Chapter 11

CHAPTER ELEVEN : Just Once More

~Zella's POV~

The penthouse was too quiet and the night was too long and I had known within approximately twenty minutes of Brynn leaving that staying in my room was not going to work.

I tried. I lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling and scrolled through my phone without absorbing anything on the screen and rearranged my pillow three times and had the internal conversation about the agreement again, which was becoming less convincing every time I had it. The quiet kept pressing in from the edges. His footsteps had gone still somewhere down the hall and that was almost worse than hearing them, the not knowing where he was, the awareness that the penthouse contained exactly two people and one of them was me and the other one was the reason the agreement existed in the first place.

At some point my stomach made a completely reasonable biological complaint that had nothing to do with anything else, and I picked up my phone and ordered food because at least that was something I could control.

When the notification came that it had arrived downstairs I told myself it was a simple transaction. Go out, collect the bag, come back, close the door, eat in peace. Forty-five seconds maximum. No complications.

I opened my bedroom door and walked directly into the living room light.

He was on the sofa.

Not asleep. Sitting, jacket off, shirt sleeves pushed up, a glass in his hand and a bottle on the table in front of him that was somewhere between a quarter and a third empty. He was looking at nothing in particular when I appeared in the doorway and then he looked at me instead.

I held up my phone like evidence. "Food delivery. I'll just..."

"Go ahead," he said.

I went. I collected the bag from the lobby attendant, told myself the forty-five seconds were almost up, and came back upstairs and was almost, almost at my hallway when his voice came from the sofa.

"Zella."

I stopped.

"Come and sit down."

I turned around. He was looking at me with the expression that was not quite a request and not quite a command but sat somewhere in the territory between the two in a way that made it very difficult to say no. I looked at my food bag. I looked at the hallway. I looked at him.

I sat down.

---

He asked about my work first, which was the last thing I had expected.

Not Cole. Not what had happened. Not anything that required me to arrange my face carefully or choose my words with precision. Just ... what did you study, what did you want to do when you get back, what were you good at before someone asked you to be good at something else instead.

I talked. More than I had talked in weeks, maybe. About the degree, about the two job offers I had turned down, about the three years of managing Cole's company and what I had actually been good at in that role, the parts that had been mine regardless of how I'd gotten there. He listened the way he did everything without interrupting, without redirecting, without making it about anything other than what I was saying. By the time I had finished my food I had told him things I hadn't said out loud to anyone, not even Brynn, because Brynn had been too close to the situation to hear them without getting angry on my behalf.

Evander just listened. And then asked the next question.

"You're good at it," he said, when I had finished. It wasn't a compliment exactly. It was a statement, the way he said most things, like he was simply identifying something that was already true.

"I was," I said. "I think."

"Not was." He looked at me. "Are."

I didn't say anything to that. I looked at the Paris lights instead and felt something shift quietly in my chest that I didn't have a name for yet.

After a moment I looked back at him. He had refilled his glass at some point and was looking at it rather than drinking it, turning it slowly in his hand.

"Why are you drinking so much?" I asked.

He was quiet for a second. Then he ran his hand through his hair, rough, distracted, the gesture of a man who had been sitting with something heavy and had temporarily forgotten he wasn't alone and the movement did something completely unreasonable to me. The way his hair fell afterward. The line of his jaw. The fact that he looked, in that one unguarded moment, like a person rather than a composed version of one.

I pressed my lips together and looked at him in a way I absolutely should not have been looking at him.

"Lots to think about," he said.

"Like what?"

He looked at me. The corner of his mouth moved. "You know what."

The room felt smaller than it had a minute ago. I was aware of the distance between us on the sofa in a way that was disproportionate to the actual measurement.

"Evander..."

"Don't," he said. Not unkindly.

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"You were about to remind me of the agreement."

"I was not." I had absolutely been about to remind him of the agreement.

He looked at me for a moment and then looked back at his glass and I watched him and tried very hard to think about something other than the fact that Brynn was gone for the night and the penthouse was quiet and the agreement had already failed once and his hair was doing the thing it did when he ran his hand through it and I was twenty-two years old and apparently completely incapable of making good decisions in December.

"Don't do that, Zella."

I blinked. "Do what?"

"That." He didn't look at me. "Whatever you're doing with your face right now. It's dangerous."

I became immediately aware of my own face, which was doing something I had not given it permission to do, lower lip caught between my teeth, eyes slightly too direct, the specific expression of a person who has stopped pretending to think about something else.

Brynn was gone for the night.

The thought arrived cleanly and sat there.

Gone for the night. Spending it with a boyfriend Evander didn't know about. Not coming home until morning. The penthouse quiet and the night still early and the agreement already in pieces on the floor from last night and his hair doing the thing and his voice doing the thing and everything in my body voting unanimously against the remaining forty percent of me that still believed we were going to keep the agreement.

'Just once more,' something in me said. 'Just this once. Last time. Final time. Then it's done properly and you can both move forward and pretend none of this happened.'

I knew that was not how any of this worked. I said it to myself anyway.

"What if," I said, slowly, "I don't want to stop."

He looked at me.

"Brynn won't be home tonight," I said.

"Zella." His voice was a warning and something else at the same time.

I leaned forward and kissed him.

For exactly one second he didn't move, the same one second he always gave me, the pause that said 'you can still go back' — and then his hand came up to my jaw and he kissed me back and it went from tentative to decided in approximately no time at all.

It was different from last night. Last night had been interrupted before it had properly started. This had the specific quality of something that had been building for several days and had finally stopped being patient about it. His hands moved and mine did and my food bag ended up on the floor somewhere and I stopped keeping track of what was happening in any sequential way and just existed inside the moment, which was warm and certain and felt nothing at all like the agreement.

At some point his mouth found somewhere that made me stop being quiet about it and I grabbed his hair and he made a sound low in his throat and my eyes closed and his hands were — his hands were exactly what I remembered from Christmas night except this time the light was on and I could see his face and that was somehow significantly more than I had been prepared for.

His mouth was on my chest, warm and deliberate, and I was making sounds I had lost the capacity to be embarrassed about and his hands were everywhere and the night was early and Brynn was not coming home and the agreement was completely—

"I'm home!"

The front door.

Brynn's voice. Bright and cheerful and coming from approximately fifteen feet away.

The world snapped back into focus like a rubber band.

We both stopped moving at exactly the same time.

For one suspended second neither of us breathed.

Then I was off the sofa and he was sitting up and I was fixing my top with hands that were not entirely steady and he was running a hand through his hair which was significantly more disheveled than it had been twenty minutes ago and the front door was opening and footsteps were coming down the hall and I grabbed my food bag off the floor and sat back down and looked at the television which was not even on and did not turn it on because turning it on now would be more suspicious than leaving it off and I had approximately two seconds to decide and I decided wrong and sat there staring at a blank screen like a person who had apparently been watching nothing for the past twenty minutes and found it very interesting.

Brynn appeared in the living room doorway.

She looked at me. Then at her father. Then at me again.

"Why does it feel weird in here?" she said.