Page 56 of Nash
I step back from the window.
This is why.
The distance. The retreat. Why he stopped looking at me after the hallway. The way he kissed me like I was everything, then spent two days treating me like a perimeter.Not like this. Not in a hallway. Not because you can't sleep.I thought he was being careful. I thought he was protecting something between us, holding it until the timing was right.
He was coming to his senses.
The headband belongs to her. The headband has always belonged to her. He wears it every day, sleeps with it on his wrist, presses it when he's thinking. I told myself it was a talisman, a habit, a comfort object. It's not. It's a leash. And the woman holding the other end is standing in front of him right now with her taped fingers on his arm with the kind of ease that says I was here first.
I was a slip. A late-night, post-adrenaline slip that he corrected in the morning the way he corrects everything: with discipline, with distance. With the wall going back up brick by brick until the woman who climbed him in a hallway is just another detail on the other side of it.
The case I've been building just closed.
I walk back to the car. Get in. Close the door. Put my hands on the steering wheel and grip until my knuckles turn white.
I don't cry. Don't shake. I sit in the dark with my hands on the wheel and the conclusion I've been running from sitting in my lap. It's not a detonation. It's a door closing. Quiet. Final. The click of a lock engaging on a room I was never invited into.
I start the engine and drive.
Chapter 15
Nash
Fourdays.Somethingshiftedfour days ago, and I can't find the source.
Ruby still talks. Still jokes. Still wears the red lipstick and fills whatever room she's in with a frequency my chest registers before my brain catches up.
Yesterday she told Frankie's client that his shoulder piece was going to make him look like a "tattooed Hemsworth, but with better taste and worse decision-making." The whole shop laughed. The client laughed. Frankie laughed. I waited for her to glance at me the way she always does after a joke lands, checking for my mouth twitch, measuring the damage.
She didn't even glance.
Last week she made a joke about my security sweeps, making it sound like a nature documentary. Delivered it with her chin tilted, her eyes locked on mine, waiting for the crack. When my jaw fought, she followed up with a second one, sharper, lower, her voice dropping into the register that hits somewhere behind my sternum. Frankie had to put her machine down. The client was grinning. I bit the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste copper. For a second, everyone else in the room faded, and it was the two of us pretending not to notice.
Now the room stays wide. My chest stays loose. My jaw doesn't fight because there's nothing to fight.
I miss it. The ache that sits low in my ribs is constant.
I lie on her couch at two in the morning and listen to the silence through the wall. She's awake. I can tell by the rhythm of her breathing, the way it never fully settles, the way the sheets shift every few minutes.
A week ago I had her against that wall. Her legs wrapped around my waist, her back pinned against the plaster, the sound she made when my thigh pressed between hers. Her mouth was on mine, nails in my shoulders, and hips grinding against my cock until I had to grip her hip hard enough to leave marks just to stop myself from carrying her into the bedroom and finishing what we started. Yes sir. Stripped bare. No joke underneath.
I pulled back the next morning. Spent three days putting distance between us because the alternative was crossing a line I couldn't uncross. Three days of me retreating. Then something shifted in her, and the last four days have been hers.
Now I'm on this side of the wall with the spring in my back. She's on the other side with whatever I broke. The silence where her voice should be is louder than anything she's ever said.
In the morning, I make her coffee. Two sugars. Splash of cream. Set it on the counter. She takes it without our fingerstouching. Four days ago she brushed up against me on purpose. Now she waits until my hand is clear.
"Morning," she says. Bright. Easy. Aimed past me.
"Morning."
"Frankie's got a full day. I've got a sleeve session and two consults." She takes a sip. "Ready when you are."
I watch her over the rim of my mug. She's dressed with purpose this morning. Her jeans, boots, her jacket pulled from the hook by the door. Everything buttoned, zipped, covered. Last week she walked out of the bathroom in sleep shorts and a tank top with her hair still damp, close enough that I could smell coconut, then held my gaze until my chest ached. This morning she's armored.
"You good?" I ask.
"Always." The word lands flat. She rinses her mug, grabs her bag, and heads for the door.
