STRAWBERRY NIGHT

Adriana Chen

Looking back now, the way he looked at me that first evening should have told me everything. His whole presentation was the precise type I had spent my entire life instinctively avoiding. I had a radar for men like Julian Sinclair. I had always taken the longer route around them, kept my gaze low, my posture closed. I mean for his gift was a packet of protection.

Julian pressed his cigar into the ashtray slowly, the ember dying with a small hiss. Then he straightened, adjusted the lapels of his coat with two fingers, and let the smirk stretch.

 "I hate kids," he announced.

 He was already turning, already moving toward the door when he paused mid-step as though something had just occurred to him. He glanced back at Andrew, casual and cutting in equal measure.

 "Right — when is the wedding, bro? Don't forget to send an invitation." And then he was gone, his footsteps disappearing.

Benjamin Sinclair was on his feet before the echo of those steps had faded, his jaw set, excusing himself quietly. Down the corridor — Benjamin & Julian

From where I sat, I could hear them, not every word, but enough. The sharp cadence of Benjamin's voice, controlled but fraying at the edges. Then Julian's, lower, slower, each syllable a door closing.

It was Victoria who moved first. She rose from her seat with the quiet authority of a woman who had learned that rage left more wreckage than grace. She touched my hand once brief, warm, certain — before she followed them.

I stayed the night. The room assigned to me was vast in the way that old money rooms always are — high ceilings, heavy drapes, furniture chosen to last rather than impress. I stood in the middle of it for a long moment after the door clicked shut, just breathing.

Andrew found me before I could spiral. He was warm and present and entirely himself, and when I wrapped my arms around him from behind and pressed my lips softly to the back of his neck, the tension in my shoulders unknotted itself by degrees.

"Is he always like that?" I murmured, his hands finding mine, fingers interlacing.

"Like what?"

"Like some — like a complete and utter—" I exhaled sharply. "Is it just being a spoiled kid? What is actually wrong with him?"

Andrew was quiet for a moment too long. The warmth in his posture shifted; he moved to the window, and the city lights below painted the side of his face in gold and grey. When he spoke, his voice had gone somewhere careful. "I don't really blame him. If I were in his position, I would probably hate me too."

"What does that mean?"

"Family things. Dark family things. Things I don't want you anywhere near." He crossed back to me and stepped into my open arms, and I held him, this careful, considered, warm man I had chosen and I didn't ask again. I trusted him. That was the truest and most naive thing about me.

I moved in officially the next morning. The wedding was two weeks away. In those fourteen days I settled into the mansion's rhythms — the soft knock of Mr. Grey before breakfast, Victoria's laughter drifting from the garden, the vast library on the second floor that became my favourite room. Julian was absent from all of it. According to the butler, he rarely came home. I filed that information away and did not examine my relief too closely.

✦ ✦ ✦

Three Days Before the Wedding — Midnight

I woke at midnight with the particular thirst that comes from a too-warm room and too many thoughts. I pulled on what was closest, a red satin slip dress, loose at the shoulders, edged in lace, the kind of thing you only wear when you are certain no one is watching. The house was a held breath. Not a footstep, not a creak. I padded barefoot down the grand staircase into the kitchen, where the refrigerator light spilled out in a single cold rectangle across the marble floor.

I had the jar of water in my hand when his voice came from behind me.

"Trouble sleeping, sunshine?"

I startled so hard the jar slipped. A he caught it before it could shatter. I spun around, heart slamming once, hard, against my ribs like it had just remembered what fear felt like.

Julian Sinclair stood barely two feet away, in dark trousers and a black shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows. He handed the jar back with a half-smile that didn't reach his eyes. 

"Careful, sister-in-law. Well — to-be."

"Hello," I managed, taking a step back. My heel found the cabinet behind me. There was nowhere further to go.

"Relax, sunshine. I won't bite." He reached past me for a glass. He poured the water and held it out. "Unless you want me to."

I took the glass and drank in a single go and was already turning to leave when his arm came up, not grabbing, just appearing, cutting off my exit. I turned back and found him closer than he'd been a second ago, one hand braced on the refrigerator above my head, the other holding a small tin. Red berries. My back found the cold metal of the fridge and stayed there.

"A friend recommended these," he said, his gaze fixed on me. "I've never tasted them before. But I hear your specialty is plants. Exotic farming." A pause as he drew one berry from the tin. "Tell me if she has a good taste."

He was tall in a way I hadn't properly registered when we first met. Here, with the refrigerator at my back and nothing between us but cold air and the faint smell of something dark and woodsy, his cologne, or just him, I couldn't separate them he was enormous.

My pulse did something it had no business doing. It didn't race faster after every beat. I told myself it was the shock of being startled. His eyes moved over my face with an attention that felt surgical. My fingers tightened around the glass. I didn't move.

I reached for the berry.

His hand intercepted mine barely a touch, just a redirection, his fingers curling once around my wrist and releasing before I'd registered the contact.

 "I'll be the one doing the feeding," 

Something went very wrong with my breathing.

He lifted the berry and ran it across my lips, slowly, the skin of the fruit was cool and impossibly soft and he moved it with a patience that felt like punishment, tracing the curve of my lower lip, then the upper, then back again. My entire nervous system narrowed to that single point of contact.

 My heart was no longer beating normally; it had taken on something closer to a stagger, an arrhythmic stutter I felt in my throat, in my fingertips, behind my eyes.

My lips parted slightly. He pulled the berry away.

Brought it to his own mouth. Bit into it slowly, deliberately, his eyes never leaving mine, dark juice catching the faint light. Then he held out what remained, the other half, glistening, offered between his fingers, and before I could locate a single reason to refuse, he pressed it between my lips himself.

The flavour bloomed, sweet with an edge of something almost bitter underneath. He leaned in, close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off him. His voice, when it came, was barely above a murmur, each word landing precisely where he intended it. 

"How does it feel?" A fraction closer. The glass in my hand was the only cold thing left in the world. "Delicious?"