Chapter 12

CHAPTER TWELVE : Two Days

~Zella's POV~

The television was not on.

That was the first thing Brynn would notice if she looked at it, which she was going to, because Brynn noticed everything, which was one of her best qualities and currently her most inconvenient one. I was sitting on the sofa staring at a blank screen with the specific energy of someone who had been watching it for the past twenty minutes and found it absolutely riveting, which was not a convincing performance even by my own standards.

Evander was in the armchair. Completely composed. Shirt settled, hair slightly less settled than usual, which I was not going to think about and expression doing absolutely nothing that could be considered evidence of anything. He was looking at his glass like a man with no history and no secrets and no reason whatsoever to feel the way the room currently felt.

Brynn stood in the doorway and looked between us.

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

"It doesn't feel weird," I said, at the same time Evander said "Nothing feels weird," and we both stopped and the room felt significantly weirder.

Brynn looked at me. Then at her father. Then at the television that was not on. Then at the food bag on the floor beside the sofa that I had not managed to make look like it had always been there.

"Were you watching something?" she asked.

"Just finished," I said.

"What were you watching?"

A pause approximately one second too long.

"Something French," Evander said. "Documentary."

"About what?"

"Architecture."

I looked at him. He did not look at me. Brynn looked at the blank screen, then at her father, then at me, then back at the screen, with the expression of someone doing a calculation they hadn't expected to need to do tonight.

"Right," she said slowly.

"How was your friend?" Evander asked, which was a masterful redirect and I was grateful for it in a way I could not express out loud.

Something shifted in Brynn's face. Subtle, the way Brynn's things were rarely subtle, but there — a tightening around her eyes, a very brief pause before she answered.

"Fine," she said. "It was fine."

I looked at her properly for the first time since she'd walked in.

Her hair was slightly different from how she'd left , she'd had it up when she walked out the door and now it was down, which meant she'd taken it out at some point, which meant the evening had not gone the way she'd planned it. Her mascara was intact but her lipstick was gone. Her energy was bright in the specific way that Brynn's energy got bright when she was covering something, higher wattage than normal, more directed, the cheerfulness of someone who had made a decision to be fine and was performing it slightly too hard.

"Just fine?" I said.

"Yes." She crossed to the kitchen and opened the fridge with her back to both of us. "We had a disagreement. It happens. It's not a big deal." She said it the way people said things that were a big deal. "Anyone want water?"

"What kind of disagreement?" Evander asked.

"The regular kind, dad. Not everything needs a full debrief." She appeared in the kitchen doorway with a glass of water and a smile that was working very hard. "Can we talk about something else? What are we doing for New Year's Eve? That's in two days, we should have a plan."

Evander looked at her for a moment, the careful look of a father who could see through the performance and was deciding whether to push it and then let it go. "Whatever you want."

"Dinner," she said immediately, which meant she had already been thinking about it and the subject change wasn't spontaneous. "Proper dinner, dressed up, somewhere nice, and then we find somewhere to do the countdown. All three of us." She looked at me. "You're staying through New Year's."

It wasn't a question.

"Brynn..."

"You're staying through New Year's," she said again, with the finality that ended discussions. "I'm not negotiating on this."

I looked at my lap. "Okay."

"Good." She took a long drink of water. "I'm going to have a shower. Don't go anywhere, I want company tonight." She pointed at me specifically. "Come to my room after."

She disappeared down the hall and her door closed and the living room went quiet in the way it went quiet when Brynn left a space, suddenly, completely, like someone had turned down the volume on the whole room.

Evander and I did not look at each other for approximately five seconds.

Then we both looked at each other at exactly the same time.

He raised an eyebrow slightly. I pressed my lips together. We looked away again.

Nothing was said. Nothing needed to be.

---

I gave her fifteen minutes and then knocked.

She was on her bed in her robe with her hair wrapped in a towel and her phone face down beside her, which was the detail that told me everything. Brynn's phone was never face down. Brynn's phone was always face up, always visible, always within immediate reach in case something required her attention. Face down meant she didn't want to see it. Face down meant she was waiting for something and had decided that watching for it was worse than not watching.

I sat on the end of her bed. "Tell me."

"I told you. We had a disagreement."

"Brynn."

"It was just a disagreement, Zella, it happens with friends..."

"It was Theo."

She looked at me. The bright performance switched off completely, the way it did when she was too tired to maintain it, and underneath it she just looked like a person who was having a bad night.

"How did you..."

"Because you came home with your hair down and your lipstick gone and your phone face down and you immediately tried to talk about New Year's Eve which is what you do when you don't want to talk about the actual thing." I kept my voice gentle. "What happened?"

She was quiet for a moment. Then she pulled her knees up to her chest and looked at the duvet.

"He wants me to tell my dad about him," she said. "He's been patient about it but he's done being patient. He said if I can't tell my dad then maybe I don't actually see a future in it and I'm just..." she stopped. "He said some things that were hard to hear. Some of which were probably true. Which is the annoying part."

"Do you think your dad already suspect you were with him tonight?"

