CHAPTER THREE #2
I reached for it. He lifted it smoothly over my head, holding it aloft just out of reach. I stared at him. He stared back down, his expression utterly serious.
"Are you twelve, Ethan?"
"Are you short, Julia?"
I hated how much I laughed around him. Or maybe I hated how easily it happened, because somewhere between the courthouse and that bookstore, I'd stopped thinking about when I was going home.
I should've checked my messages. I had laundry waiting, errands I'd planned to run, and an entire ordinary day that had existed before Ethan Marcelli decided to occupy it.
Instead, I followed him upstairs.
The whiskey bar was small and dark, tucked beneath exposed beams with only a handful of tables.
Candles in short glass holders threw amber pools across the wood.
We took a table near the window, the city moving quietly below us.
He ordered without asking. An actual drink for himself and kindly a mocktail for me.
And we talked.
Bad movies first—he had strong, wrong opinions about a film I loved, which I told him. Food. The pineapple thing came up and nearly ended whatever this was before it started.
He told me about his brothers—not by blood, just the three men he'd built his firm with, the ones who'd shown up when it mattered. He had a sister a few years younger than him, close to my age, who apparently shared my position on pineapple.
I told him about Toya. Meg, and Carmen, who had been absent the night before due to a schedule conflict. He asked follow-up questions. Real ones, the kind that meant he'd actually been listening to the answer before it, not just waiting for the silence that followed.
That might've been the thing that got me.
Not his face.
Not the suit.
Not the tattoos or the low register of his voice or the way buying me a book had somehow felt less like a gesture and more like a joke we'd been telling each other for years.
It was the follow-up questions. The way he'd go still when I was talking, his glass halfway to his mouth and forgotten there, like whatever I was saying was the only thing currently happening in the world.
By the time we walked back out into the afternoon, the air had cooled and carried the distant scent of rain on hot pavement.
Before heading back to where he’d parked his car, we stopped at a hole-in-the-wall Chinese place tucked between a dry cleaner and a shuttered newsstand. The menu was half in Mandarin, the characters brushed in red beside faded English translations.
Ethan stepped up to the counter without hesitation, one hand resting on the laminated menu that lay flat against the glass. I watched him scan the offerings, his dark eyes moving with the efficient assessment of someone who'd ordered here before.
"What do you want?" he asked, not looking up.
I leaned against the counter beside him, close enough that her shoulder brushed his arm. The fluorescent lights overhead buzzed faintly, casting everything in a yellow-green wash. "Kung Pao. Extra peanuts."
He nodded once, then turned to the man behind the counter—older, with salt-and-pepper hair and reading glasses perched on the end of his nose—and rattled off the order in Mandarin. The man didn't even blink, just scribbled on his pad and waited.
"Two orders of Kung Pao, extra peanuts on both," Ethan continued. "Salt and pepper shrimp, and a box of the dumplings. Pork."
I opened my mouth to say that was too much food, then closed it. He hadn't finished.
“What does Latoya like?”
"Sweet and sour chicken," I answered automatically, still processing the unexpected question. "Extra sauce on the side. I can—."
"Add sweet and sour chicken, extra sauce on the side and white rice," he told the counterman, who nodded and continued writing.
The fluorescent lights hummed overhead as I watched Ethan's profile, the efficient way he conducted this transaction that felt like something more significant than ordering takeout. My stomach did a strange little flip that had nothing to do with hunger.
“Thank you.”
“You don’t need to thank me for that,” he replied.
"I know. You didn't have to do that."
Ethan paid with cash, slipping bills across the counter without counting them. The older man handed him change, which Ethan placed in the tip jar without checking the amount.
"She needs to eat too," he said simply.
The counterman disappeared into the kitchen, and the smell hit her first—garlic and ginger and something smoky I couldn't name, layered over the deep, oily warmth of the wok. I watched the steam curl from the kitchen door in pale ribbons that dissolved into the fluorescent glare.
A plastic bag materialized on the counter, heavy and translucent, the containers stacked inside. Ethan gathered it with one hand, the paper bag with my new book tucked beneath his other arm, and turned toward the door.
I followed him out into the cooling afternoon, the heat of the day already breaking apart.
The sky had gone a bruised, heavy gray at the edges, and the air smelled like ozone and concrete and the faint, sharp sweetness of the food in his hand.
A breeze lifted the loose strands of hair at my temples and carried the scent of him.
He didn't offer me the bag. He didn't offer me anything. He just walked beside me down the sidewalk with the practiced ease of a man who understood the weight of his own company and the weight of mine and seemed content to carry both.
I matched his stride.
The book pressed against my ribs through the paper bag, and the plastic of the takeout swung gently with each of his steps, and somewhere behind them the door of the Chinese place chimed once and fell silent.
I didn't know what this was.
I didn't know what to call it. I only knew that for the first time in a long time, the ordinary day I'd planned had folded itself quietly away, and I wasn't going to go looking for it. Ethan's shoulder brushed mine as we rounded the corner toward the lot where he'd parked, and I let it.
The rain held off.
For now.