Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Sammie
Morning is a softer animal than night, but it still has teeth.
I know before I open my eyes that I’m not alone. Not from the weight on the mattress or the heat at my back—though both make a case for themselves—but from the way my body has decided to rest. That only happens when something in me believes it’s safe, even if the rest of me is busy arguing.
I keep my eyes closed and catalog the scene like a thief: the linen smell that isn’t mine, the murmur of the HVAC, the hush a good hotel has when it’s doing the work you came here to avoid.
And him. The way his breath finds my shoulder in unhurried intervals, the way his hand is set on my waist like it isn’t claiming anything, just checking the world is where he left it.
“Awake?” he asks, voice low enough that it feels like a secret.
I make a noise that could be yes or no. It earns me a small laugh against my skin, and my stomach flips because he was careful last night and he’s careful now, and I want both the tenderness and the trouble it implies.
“I’m going to move,” he says. “And then I’m going to come back.”
I nod before I mean to. The bed gives as he slips away, the covers lifting and settling.
The bathroom door clicks; water starts—a soft, quick rush—and stops again.
He returns with a glass of water and the face of a man who slept but didn’t dare dream.
Watching me, he sets the glass on the nightstand and slides in behind me, arm finding my waist like we practiced it.
“Hi,” I say into the pillow.
“Hi,” he says into my shoulder.
I turn and face him, hair messy, mouth unguarded. He looks at me like he’s counting things other people missed. It should make me squirm. It doesn’t. It steadies me, the way hands on my hips did last night when restraint and desire shook hands and agreed not to embarrass us.
“How do you feel?” he asks. It isn’t a formality; it’s a check-in. He waits for the real answer.
“Like I finally exhaled and now I have to learn how to breathe like a person again,” I say. “Hungry. Scared. Better.”
His mouth tilts. “We can handle that range.”
I reach up and touch the rough at his jaw with my fingers, the places a razor pretends to smooth and fails. “You kept your promise.”
“I always will,” he says. “Especially when you make it hard.”
“I know,” I say, and the relief that unfurls in my chest is both embarrassing and holy. “I—” The word stalls because too many follow it. I try again. “Thank you.”
“You don’t owe me gratitude for choosing what you wanted,” he says, so gentle it almost hurts. “If you want to thank me, drink that water and let me order you something with actual calories.”
I glance at the clock. Too early for a woman who was supposed to go home hours ago. Too late for pretending none of this happened. The calendar ticks under my skin: three days until the gala; forever to deal with the fallout.
“What time do you have to be at the rink?” I ask.
He brushes hair from my temple with the back of a knuckle, like touching me with the softest part of himself means something he can’t say out loud. “Morning skate’s late today. Twelve. I’ll leave when you tell me to.”
“You’ll leave?” It comes out sharper than I intend, like the word itself is a bruise.
He hears it and softens his mouth. “Only to make it easier. Not because I want to.”
“I don’t want to make it easy,” I say. “I want to make it honest.”
“Honest is harder,” he says, amused and approving. “Best kind of hard.”
I groan at the choice of words and bury my face in his chest, mortified. He laughs, both hands lifting in a no-hands gesture that still somehow counts as holding me. “Breakfast?” He offers, a peace treaty disguised as room service.
“Coffee,” I bargain. “Then food. Then…”
“Then you decide if you want to shower here or go home and pretend it was an early morning errand.”
I look up. “You always narrate the routes?”
“Only when the map matters.”
We order like people who’ve seen other mornings and failed to make them stick: coffee, eggs, toast, fruit.
While we wait, he kisses my forehead, my nose, the corner of my mouth, as if the slow path needs to be re-learned in sunlight.
We do not make it messy again. It’s not about self-control, not exactly.
It’s about honoring the version of last night that deserves to stand separately from morning’s logistics.
When the knock finally comes, he goes to the door in pajama pants that do not belong to him and a T-shirt that might.
The tray rolls in; the server pretends not to see me pulling the duvet higher.
Triston tips like a man who knows labor when he sees it, and when the door clicks shut, the room exhales with us again.
We sit cross-legged on top of the covers, his knee knocking mine, my hair refusing to behave.
Coffee scalds my tongue and I forgive it.
