Novels by Aveline Kryss

Somewhere across the room, a phone buzzed insistently against the nightstand, and I surfaced slowly from sleep with the distinct sense that something important was being ignored. I reached blindly toward the sound and found nothing, the phone apparently having migrated during the night, and squinted at the clock instead, my brain taking several long seconds to register what it was actually telling me."Damien." I sat up properly, the tangled sheets falling away, and shook his shoulder with more urgency than the gentle wake-up I'd originally intended. "Damien, it's nearly eight."He groaned into the pillow, one arm still draped over my waist, apparently in no hurry to acknowledge the crisis unfolding around us. "That seems unlikely.""I have an early session at New Ground.""I have a meeting with the board." He finally lifted his head, blinking at the clock with the particular betrayed expression of a man who genuinely believed time had personally wronged him. "How did we sleep through

I filed that reaction away carefully, watching the way his composure had briefly slipped at those two small words, and decided immediately that this was information worth testing further. "Mine," I said again, mostly to confirm what I'd already noticed, and felt the satisfaction of watching him go still all over again, his jaw tightening in a way that gave him away completely."You're doing that on purpose now.""I'm confirming a theory.""You're conducting an experiment at my expense." He tried to sound accusatory, but the effect was undermined considerably by how his hands had settled more firmly at my waist, no real complaint behind the words at all."Consider it thorough research," I said, reaching for his loosened tie and using it to draw him closer, watching his eyes track the movement with obvious interest. "You spent the entire evening enjoying yourself at my expense. I'm allowed a much shorter study.""That seems like an unfair comparison.""It seems like exactly the right co

"I know," I said, before he could continue, reaching for the second cufflink still caught between his fingers. "I never thought there was."He paused, clearly having braced for something else entirely, some reassurance he'd clearly rehearsed on the way home now sitting unused between us. I took the cufflink from him gently and set it on the nightstand beside its match, then let my hand rest against the arm Victoria had touched hours earlier, my fingers tracing lightly along his forearm."Then what was it," Damien asked, watching me with genuine curiosity now instead of amusement, his earlier teasing fully set aside."I looked at her hand on you and thought she should move it." I said it plainly, no elaboration attached, the whole shape of the feeling simple enough that dressing it up further would have only made it less true. "That was the entire problem.""You weren't worried.""No." I shook my head slightly, my hand still resting against his arm. "I wasn't afraid of anything. I was

I pulled away from him and walked toward the bedroom without answering, refusing to give him the satisfaction of another word, though I could hear him following at an unhurried pace, in no rush at all despite my obvious retreat. I reached back to unfasten my earrings, and his hands appeared before mine did, gentle and familiar, working the clasp free with the ease of a man who'd done this a hundred times before without me asking."I can do it myself," I said, though I didn't actually stop him."I'm aware. I'm choosing to help anyway." He set the earrings on the dresser, loosened his tie and shrugged out of his jacket, the particular unhurried grace that always made ordinary tasks look faintly theatrical when he did them. "Do you think this jacket needs to be retired, given the circumstances?""What circumstances.""Victoria touched the sleeve." He held it up briefly, inspecting it like evidence. "I'm asking whether it requires your approval before I wear it again, or whether we've rea

"I don't know what you mean," I said, entirely unconvincingly, keeping my eyes fixed on the streetlights sliding past outside the window rather than looking at him directly."You don't." He didn't sound remotely convinced, the corner of his mouth already threatening to become a full smile. "That's interesting, because you've had a very specific expression since I crossed the room to you, well before Victoria's story even started.""I'm allowed to have expressions, Damien.""You are. This particular one seemed to appear directly after a woman put her hand on my arm." His thumb moved slowly against my fingers while his eyes remained properly on the road, his amusement obvious even without him looking at me. "I only mention it because you're normally significantly better at hiding things from me.""I wasn't hiding anything. There was nothing to hide."He made a low, unconvinced sound and let it sit there, entirely too pleased with himself, while my irritation sharpened at how thoroughly

"What does that mean?" I asked, before Damien could redirect the conversation toward anything safer, and I caught the small, resigned sigh he gave beside me, clearly already anticipating exactly where this was headed."Do not encourage her," Damien said, glancing at Victoria with a look that carried years of practiced warning behind it, though the corner of his mouth betrayed him entirely."I'm going to encourage her considerably," I said, and Victoria laughed, delighted, already leaning slightly toward me like a woman settling in to tell a story she'd clearly enjoyed retelling for years."Years ago, I brought a proposal into his office," Victoria said. "One projection buried in the middle was wrong, a small error in the growth model, easy enough to miss if you weren't looking for it specifically.""He was looking for it specifically," I guessed."He found it within the first four minutes." Victoria's smile widened. "Ended the meeting on the spot. Didn't raise his voice, didn't explai

