Page 154 of Impulse Control
I hadn’t chosen.
I’d just added another window.
And for now — that felt like enough.
Chapter
Twenty-Seven
RACHEL
Ten minutes turned into twenty.
Not because we decided or because the rain came back. It was more because the café was warm, and she didn’t fill the silence with demands the way my calendar did.
She had ordered something for me while I was still outside, still crossing the street with Dominic in my ear and my life in my chest like a live wire. A second coffee—milk, one sugar, like she’d been paying attention without making it feel like surveillance.
“You guessed,” I said, wrapping my hands around the cup.
“I brought you coffee at the shoot,” she corrected, the faintest smugness on her mouth. “You look like you need to dilute the spreadsheets in your bloodstream.”
I snorted, then immediately regretted it because my laugh sounded too loud in the quiet room.
She just watched me like she’d made a hobby out of noticing the ways I tried not to be noticed.
Outside, Paris moved at its usual pace—pedestrians weaving, scooters slipping through gaps, the drying pavement flashed under the shifting light. Inside, everything smelled like espressoand toasted sugar and that citrus-clean perfume she wore that made my brain do stupid things.
“You didn’t have to come,” I said, because apparently I needed to ruin anything that felt like rest.
Her brows lifted. “That’s an odd thing to say when you’re sitting here.”
“It’s not—” I started, then stopped.Justifying. René’s voice, sharp and bored in my head.
I exhaled and tried again. “I mean… I’m not good at this.”
“At coffee?” she asked, deadpan. It should be illegal how sexy she made those two words with her Australian accent.
“At—” I gestured vaguely between us, then immediately hated myself for it.
Her smile softened into something less amused. “Sitting?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah,” she said, like she’d already clocked that. Like she’d been watching me sprint past my own life and waiting to see if I’d trip.
For a few beats, we did the thing she’d asked for.
We sat.
We existed.
It was horrifying. I fought the urge to fidget.
It was also… nice.
I sipped my coffee and tried not to think about the fact that I’d just declined Dominic’s call and then answered the next anyway and somehow managed to be both a good girlfriend and a bad one in the same five minutes.
“You talked to him,” she said quietly.
