Chapter 6

CHAPTER SIX: An Agreement Neither of Us Meant

~Zella's POV~

I went back to my room and sat on the edge of the bed and hated myself quietly for about ten minutes.

Not for what had happened in the hotel room , I had made my peace with that, or at least I was working on it. What I hated was my face. Specifically the way it refused to behave like a normal human face when Evander Ashford was within twenty feet of me. The redness. The heat. The complete inability to maintain eye contact for longer than three seconds before something in my chest started doing things I had no name for and my eyes dropped to the floor like they were trying to save me from myself.

I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling and made the catastrophic mistake of letting my mind drift back to the hotel room.

The dark. The way he had moved, unhurried, certain, like a man who knew exactly what he was doing and had decided to take his time doing it. The moment the pain had shifted into something else entirely and I had arched into him without meaning to, wanting more before I had even finished processing what more meant. The sounds he made. Low. Quiet. The kind that told you everything without saying anything. He hadn't commented when he understood what he was dealing with, hadn't stopped, hadn't made it into something awkward, had just been gentle in a way that felt deliberate, like he had noticed and adjusted and chosen not to make it about himself.

I pressed both hands over my face.

'What is wrong with me. He is my best friend's father.'

I got up and went to the bathroom and ran cold water and splashed it on my face until the heat started to go down, gripping the edge of the sink and looking at my reflection and having a very firm internal conversation about the fact that I was twenty-two years old and I was not going to spend the rest of this trip going red every time a man walked into a room. Even if the man had dark hair with grey threading through it and eyes the colour of deep water that looked at you like he was reading something you hadn't finished writing yet. Even if he said your name in a way that made it sound like a decision.

'Why does he want to talk? What could he possibly want to say?'

My door opened without a knock, which meant Brynn.

She walked in, took one look at me, and stopped.

"Why is your face like that?" She crossed the room and pressed the back of her hand to my forehead before I could move away. "You're not running a temperature. What's going on?"

"Nothing."

"Zella."

"I'm fine, Brynn, I promise."

She looked at me for a long moment with the specific expression she wore when she didn't believe me but was deciding whether to push it. "Do you want me to move into your room tonight? I don't like how you've been since we got here."

"I'm okay. Really. I just need some air."

"Air." She considered this. "Okay. Get dressed. We're going shopping."

"Shopping?"

"Just the two of us." She held up a hand before I could object. "No dad, no party, just us walking around Paris like we used to. You need to remember what it feels like to exist outside of everything that happened." She said it simply, without drama, the way Brynn said most true things. "One afternoon. Come on."

The two of us alone. No Evander. Fresh air and distance and Brynn's chaos to fill up all the space in my head where the bad thoughts lived.

"Okay," I said. "Give me ten minutes."

---

She took me everywhere.

Ice skating first, which I was terrible at and she was somehow worse at despite her complete confidence going in, and we spent twenty minutes holding onto the barrier and laughing at each other before giving up entirely. Then a ride in one of those glass lifts that went up the side of a building and I gripped the rail the whole way up while Brynn pressed her face to the glass and narrated everything she could see. Street food after that, standing on a pavement eating something warm while Paris moved around us, and then a shop where Brynn held dresses up against herself and asked my opinion on each one with the seriousness of someone making a very important decision.

For a few hours I forgot everything. Not in the blurry way I forgot things when I was drinking, not the kind of forgetting that sat on top of everything and peeled off the moment the glass was empty. This was different. This was the kind of forgetting that came from being genuinely present in a moment, from laughing at something real, from feeling like myself instead of like the woman who had walked into Cole's apartment seven days ago and had her entire life handed back to her in pieces.

I felt, briefly and surprisingly, like the girl I had been in secondary school. Before Cole. Before any of it. Just Zella, with her best friend, in a city that didn't know her name.

It lasted until ten o'clock, when a car pulled up beside us on the pavement and the window came down.

Evander.

"Alright girls." He looked between us. "I hope you had fun."

"Yes daddy, so much fun, you should have come." Brynn was already pulling the door open.

His eyes moved to me briefly. "And you, Zella?"

"Yes." I kept my voice level. "Thank you, Mr. Ashford."

Something that might have been amusement moved across his face and then disappeared. "Get in. You need to eat before tonight."

Brynn grabbed my arm and pulled me into the backseat beside her and I sat there and looked out the window and told my face to behave itself for the duration of the drive, which it did, barely.

---

Back at the penthouse we showered and changed into the things we'd bought and ate dinner at the long dining table while Brynn talked about the ice skating and the lift and the street food and made everything sound funnier than it had been, which was a skill she had always had. Evander listened and occasionally said something that made her laugh and didn't look at me more than was normal for a man having dinner with his daughter and her friend.

