Page 130 of Shades of Grey & Gold

“Please don’t be a stranger, Max.” She looks at me with tears in her own eyes.

“Please,” Sophia whispers and I see that Maggie is holding her now, as they both look close to tears.

I nod, and force a small smile, fearing if I try to speak, a sob might escape instead. I offer a small wave and turn on my heel.

Nico is still standing in front of the bathroom with his hands in his pockets as I walk toward the foyer.

“I can take you,” he murmurs, looking sorry, like somehow this is his fault.

“No offense, Nico,” I sniffle again, grabbing my jacket from the coat rack beside the door. “If I have to smell you all the way home, I might throw up or go catatonic. Neither of which I think you want to deal with—again.”

He frowns and sniffs at his armpits.

“You smell like him.”

A look of terror, wide-eyed and manic, appears on his face. His mouth opens and closes like he can’t formulate a response.

I shrug my jacket on and stare at him while his eyes look around like the response he is trying to find is on the ceiling or the walls.

“Because you were at the penthouse, you smell like him.”

He snaps his fingers and points at me with a smile. “That’s right, yes.”

I frown and pull open the door.

Gio is already on the other side.

“Bye, Nico.”

He says something I don’t catch because I’m moving as fast as possible to the car to get away from the memories that continue to haunt me, and the smell I can’t ever forget.

Becca is awake when I get home, sitting on our secondhand couch with tea and a look on her face like she knew this would happen.

I’m already crying as I say, “I can’t go back.”

“I know,” she says.

She moves over. I sit. She hands me her tea. The radiator clanks and we sit in the quiet of the small apartment, and I think about how this is what I have now—this couch, Becca, law school, this life that is mine and can be good—and I think he would probably say that’s not nothing.

He’d be right.

Bart lifts his head from his bed on the floor.

He would be right. It’s not nothing.

I just don’t know if it’s enough.

Chapter Forty-Seven

Nico

Theelevatoropensdirectlyinto the foyer, and I stand in it for a moment longer than necessary, cringing at the drop cloth covering the floor where the white marble tile used to be.

Used to be. Weeks ago.

I step out fully and the elevator closes behind me.

Cal’s penthouse smells like construction—sawdust and joint compound, wood and the chemical bite of new paint on the walls. There are drop clothsand piles of new wood flooring all over, buckets in corners and power tools sitting on what used to be the kitchen island as I make my way into the space.