"He thinks I was with a friend." She looked up. "Which I was. Theo is my friend. Among other things."

"Brynn."

"Don't." She pointed at me. "Don't look at me like that. I know. I know I need to tell him. I just..." she exhaled. "You've met my dad. You know how he is. I told you he has a whole thing about Theo from one bad meeting and he's decided and when my dad decides something he's very..." she waved her hand, searching for the word.

"Certain," I said.

"Certain. Yes. Exactly. He's very certain about things and I don't know how to have that conversation and Theo is running out of patience and I don't know what to do." She looked at me. "When did everything get so complicated."

"Approximately eight days ago," I said. "For both of us."

She looked at me for a second and then laughed, a real one, short and slightly tired but real and some of the tension in the room eased.

"We're a mess," she said.

"Complete mess," I agreed.

She leaned her head back against the headboard. "Stay in here tonight. Sleep in my room. I don't want to be alone and you're better than a weighted blanket."

"High praise."

"Extremely high praise, I love my weighted blanket." She shuffled over to make room. "Come on."

I went and got my things and came back and climbed into her enormous bed and she turned the lamp down and we lay in the dark the way we had when we were seventeen and the world was smaller and the problems were different and somehow both more and less manageable than they were now.

"Zella?" she said, into the dark.

"Yeah."

"The guy I want to set you up with. I wasn't joking about that."

"I know."

"He's genuinely lovely."

"Okay."

"Just.... keep an open mind. When you're ready."

I stared at the ceiling. Across the penthouse, down the hall, in a room I had not let myself think about too directly, Evander Ashford was presumably also staring at a ceiling. Or sleeping. Or doing whatever composed, certain, silver-haired men who decorated penthouses in the dark and said 'not was, are' did at eleven thirty on December twenty-ninth.

"I'll keep an open mind," I said.

Brynn made a satisfied sound and was asleep within four minutes, the way she always was.

I lay in the dark and kept my open mind very firmly closed and thought about two days.

New Year's Eve in two days. Dinner, dressed up, all three of us. The countdown. The moment the year changed and whatever this was either became something or got left behind in the one that ended.

Two days.

I pressed my hand flat against my sternum and told my heart to behave itself.

It didn't listen.

---

I woke up before Brynn, which never happened.

She was still deeply asleep, hair everywhere, one arm thrown over the edge of the bed in the dramatic fashion of someone who slept the way they lived , fully committed and taking up space. I slipped out without waking her and padded down the hall toward the kitchen because I needed coffee before I needed anything else.

Evander was already there.

Of course he was.

He was standing at the counter in a grey shirt and dark trousers, coffee already made, reading something on his phone. He looked up when I appeared in the doorway and the quality of the morning shifted slightly, the way it always did when we were in the same space without Brynn between us.

"Morning," I said, very normally.

"Morning." He turned back to his phone and then, without looking up, reached for the cabinet above the counter and took out a second mug and put it beside the coffee maker.

I crossed the kitchen and poured myself a cup and stood at the counter and we both looked at our respective coffees and the Paris morning outside the window and said nothing for a moment.

"She okay?" he asked. About Brynn.

"She will be."

He nodded. He knew there was more and wasn't pushing it. She appreciated that. She wasn't sure she could have explained Brynn's situation without explaining things adjacent to it that she had no intention of explaining.

Probably both.

I looked at my coffee. He looked at his phone. The kitchen was quiet and the morning was grey and cold outside and the penthouse felt like a place slightly removed from the normal rules of things, which was either Paris in winter or the specific problem of sharing a space with someone you had an agreement with that neither of you had managed to keep for more than twenty hours at a stretch.

"Two days," he said.

I looked up. He was still looking at his phone.

"New Year's Eve," he said. "Brynn will want to make it something."

"She already decided on dinner."

"I know." A pause. "Are you alright with that."

I looked at him properly. He looked at me properly. In the morning light without the charged atmosphere of the sofa and the night and the wine he looked — he looked like a person. Just a person, with grey in his hair and a coffee in his hand and something careful in his expression that was not the composed version of him but the real one, the one that had appeared briefly when Brynn hit her head and when he said 'not was, are' and when he gave me the one second pause every time before he kissed me back.

"I'm alright with it," I said.

He held my gaze for a moment. Then he looked back at his phone.

"Good," he said.

Down the hall, Brynn's alarm went off. Loud, cheerful, the specific ringtone she used because she said anything peaceful would just become part of a dream and she'd sleep through it. We both heard it. We both heard her groan and turn it off and then, thirty seconds later, turn on music, which meant she was getting up.

I picked up my coffee.

"Evander."

He looked at me.

I didn't know what I had been going to say. Something about the agreement, probably. Something about New Year's Eve and the dinner and the two days between now and then and whether we were going to manage to get through them without — I looked at him and he looked at me and Brynn's music was audible down the hall and neither of us said anything.

"Never mind," I said.

He looked at me for one more second.

"Two days, Zella," he said quietly. Like a warning. Like a promise. Like he hadn't decided yet which one he meant it as.

I took my coffee back to my room.