He gave his driver the night off. Then he drove us himself to a Christmas market on the edge of the city, lights strung between the stalls, a crowd moving slowly through the cold, music drifting from somewhere inside. The kind of place that made it temporarily impossible to be unhappy even if you were trying. We walked and ate and Brynn bought things she didn't need with the enthusiasm of someone who had never once considered a budget, and at some point I stopped watching the clock and just existed in the evening alongside them.

On the drive home Brynn fell asleep somewhere around the first turn, her head against the window, completely out, the way she had always been able to sleep, instantly and anywhere, like her body had simply made a decision and her brain had agreed. Evander glanced in the mirror once and then drove the rest of the way in quiet that wasn't uncomfortable, which I noticed and wished I hadn't.

His hands were easy on the wheel. Unhurried, the way he did everything. I looked out the window and watched Paris move past and told myself that the only reason I was aware of his hands was because the car was quiet and there was nothing else to look at. It was a reasonable explanation. I kept it.

At the penthouse he carried her in. Not awkwardly, not making anything of it, just lifted her from the backseat the way a father carries a daughter and took her upstairs. I grabbed her bag and her shoes from the floor and followed.

He laid her down carefully, pulled the blanket up, removed her scarf and her socks with the practiced efficiency of someone who had done this before, on childhood nights, on other evenings, all the years of being her father that I had no window into. Then he straightened up and looked at me.

"Can you help me with her bra? She'll be uncomfortable if she sleeps in it."

My brain went somewhere it absolutely should not have gone. Immediately and without my permission. The hotel room, his hands, the dark, how quickly and efficiently he had - I stopped that thought before it finished forming and nodded and said "yes, I will" in a voice that came out surprisingly normal given what was happening inside my head.

"Thank you."

He went out and I did what needed doing, quiet and quick, and turned off the bedside lamp and slipped out into the hallway and nearly walked directly into him because he was standing right outside the door.

"Sorry," I said, stepping back.

"Don't be." He looked at me for a moment. "Can we talk now?"

I had been dreading this since he'd mentioned it in the hallway that afternoon. I had spent the ice skating and the street food and the countdown trying not to think about it and now here it was, unavoidable, at midnight in his penthouse hallway with his daughter sleeping ten feet away.

"Yes," I said. Because there was nothing else to say.

---

He poured two glasses of something that wasn't alcohol, sparkling water with something in it, elderflower maybe and we sat in the living room with the city lights spread out behind the floor to ceiling windows and I held my glass with both hands and waited.

He looked at the window for a moment. Then at me.

"What happened," he said, "was not something either of us planned."

"No."

"And it can't happen again."

I held his gaze. "I know that."

"You're Brynn's best friend." He said it evenly, not as an accusation, just as a fact being placed on the table between us. "She loves you. I'm not going to do anything that puts that at risk."

"Neither am I."

He nodded slowly. "So we agree. Last night was a mistake. It doesn't leave that room. And going forward..." he paused briefly, "...we're simply who we're supposed to be. Her father. Her friend."

"Agreed," I said.

The word came out clean and certain and I meant it completely, or I told myself I meant it completely, which felt close enough in the moment.

We sat with that for a second. The city was quiet outside. Somewhere below a car passed, headlights sweeping briefly across the ceiling.

"Goodnight, Zella," he said.

"Goodnight, Mr. Ashford."

He looked at me. Something in his expression shifted not quite exasperation, not quite amusement, something between the two. He didn't correct me this time. Just stood up and took his glass to the kitchen and I heard the tap run briefly and then his footsteps going down the hall.

I sat there alone in the living room for a moment.

The agreement was sensible. It was the right thing. It was the only thing, actually, given everything, Brynn, the age gap, the fact that I was sitting in his home in Paris having just spent the evening with his family like I was already part of something I had absolutely no business being part of.

I stood up to go to my room.

That was when I noticed he had left his jacket on the chair by the door. And I noticed, because I was apparently a person who noticed these things now, that he had been looking at me for most of the conversation in a way that was not entirely consistent with the speech he had just given about mistakes and agreements and going forward as who we were supposed to be. His eyes had moved , briefly, barely, but they had moved and I had felt it in places that the agreement was supposed to have resolved.

I picked my glass up and took it to the kitchen.

'We agreed,' I told myself. 'It's done. It's finished.'

I went to my room and closed the door and stood in the dark for a moment.

Neither of us had moved to leave.

Not until the very end. Not until we'd been sitting in that agreement for longer than an agreement needed, in a room that felt smaller than it actually was, with the city spread out behind us and his eyes doing the thing they did where they said something completely different from whatever was coming out of his mouth.

I got into bed and pulled the covers up.

'We agreed,' I thought again.

I almost believed it.