Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO : Umbrella in the Rain

~Zella's POV ~

---

I had given him six years.

I stood in that hallway and I thought about that. Six years of turning down opportunities because he said he wanted me close. Six years of keeping quiet at work so nobody would think I'd slept my way into a position I had actually earned. Six years of planning a wedding, choosing flowers, dreaming about snow and candlelight on Christmas Day, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, apparently, this had been happening.

I pushed the door open.

Cole had Dara bent over the edge of the bed, moving behind her at a pace that made my stomach turn, and the worst part, the part that would stay with me longer than anything else, was that neither of them noticed me standing there. They just kept going. Like the door opening meant nothing. Like I was air.

"Yes.... Cole.... God, I love this, you're so big."

"Want me to go faster, baby?"

"Yes Cole, just.... fuck, I've missed this so much."

The car key slipped out of my hand.

It hit the floor and the sound cracked through the room like a gunshot and they both stopped at exactly the same time. Dara scrambled for the sheet, pulling it up over herself, her face cycling through shock and guilt and something else, something that landed on defiance, like she had decided in the span of two seconds that I was the problem here. Cole just went still. He looked at me the way you look at something you've knocked over briefly, measuring how bad the damage was.

Nobody said anything.

"Cole." My voice came out wrong. Too small.

"Why are you here?" He said it flatly, like the question was reasonable. "I've told you so many times not to just show up without telling me first."

"I called you. You didn't pick up."

"Then you should have kept calling until I answered. You can't just walk into my house, Zella."

I stared at him. "You can't just.... Cole, what is this? What am I looking at right now?"

"You're looking at exactly what you think you're looking at."

"So you're not even going to explain yourself."

"Explain what? You saw everything already."

I felt something rising in my throat that wasn't quite crying and wasn't quite screaming. "Are you serious right now? I just walked in on you and my cousin and you're talking to me like I'm the one who did something wrong?"

He didn't answer. He reached for his shirt from the floor and pulled it on, casual, unbothered, and that casualness was somehow worse than anything he could have said.

"I can forget this." I heard myself say it before I'd even decided to. "I will forget it. Six years, Cole. Just tell me it was nothing and I will forget this ever happened. Seven days. We have seven days and then we're married and I will never bring this up again, I swear."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he said, "Give me the ring back, Zella."

The floor tilted under me. "What?"

"This hasn't been working for a while. I'm sorry."

He didn't sound sorry. He sounded like a man who had been waiting for a convenient moment to say something he'd already decided, and this was apparently convenient enough.

I looked at Dara. She was staring at the wall like the pattern on the wallpaper had suddenly become very interesting.

"I thought you loved me." My voice was steadier than I expected. "I thought we were it. You waited six years, Cole. Six years without sex, six years of being careful at work, six years of me believing every single thing you said. What could possibly have been worth throwing all of that away?"

He made a sound that might have been a laugh. "You really thought I waited six years without sex? Zella. Come on."

The room went quiet.

"She's right, you know." Dara's voice was softer than I expected, which somehow made it worse. "No woman is going to ignore what Cole has. And we're in love, Zella. It isn't just physical."

I looked at my cousin. At the sheet pulled up to her chin. At the way she said *we're in love* like it was something she'd been waiting to say out loud.

I pulled the ring off my finger. I set it on the dresser by the door because throwing it felt like giving him too much, and I had already given him everything I had.

Then I walked downstairs, out the front door, and into the dark.

---

I don't know how long I walked. Long enough that the cold stopped feeling like cold and just became the temperature of everything. Long enough that the memories started coming, not in order, not in any way that made sense, just fragments. Cole's voice at dinner saying 'I want to give you the day you've always dreamed about.' The weight of the ring going onto my finger.

I wondered how long it had been going on. I wondered if my aunt knew. I wondered if anyone had known and simply decided not to tell me.

The rain started somewhere during all of that and I didn't notice until I was already soaked through, my clothes sticking to my skin, my hair flat against my face. I kept walking anyway. There wasn't anywhere to go but walking felt better than standing still.

I don't know when I stopped paying attention to where I was. At some point the pavement became a road and at some point the road became the middle of the road and I could hear cars honking around me, a driver somewhere shouting something out of a window, but the sounds felt very far away, like they belonged to a different version of the city that I wasn't quite inside anymore.

Then something blocked the rain.

I blinked. An umbrella had appeared above my head, black, large, held by a hand connected to a man who was standing directly in front of me, completely still, getting rained on from the shoulders down because the umbrella was entirely over me and not at all over him. He was tall. Dark hair with grey threading through it, jaw sharp, shirt soaked flat against his chest. He looked at me with an expression that wasn't pity and wasn't impatience, just a kind of steady attention, like he had all the time in the world and had decided to spend some of it waiting for me to come back to myself.

"You need to move off the road," he said. Not unkindly. Just a fact.

I looked at him. Then at the cars edging around us. Then back at him.

"Would you like to sleep with me?" I asked. "Just tonight."

He didn't flinch. He looked at me for a moment, reading something in my face that I couldn't see myself, and then he said, "You need a drink more than you need a mistake."

He shrugged his jacket off and draped it over my shoulders in one motion, covering the fact that my wet clothes had gone completely transparent, and then he put one hand lightly at my back and walked me off the road without asking if I wanted him to. I let him. I didn't have the energy to object and some distant part of me understood that this stranger with his umbrella was the only person currently standing between me and traffic.

He walked me to his car. Opened the passenger door. I got in without saying anything and he got in on the other side and drove without asking me where I wanted to go.

He took me to a bar. Not a club, somewhere quieter, dark wood and low lighting and the kind of place where nobody looked up when you walked in. He sat across from me at the bar and ordered something without asking what I wanted and slid it in front of me and I drank it without asking what it was.

I ordered another. He didn't comment.

The third one I drank faster and somewhere during the fourth the edges of the evening started to soften, the sharpest parts going slightly blurred, and I looked at the man across from me, really looked at him and thought that he was unfairly attractive for someone who had just pulled a soaking wet stranger out of traffic without even asking her name.

"Do you know how?" I asked.

He looked up from his glass. "Know how to what?"

"Sleep with someone." I held his gaze. "Would you? With me. Tonight."

He set his glass down. Looked at me in that same steady way he'd looked at me in the road, like he was reading something. Then, slowly, something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. "You're drunk."

"I'm aware."

"Then my answer is no."

"That's a disappointing answer."

"I imagine it is." He picked his glass back up.

I leaned forward, closing some of the distance between us, and whatever was in my expression made him go very still. I reached across and held the back of his neck and kissed him before either of us had finished deciding whether it was a good idea.

He went still for exactly one second.

Then he kissed me back.

When we finally pulled apart I looked at him and said, "Should we get a room?"

He looked at me for a long moment, something unreadable moving across his face.

"Yes," he said. "I think we should."