanted me to stop talking.
Now he’s the reason I rerouted my entire flight home, and his hand is on my leg like it belongs there and the heated look in his eyes makes my stomach do a slow, liquid flip that has nothing to do with turbulence.
Hours later, we land at JFK in the gold-brown light of a late afternoon.
I know this light. I know this airport and the sounds and smells of the city.
I spent the first eighteen years of my life across the river in Hoboken.
The skyline isn’t a postcard to me. It’s the backdrop I grew up under, the view from the waterfront where my dad used to take me after his Saturday shifts.
But I haven’t been here in years, and seeing it now, in a private car with Alec, everything familiar feels charged.
The bridge cables catching the light. The aggressive lane changes.
A cab driver leaning on his horn with the commitment of a man who has given up on society.
All of it ordinary and all of it electric because of the man beside me.
Alec is different here. Not tense, not controlled.
Settled. His body has a loose, easy quality now.
In Barbados he was relaxed because the island made him relax.
Here he’s relaxed because he’s home. The way his shoulders sit, the way his eyes track the streets like he’s reading a language he’s fluent in.
He brought me here. Into the place he actually belongs.
He’s quiet, though. Not in a bad way. In a thinking way. His fingers lace with mine, holding fast, his gaze on the road. Like he’s organizing something in his head. I don’t ask. Some silences with Alec are invitations and some are just him being him, and I’ve gotten good at reading which is which.
When we cross the bridge into Brooklyn, I sit up a little straighter, slightly confused.
He told me he lived in Manhattan that first day on the flight to Barbados.
I remember because I’d pictured it instantly, the glass-and-steel version of his life: a high-rise with a doorman, a view of Central Park, furniture that looks like it was selected by someone with a magazine editor’s eye and an endless budget.
But this is not Manhattan.
The neighborhood is tree-lined and brownstone-rowed and quieter than anywhere I’ve been in New York.
The late light filters through the canopy and lands in warm stripes on the sidewalk.
Kids on a stoop two doors down. A woman walking a dog that weighs more than she does.
It looks like a place where people actually live, not a place where people perform living.
The car stops in front of a brownstone with iron railings and a stoop that has a clay pot of herbs by the door. Not decorative herbs. Herbs that have been watered and used and are slightly unruly in the way of plants that someone tends regularly but doesn’t fuss over.
The driver lets us out and moves our luggage to the curb.
I stand on the sidewalk and look up at the building.
The brick is old and warm. The windows have character.
The front door is dark wood with hardware that looks original, heavy brass that’s been polished by decades of hands rather than a catalog purchase.
He has good taste. He values things that were built to last.
I think of Alec’s dad. Frank, the construction foreman. The man who built things for a living and probably taught his son that solid mattered more than shiny. This home looks like something Frank Beckett’s kid would choose.
Manhattan is the answer you give a stranger on an airplane when they ask where you live. Brooklyn Heights is where you actually go home.
“This is you,” I say, and it comes out softer than I planned. Not a question.
Alec is watching me take it in. His eyes are steady on my face with that guarded alertness I recognize from the early days when he was trying to figure out if I was going to be a problem. Except now he’s not assessing a threat. He’s waiting to see if I like what I see.
“This is me,” he says.
He unlocks the front door, and I step into his real life.
The entryway smells like wood and coffee and something faintly green, like the herbs from the stoop have been finding their way inside. The hallway opens into a living space that stops me in my tracks. Not because it’s grand. Because it’s human.
Bookshelves line one wall, and they’re not the curated kind where someone arranged the spines by color.
These are working bookshelves. Cybersecurity manuals next to a dog-eared Michael Lewis.
A stack of paperback thrillers. A small collection of framed photos I can’t quite see from here but that looks like it holds real people in it, not a design concept.
The kitchen is open to the living room and it is clearly, unmistakably, a kitchen that gets used.
A French press on the counter next to a bag of coffee beans.
Black, no sugar, of course. I could have drawn this kitchen from memory.
Wooden cutting board with knife marks. A cast-iron skillet on the stove that has the dark, seasoned patina of something that’s been fed and cared for over years.
His mother probably has one just like it.
Running shoes by the door, laces loosened and tucked neatly inside. His 5:30 AM habit, standing by the entrance in physical evidence, waiting for him to come home and pick up where he left off.
The floors are worn hardwood, the kind that creak in specific places, and I watch Alec move across them with the ease of a man who knows exactly which spots to avoid if he’s trying to be quiet.
He opens a cabinet without looking. Pulls down two glasses.
Fills them with water from a filtered pitcher that lives on the second shelf of the refrigerator door, left side, and every one of these automatic gestures tells me the same thing: this is not a showroom. This is where he lives.
My chest aches. Not the sharp, undeniable awareness I’m used to with Alec, though that’s here too, humming underneath everything like it always does.
This is quieter. A steady pressure behind my ribs that comes from recognizing that the man who told me about his parents on the beach and who held me in the ocean and who bought me a scarf at a street festival is the same man who lives in this brownstone with his cast-iron skillet and his worn floors and his bookshelves full of things he’s actually read.
He didn’t take me to a hotel. He brought me to the place where his real coffee mugs are, and his real books are and his real running shoes sit by the real door. The trust of that gesture is so big I can feel it pressing against the walls of my ribs, making room for itself.
Alec hands me the glass of cold water. His fingers brush mine in the transfer and the contact sends a streak of awareness up my arm that I feel in my collarbones.
Even here. Even doing something as mundane as handing me a glass.
My body hasn’t figured out how to be casual around domestic Alec yet, and honestly I don’t think it’s going to.
“You cook,” I say, nodding at the kitchen. “Like, actually cook. With a skillet and everything.”
He grins, bringing out those sexy dimples. “I eat, so cooking is the prerequisite.”