Chapter Six #3
We reached the interior doorway. The hallway beyond was narrow—seventeenth-century architecture had opinions about personal space that were fundamentally incompatible with twenty-first-century notions of appropriate proximity, especially when one of the people in question was six-foot-three and built like something that had been carved rather than born.
Ari’s hand was still on my back. His body was close behind mine, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him.
We stopped at my door. My working room—the one with the good light and the questionable wifi and the desk where I’d spent the morning annotating Geno’s financial crimes with the focused attention of a man who considered embezzlement a form of conversational icebreaker.
Ari’s hand didn’t move.
My nervous system had grown used to the warmth, which was concerning from a professional standpoint and considerably less concerning from every other standpoint I was currently operating from.
I turned to face him.
Ari was close. Too close for the kind of conversation we were theoretically having, which was absolutely not about the way his black eyes found mine in the dimness and held them.
“I’m fine,” I said. Evenly. Pleasant. The voice of a man who had been followed for six blocks, handled it competently, collected useful intelligence, and was now standing in a narrow hallway with his boss’s hand on his lower back and his pulse doing something that would not look good on a performance review.
“In case you were wondering. No lasting trauma. Expensive shoes, shoulder tell, all handled. Professional-grade stalking response. You can add it to my resume under ‘special skills.’”
His jaw shifted. Something moved behind those eyes—assessment, calculation, the look of a man who was running several equations simultaneously and arriving at an answer he hadn’t expected.
“I wasn’t wondering,” he said. “I could see that.”
“Then why do you still look like that?”
“Like what.”
“Like you’re deciding something.” I held his gaze.
The hallway felt smaller than it had thirty seconds ago, the air between us thicker, the heat from his hand on my back radiating outward in a way that suggested my nervous system had abandoned professional boundaries entirely and was now operating on a different set of protocols.
A pause.
“I am,” he said.
My heart did something athletic. The kind of thing that would have qualified for Olympic consideration if cardiac gymnastics were a sport, which they should be, and I would win a medal, and the medal would be shaped like a caramel and engraved with the words “this was avoidable.”
I kept my face pleasant and my voice dry “I hope the decision involves dinner, because I skipped it. On account of the whole stalker thing. Which, for the record, was not my fault, though I acknowledge that my response involved gelato, which some might consider inferior from a security standpoint, but I stand by it. The pistachio was worth the risk.”
Ari looked at me for a long moment, long enough that the church bells rang somewhere in the distance, the sound carrying through stone and old wood and the narrow space between us.
Something shifted behind those black eyes. Something that started as assessment and landed somewhere warmer, something that looked like a man arriving at a conclusion he had been circling for longer than either of us was willing to admit.
“Dinner is fine,” he said.
Then he stepped back. His hand left my lower back, and the absence of it registered with an immediacy that my body interpreted as a tactical error requiring immediate correction.
The heat lingered where his palm had been. I could feel it through the cotton of my shirt, a ghost of contact that my nervous system was refusing to relinquish, like it had decided that patch of skin was now under different management.
I turned into my room, closed the door behind me, and leaned against it for approximately three seconds while my expression did something I would not have wanted witnessed by anyone with functioning eyesight.
When my three seconds of sheer panic were up, I pushed off and crossed to the desk where my laptop sat and opened it up to the document I’d been working on.
I didn’t sit. Standing felt better. Standing let me stare at the screen without pretending that I was actually reading anything on it, which I wasn’t. My brain could not currently process due to bandwidth allocation issues elsewhere.
I thought about that hand, the heat of it through the cotton of my shirt, the way it had stayed there, deliberate, the kind of touch that knew exactly what it was doing and had chosen to do it anyway.
I thought about the fact that he had come himself. Not Leon. Himself. Six-foot-three of controlled menace, personally deployed to a public square because someone had followed the caramel guy.
The implications of that lived in a neighborhood my brain was still mapping, and the real estate values were rising by the minute.
I thought about the way Ari had looked at my mouth in the hallway. Just for a second. Down and then away, like he’d caught himself, like he was correcting a calculation that had arrived at an answer he wasn’t ready to implement.
I’d seen it.
I see everything.
It’s what I do.
I opened a new document. My fingers hovered over the keys, and the words that wanted to come out were not the kind that belonged in a financial audit or an NDA or any document that would ever see the light of a printer.
I reached into my laptop bag. Found the last caramel.
Unwrapped it with the focused attention of a man who was using sugar as a structural support for a nervous system that had been operating at capacity since approximately the moment I had met Ari and my brain had registered him as a problem I was going to enjoy having.
The caramel went into my mouth, sweet and salty. The flavor of a man making a series of questionable decisions and committing to every one of them.
I started typing. Numbers. Accounts. The vendor fraud from this morning, the transaction history, the clean rounding that had tipped me off. Professional things. Things that belonged in a document.
Things that had nothing to do with the heat of a hand on a lower back or the sound of a not-quite-laugh in a courtyard or the way a pair of black eyes had looked at my mouth and then looked away like the looking itself was the transgression.
I typed. The keys clicked under my fingers, steady and familiar, and somewhere in the building—down the hall, through a door, in a study that smelled of cigarette smoke and bad decisions—Ari was also not thinking about me.
I was almost certain of it.
Then the certainty unraveled, thread by thread, until I wasn’t certain at all, and the warmth behind my sternum had nothing to do with the caramel and everything to do with wanting something that was standing on the other side of several very good reasons why wanting it was a catastrophically bad idea.
I kept typing. The document filled. Numbers. Accounts. The clean, clinical architecture of financial forensics, built to withstand scrutiny.
Somewhere in the margins, in the spaces between digits, in the pauses between keystrokes, something warmer lived. Something that had nothing to do with ledgers and everything to do with a hand on a lower back and a decision that hadn’t been announced yet.
I ate the last of the caramel and kept working, and the warmth stayed where it was, patient as the lemon tree in the courtyard, putting in the work, earning its space.