Page 40 of You, Only You

He moved to stand beside me at the counter, close enough that our shoulders almost touched. Close enough that I could feel the warmth of him, solid and present and here, which wasthe thing he kept choosing to be, even when I was furious with him, even when he'd messed up, even when the smart move was to retreat behind his walls and wait for the storm to pass. He didn't retreat. He stood there and took it and came back.

My father had never done that either.

"Twenty-four hours," he said quietly.

Outside the penthouse windows, the city glittered with indifferent light. Somewhere out there, Victor Reeves was planning his next move, probably congratulating himself on the car accident that should have taken me out of the game.

He had no idea what was coming.

And standing beside Will in the kitchen, shoulder to shoulder, close enough to touch but not touching, I realized that the door I'd walked through back at the storage unit had led somewhere I hadn't expected. Not into his world. Into ours. A messy, complicated, frequently infuriating world where the man I was falling for had a tracking problem and a hero complex and the best omelet recipe I'd ever tasted.

It wasn't what I'd planned. None of this was what I'd planned.

But the plan, like the lo mein argument and the wobbling second table and every other carefully constructed excuse we'd built between us, had never been the point.

He was the point. We were the point. And tomorrow, we'd find out if that was enough.

10.Will

Istood at the window for an hour after Lindsey closed the guest room door, and I didn't pace. Didn't strategize. Didn't reach for my phone or my laptop or any of the tools I normally used to turn bad situations into manageable ones.

I just stood there. Useless. Which was, apparently, what I deserved to be.

The city did its thing beyond the glass. Traffic moved. Lights changed. People walked dogs and argued into phones and lived their ordinary lives. I watched all of it and saw none of it, because my brain was stuck on a loop: the look on her face when she'd held up the phone. Not anger. Something worse than anger. The quiet, careful devastation of someone who'd been expecting this.

She'd been expecting it. That was the part I couldn't get past. She'd taken the phone from me and used it for four days and at some point she'd started watching the battery drain and she'd thought: I should check. Because she'd learned, at twenty-four, that gifts from people you trust come with hidden costs. Because her father had taught her that lesson so thoroughly it was coded into her operating system.

And I'd confirmed it. I'd taken the fragile, hard-won trust she'd offered me and I'd installed surveillance on it.

The locked room in my chest, the one where I'd been putting all the things I wasn't ready to deal with, was making sounds. Not metaphorical sounds. Actual physical sensations. Pressure behind my sternum. A tightness in my throat. The particular discomfort of a man who has run out of rationalizations and is left with nothing but the raw shape of what he's done.

I poured a scotch. Held it. Didn't drink it. Set it down on the counter and watched the amber liquid catch the light.

Then I called Nicole.

The phone rang twice. She picked up with music playing in the background, something folksy, and the clatter of dishes.

"Hey, hold on, I'm washing..." The water turned off. "Okay. Hi. You never call this early. What did you do?"

"Why do you assume I did something?"

"Because you have a specific voice for 'I need to talk about my feelings' and a different voice for 'I did something stupid and I need you to tell me it's going to be okay.' This is the second one."

She wasn't wrong. She was never wrong about this. Three thousand miles away, and she could read me through a phone line the way Lindsey read spreadsheets: instantly, accurately, with an annoying lack of effort.

"I installed a tracking app on Lindsey's phone," I said. No preamble. No context. Just the ugly fact, sitting there.

Dead silence. The folksy music was still playing faintly in the background.

"Will."

"I know."

"You tracked her? After everything you promised? After the fight about her apartment?"

"Yes."

"Why?"