CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Kael — What I Won’t Let Myself Want
She fell asleep in the passenger seat on the drive back from Queens, exhaustion finally outpacing the adrenaline of the day, and I spent forty minutes doing the thing I’d sworn off doing in front of her — watching her, not from a distance this time, close enough to see the small furrow that stayed between her brows even in sleep, like even her unconscious mind refused to fully let its guard down.
I’ve spent four years cataloguing details about this woman that I had no right to know.
The way she takes her coffee. The particular quality of quiet she falls into after a difficult conversation, different from the quiet of contentment, sharper at the edges.
I know these things the way you know the details of a life you’ve watched from outside a window, and I’ve told myself, over and over, that the knowing was in service of the protecting, that there was a clean line between the two.
There isn’t. There never was. I’ve known that since the gallery, since a painting of black water made something in my chest go tight in a way that had nothing to do with reconnaissance.
I pulled up outside her building and didn’t wake her right away.
Gave myself thirty seconds of a life I don’t get to have — her, asleep, safe, trusting me enough to close her eyes in a car with a man whose entire relationship to her began in secrecy and surveillance.
Thirty seconds of imagining a version of this where none of that history existed, where I was simply a man who’d met a woman at a gallery opening and asked for her number like anyone else gets to.
“We’re here,” I said finally, because thirty seconds was already more than I’d earned.
She woke slowly, the furrow between her brows softening as awareness returned, and for one unguarded moment before she remembered exactly who I was and everything that came with it, she looked at me the way I’d been afraid to let myself imagine anyone looking at me again — without calculation, without fear, just tired and human and present.
“Thank you,” she said. “For today. For not deciding what I got to see.”
“You don’t have to thank me for the bare minimum.”
“Maybe not. But you’ve spent four years thinking the bare minimum was too much to risk giving me, so I’m going to keep thanking you for it until it stops being remarkable that you did.
” A small, tired smile, the first one she’d given me since the storage unit, since before that, since the night at the market when she’d turned around and found me instead of a stranger.
“I’m not saying I trust you completely. I’m saying today was a start. ”
I walked her to her door because some habits from four years of watching had turned into something closer to instinct than obligation, and at the threshold she paused, keys in hand, close enough that I could see the exact color of her eyes for the first time without the distance I’d always kept between us — a gray that shifted toward green in the porch light, nothing like the flat dark I’d imagined from two blocks away for four years.
“Goodnight, Kael,” she said, and there was something in the way she said my name now, easier than the first time, that felt like being handed something I hadn’t earned and wasn’t sure I deserved.
I didn’t kiss her. I wanted to, with an intensity that frightened me more than Vane ever had, and I didn’t, because the last four years had taught me exactly one lesson worth keeping: that everything I want most is exactly the thing I have no right to take before it’s freely given.
I watched her door close, and I stood on that step longer than any reasonable man would, and for the first time since this began, the ache in my chest wasn’t guilt.
It was hope, which felt far more dangerous.