Chapter Nine: Cracks in the Armor

“We’re not fighting it,” I said, before he could answer his own question. “Fighting it just makes a bigger story. Moving in quietly makes a smaller one.”

“That’s the practical answer.”

“It’s the only answer I’ve got tonight.”

He nodded, and that was that. No more discussion, just two moving trucks worth of his life arriving at my building on Friday morning, mostly boxes of books, more books than I’d expected from a man who only ever carried the one with no cover.

“You read all of these?”

“Most of them. Some of them are for research.” He set a box down in the spare room Gerald’s team had designated his, though we both knew that was a formality neither of us intended to enforce past the cameras. “Don’t touch the ones on top. I haven’t finished them yet.”

“I wasn’t going to touch your books.”

“You were absolutely going to touch my books.”

He wasn’t wrong, and I didn’t dignify it with a response.

That first week fell into a strange rhythm, half performance, half something neither of us had a name for. We cooked dinner together most nights, badly at first, better once we figured out he could actually handle a knife and I could actually follow a recipe if someone stood close enough to keep me from burning things.

“You’re doing it wrong,” he said, one hand covering mine on the cutting board, adjusting the angle of the knife before I took a finger off along with the onion.

“I’ve been cooking for myself for ten years.”

“And yet.”

“Shut up and hand me the garlic.”

He did, brushing past me to reach it, close enough that I felt the warmth of him along my whole side for half a second before he stepped back to his side of the counter like he’d remembered a rule I hadn’t seen written down anywhere.

“You’re a good cook,” I said, surprised, once he’d plated something that actually looked like a restaurant had made it.

“I lived alone a long time. You either learn or you starve.”

“That’s a bleak way to learn a skill.”

“Most of the useful ones start out bleak.” He said it lightly, but something underneath it wasn’t light at all, and I didn’t push, because I was starting to learn which doors he’d actually open if I gave him room, and which ones he’d slam shut faster the harder I knocked.

We ate on the couch most nights instead of at the table, some show playing that neither of us really watched, plates balanced on our knees, his shoulder eventually finding its way against mine without either of us deciding it should happen. It stopped feeling strange faster than I wanted it to.

One night, somewhere between the second episode and the third, I caught him looking at me instead of the screen. I don’t know which of us moved first. His hand found the side of my face, careful, like he thought I might pull away, and for a second neither of us breathed, faces close enough that I could count the small scar through his eyebrow up close for the first time.

Then he stopped. Pulled back, just an inch, but it might as well have been a mile.

“We shouldn’t,” he said, voice rough.

“Why not.”

“Because I don’t get to have this. Not with everything I haven’t told you.” He looked away first, jaw tight, hand dropping from my face like it had cost him something to lift it in the first place. “It’s not fair to you.”

“That’s not really an answer either.”

“I know.” He stood, put actual distance between us, the couch cushion still warm where he’d been sitting. “I’m going to bed.”

He left me sitting there, cheeks still warm where his hand had been, watching the scar-shaped absence of him disappear down the hallway, and I hated how much that rejection stung considering the whole thing was supposed to be fake. I sat there a long time after his door clicked shut, replaying the half second before he pulled away, trying to decide if I’d imagined the way his hand had trembled slightly against my jaw, or if that part, at least, had been real.

I didn’t sleep much either. Around midnight I gave up trying and went looking for the notebook I’d left in the living room, half-written lyrics I’d abandoned three days ago because none of the words were landing right. I found it exactly where I’d left it, except someone had gone through it. Small pencil marks in the margins, not corrections exactly, more like suggestions, a better word circled here, a line reordered there, all of it quiet and careful and clearly not mine.

I knew his handwriting by now. Small. Careful. Nothing like the man who talked around every hard question I asked him.

He’d fixed my bridge. The one part of the song I couldn’t get to land, and he’d found the exact word I’d been circling around for days without ever once mentioning he’d looked at it. Not rewritten, not taken over, just nudged, the way someone helps without needing the room to know they did it.

I sat there with the notebook in my lap longer than I meant to, something loosening in my chest that had nothing to do with the almost-kiss and everything to do with the fact that he’d noticed what I couldn’t finish and quietly tried to help anyway, without asking for credit, without making it about him at all.

That was when I heard his voice, low, coming from behind his half-closed door. On the phone, I realized, pacing by the sound of his footsteps, and though I told myself to walk away, I stood there in the dark hallway instead, notebook still in my hand.

“I can’t keep doing this,” he was saying, voice tight in a way I hadn’t heard from him before. “She’s going to find out I didn’t write it. And when she does, she’s going to want to know who did.”

I stood very still, my own heartbeat suddenly loud in my ears, and waited for whatever came next.