Page 98 of Power Play

The concern in his voice nearly broke me.

I wanted to open it. I wanted to let him walk into the bathroom, look at the measuring tape marks on my skin, and somehow understand everything I couldn’t explain without making me say it.

The fantasy lasted only a second.

Then I imagined his face changing.

Ryan had spent weeks telling me I was beautiful. He touched my waist like he wanted it, kissed my body without hesitation, and watched me eat slowly without turning it into an interrogation. If he saw me like this, he would finally understand that the woman he wanted wasn’t real. She was a finished product built from lighting, clothing, makeup, hunger, and enough self-control to hide what happened before anyone arrived.

I kept my palms against the counter until the cold reached through the panic. Gradually, my breathing began to slow. The room stopped narrowing around me, though my hands continued trembling when I reached for a tissue.

Ryan had been waiting almost five minutes.

I lowered my shirt and faced the mirror, repairing everything that had slipped while I came apart. I wiped the tear tracks from my cheeks, fixed the mascara collecting beneath one lash, smoothed my hair, and pressed my lips together until the color looked even again.

By the time I stepped back from the counter, Charmagne Harlen looked exactly like Charmagne Harlen was supposed to look.

Nobody ever saw the process. They saw the finished product.

I sprayed perfume across my wrists because routine mattered, slipped my phone into my purse, checked my earrings, and gave myself one final inspection. My first attempt at a smile looked wrong, so I relaxed my mouth and tried again until the woman staring back at me appeared pleasant, composed, and entirely unaware anything had happened.

Ryan knocked once more. “I’m about thirty seconds from picking this lock.”

“You don’t know how to pick a lock.”

“I know people.”

Despite everything, the smallest laugh caught in my throat.

“I’m coming.”

I turned off the bathroom light and went to meet him.

Ryan stood in the hallway with a canvas bag slung over one shoulder, three books stacked against his chest, and two coffees balanced in one hand like he had made the trip often enough to stop treating my apartment as somewhere he needed permission to enter. His backward cap sat low over his brow, a few dark strands curling near his ears from the humidity, and his black T-shirt stretched across his shoulders in a way that temporarily erased Professor Brown, the mirror, my mother, and every other problem I had been carrying five minutes earlier.

His mouth curved when he saw me. “You planning to leave me out here until dinner?”

“I was getting ready.”

“For four additional minutes?”

“I’m extremely detailed.”

“I’ve noticed.”

He leaned in before stepping past me, pressed a kiss against my mouth, and handed me my coffee.

The kiss was barely anything, which somehow made it worse.

Ryan had kissed me enough over the last few weeks that affection had started slipping between us without ceremony. A kiss hello. His hand against my back when he passed behind me. My legs across his lap while we read. His thumb moving over my knuckles in the truck. Things I had spent years imagining had become ordinary enough that I was only beginning to understand how much I depended on the ordinary.

He dropped his keys beside the bowl near the door without asking where they went, and the familiarity hurt in a place I didn’t want to examine.

“You’re staring at me.”

I blinked. Ryan had already made it halfway toward the kitchen.

“I’m evaluating the number of books you brought.”