"I'm not jealous," he said, immediately, entirely too fast to be convincing."Roman.""I'm processing information.""You're jealous."He was quiet for a second, jaw working like he was deciding whether dignity was worth the fight. "Fine. A little." He said it like a concession in a negotiation he'd clearly lost before it started. "Not because I think anything's happening. I trust you completely. I trust him, professionally, as much as I can trust a man who apparently gets to look at your work up close on a Tuesday night while I'm across town not understanding a single thing you're talking about.""You could learn.""I have no interest in humidity readings.""You have interest in whatever lets you understand this part of my life.""That's not the same as interest in the wood itself."I laughed, delighted, and didn't rush to smooth it over the way I might have years ago, some old instinct to manage his feelings before they became inconvenient. I just let him sit in it, watching him try

I answered on the third ring, Roman still close enough that I could feel him not-quite listening, pretending sudden interest in the bowl he'd been trying to relocate all evening."Sorry, I know it's late," Adrian said, no preamble, straight into the problem the way he always was. "The Hendricks panel. The one we flagged for the humidity issue last month. The reading spiked again tonight and I don't trust myself to make the call on whether we pull it or leave it another week.""How high?"He gave me the number, and I felt myself shift automatically into the part of my brain that lived for exactly this kind of problem, running through the material, the timeline, the risk of moving it versus the risk of leaving it exposed. Roman watched me change in real time, laughing wife dissolving into something more precise, more certain, and I caught him noticing without saying anything about it."Pull it," I said. "Tonight if you can get someone in, tomorrow morning at the latest. That reading's c

"It's going in the living room." "It is going nowhere near the living room." "It's earned its place." "It has earned banishment." I carried the crooked bowl the entire drive home like a trophy, and Roman spent the whole time looking at it in the passenger seat with the wariness of a man escorting an unexploded device.Back at the townhouse, I set it deliberately on the console table by the door, and he moved it to the kitchen counter within ten minutes, muttering something about it being "closer to disposal" from there. I moved it back. He relocated it a second time. By the third relocation we'd stopped pretending to be serious about it and were mostly just laughing, clay still drying in patches on both of us from the studio."You have some on your neck," he said, reaching to brush it away, his thumb lingering a beat longer than the cleanup strictly required."You have some in your eyebrow.""That's structurally impossible.""It's very possible. It's right there."He went to check in

"You said practical clothing." "I said comfortable. Those are different words." "You knew what would happen." "I had theories." He looked down at his sleeves, already rolled to the elbow despite his obvious resistance to the whole enterprise, and followed me inside like a man walking into a meeting he hadn't been briefed for.The instructor demonstrated the wheel with the kind of casual competence that made it look effortless, clay rising smoothly between her hands into something resembling an actual bowl, and Roman watched with the intense focus he usually reserved for quarterly earnings. "That looks manageable." "It is not manageable." "You've never tried it." "I know myself."I was right. Within thirty seconds his clay had gone lopsided, listing hard to one side like a building mid-collapse, and he stared at it with genuine betrayal, as if the material itself had personally failed to meet expectations. "It was centered." "It was not centered." "The instructor said it was centered."

I told him at breakfast that this week's date was mine to plan, and he took it about as well as I expected, which was to say he immediately began treating the information like a puzzle he intended to solve before we ever left the house. "Just tell me the general category." "No." "Indoor or outdoor." "No." "Formal or casual." "Roman." "I'm asking reasonable questions." "You're asking reconnaissance questions."By the time I'd finished getting dressed, he'd already changed his shirt twice, apparently guessing his way toward the correct level of formality through sheer trial and error, and I found him standing in front of the closet holding two nearly identical jackets like the fate of the evening depended on his choice."Those are the same jacket.""They are not the same jacket.""Roman, they are the same color, the same cut, and I genuinely cannot tell them apart.""One has a different lining.""Nobody will see the lining.""I'll know."I left him to it and went downstairs, and he appe

I turned the coaster over in my hands one more time before setting it beside the photograph, and something occurred to me watching the two of them sit there together, our early relationship reduced to a napkin, a ticket stub, a scrap of paper neither of us had planned to keep."We should start a new box."Roman looked up. "For what?""For this. Now. Not evidence we used to love each other. Evidence we're actually living."He considered that with more seriousness than the idea probably deserved, then went and found a small wooden document box from somewhere in his study, sturdy and plain, the kind of thing that had probably held nothing more interesting than old contracts until this moment. "This is good. Sturdy." "You're already treating this like an infrastructure project." "Everything worth keeping requires infrastructure." "You're impossible."We wandered through the townhouse trying to decide what qualified, and Roman's first suggestion was a spare key to the coffee machine, which