Toast crunches; butter finds its way to my knuckle and he catches it with a napkin like he’s afraid of being caught doing the thing he actually wants to do, which is lean over and lick it away.
“You’re thinking about my father,” I say, because the silence has that shape.
“I’m thinking about how I don’t want to turn you into a problem he has to solve,” he admits. “And how that might be impossible no matter how careful we are.”
“He was born looking for fires,” I say. “I keep handing him matches.”
He studies me. “Do you feel guilty?”
“For what? Wanting you?” I stab a piece of melon to keep from wringing my hands. “Yes and no. Not for wanting. For lying by omission. For forcing him to play the villain in a story where he’s actually the man who taught me to say no.”
“He didn’t fail,” Triston says. “You didn’t, either.”
“Then why do I feel like I’m slipping?” My voice betrays me at the end, that thin high note grief likes to wear when it wants to be mistaken for hysteria.
He sets his fork down and takes my wrist with two fingers, the same place his mouth blessed last night. He doesn’t squeeze. He names my pulse with a quiet thumb. “Because you were balancing on other people’s edges for so long that standing on your own feels like falling.”
I blink against the sting in my eyes. “You always do that.”
“What?”
“Point at a truth and make it sound like permission.”
He shrugs, the small, self-mocking one that says he didn’t earn the compliment and will keep it anyway.
“Play your part at the gala,” he says. “Be your father’s right hand and the team’s smiling assassin with a seating chart.
If you want me near, I’ll be near. If you don’t, I won’t make a show of wanting what can’t be hidden without damage. ”
I turn the coffee mug between my hands. “Near.”
He nods as if we just agreed on something as simple as napkin color. “Then we’ll be near.”
We eat. We don’t rush. We’ve learned the trick of ordinary in a room built for extraordinary: chew, sip, breathe, repeat.
After, he clears the tray like a man who has waited tables, and I step into the bathroom to wash my face and meet the woman who did last night.
The mirror doesn’t lie. My mouth is swollen in a way only I would notice.
My eyes look… not haunted, not this morning. Hungry. Fed. Ready to be hungry again.
When I emerge, towel slung around my neck, he’s buttoning his shirt, tie hanging loose like a promise he hasn’t decided how to keep.
The sight of the knot undone makes my chest ache for reasons that have nothing to do with lust and everything to do with care: the way he let me loosen it with shaking fingers and didn’t make it a game, the way he watched my face more than my hands.
“I should go home,” I say.
He nods. “I’ll call a car.”
“I can drive.” I wince the instant I say it, because my car is at the party hotel’s garage, and going back right now is a running-with-scissors choice.
“I’ll call a car,” he repeats gently.
I cross to him and take the tie like it belongs to both of us.
“Let me.” I knot it slowly, carefully, a domestic intimacy that feels as dangerous as anything we did in the dark.
He watches my mouth while I work. When I smooth the tie down, I keep my palm on his chest for a beat, feeling his heart knock against the bone I want to live under.
“Tell me to wait tonight,” he says, so soft I almost miss it.
“Wait,” I say.
“Done.”
He walks me to the door like a man walking his own heart to a cliff and asking it to jump without theatrics.
In the hallway he doesn’t touch me. In the elevator, he does—one quick press of his fingers to mine, hidden between us like a gift I’ll find later in a coat pocket.
The lobby is indifferent to us. Outside, the car idles. He opens the door. I slide in.
“Text me when you’re home,” he says, and somehow it doesn’t sound like monitoring. It sounds like the sentence you say when the person you want to keep has a life you don’t intend to steal.
“I will.”
He leans in, not to kiss me, just to look at me one inch closer. “You’re not breakable,” he says again, as if I didn’t believe him the first time. “You’re bright.”
“Go skate,” I whisper. “Make them chase you.”
He smiles, the rare one that shows teeth and makes me feel like I just punched through clean ice. “I always do.”
The car pulls away, and I let myself watch him in the rearview until he’s gone. Then I lean back, close my eyes, and rehearse the story I’ll tell if my father is waiting in my kitchen with coffee and disappointment.
The city is hateful and beautiful in the morning light.
People walk dogs in coats more expensive than my rent.
A woman runs with leggings like war paint and a face that says she enjoys being cold.
The car drops me at the end of my block at my request. I like the last walk alone, the small reset that lets me shed the hotel and don the house.