Chapter 8

CHAPTER EIGHT : I Dare You

~Zella's POV~

Everything happened at once.

Evander was already moving before I had finished saying her name, crossing the pool edge in two steps and going in without hesitation, the water closing around him as he reached for Brynn and pulled her up and toward the ladder. I crouched at the edge with my heart somewhere in my throat, reaching down, and between the two of us we got her out and onto the tile and I was already pressing my hand to the side of her head where the blood was coming from, not much, not as much as the pink water had made it look, but enough.

"Brynn." I held her face in both hands. "Hey. Look at me."

"I'm looking." Her voice came out irritated, which was the most reassuring thing she could have said. "You can stop doing that, I'm fine."

"You hit your head."

"I'm aware, I was there." She tried to sit up straighter and I pressed my hand to her shoulder to keep her still. "Zella, I'm fine, it's just a scratch."

"You don't know that."

"I literally just said it was fine."

"You also said the ice skating was going to be fun and you fell over within thirty seconds."

"That was different." She looked past me at her father, who was kneeling on her other side with a towel already pressed to the side of her head, his expression doing something I had never seen it do before, not quite panic, something quieter than panic, the specific alarm of a parent who is trying very hard not to show how alarmed they are. "Dad. Tell her I'm fine."

"You need to let me look at it first." His voice was even but his jaw was tight.

"It's a scratch."

"Brynn."

"I'm not going to hospital." She said it with complete finality, the way she said most things she had already decided. "I have a small cut on my head and I'm slightly wet and I would like to go back to my room, and neither of you are going to argue with me about this because I am a grown adult and I am fine."

Evander looked at the cut. Then at her face. Then at the cut again. Something shifted in his expression, the alarm quieting slightly, replaced by the careful assessment of a man who was deciding whether to push it.

"Let me get the first aid kit," he said. "Then we'll see."

"Fine. But we're not going to hospital."

"I heard you the first time."

"Just making sure."

He stood up and I stayed crouched beside Brynn, keeping the towel pressed to her head, and she looked at me with the particular expression she wore when she was in mild pain and trying to pretend she wasn't.

"I'm okay," she said, quieter this time. "Really."

"I know." I kept my hand where it was. "I'm going to be annoying about it anyway."

The corner of her mouth moved. "I know."

---

Evander carried her back upstairs.

She protested for approximately fifteen seconds and then gave up, which told me more about how she actually felt than anything she'd said by the pool. He laid her on her bed and sat on the edge beside her and opened the first aid kit with the practiced efficiency of a man who had done this before, childhood falls, scraped knees, all the small emergencies of raising a daughter alone and cleaned the cut carefully while Brynn sat very still and pretended it didn't sting by talking continuously about something unrelated, which was her way of handling things she didn't want to acknowledge.

"It's really not that bad," she said, for the fourth time.

"I know." He applied the small dressing with two neat pieces of tape. "You're going to have a headache tomorrow."

"I already have a headache. From Zella hovering."

"I'm right here," I said from the doorway.

"I know, that's how I know you're hovering." But she was smiling when she said it, and some of the tension in my chest eased slightly.

Evander checked her eyes, both of them, carefully, the way you check for concussion and asked her a few questions she answered with increasing impatience, and eventually he seemed satisfied because he put the kit away and stood up and told her to sleep.

"I'm not tired," she said, and was asleep within ten minutes.

I watched her from the chair in the corner until her breathing steadied and then I stood up quietly and turned off the lamp and went out into the hallway, pulling the door almost closed behind me.

Evander was leaning against the wall opposite, arms crossed, looking at the floor.

We stood there for a moment in the quiet of the hallway.

"She's going to be fine," I said, because somebody needed to say it out loud.

"I know." He didn't look up immediately. "Doesn't stop the ten seconds between the sound and knowing that from feeling like ten years."

I didn't say anything to that. There wasn't anything to say.

We walked back toward the living room without discussing it, the way you move together after something has shaken you, not quite deliberately, just in the same direction. He reached past me in the doorway to turn the hall light off and his arm crossed close enough that I felt the warmth of it without contact, which was somehow worse than if he had actually touched me.

I sat on the sofa and he sat in the armchair and for a few minutes neither of us said anything at all, just existed in the quiet of the penthouse while Brynn slept down the hall.

Then he reached over to the side table for his glass of water and his hand crossed the space between us briefly not touching, just passing close, just the movement of his arm near mine and something went through me that had absolutely nothing to do with the circumstances and everything to do with the fact that I was still in my swimming things and so was he and we were alone and the agreement we had made last night was doing its best and losing.

I moved my hand to my lap.

He didn't seem to notice. Or he did and chose not to acknowledge it, which with Evander was always difficult to tell.

I looked at the window. At the Paris lights. At anything that wasn't the way his swimming shorts were sitting or the way his chest looked in the low light of the living room or the way his hands .... I stopped that thought and pressed my knees together and told myself to breathe normally.

'We agreed. Last night. Both of us. Done.'

He looked at me.

"You look..." he started.

"Don't," I said.

He paused. Something moved at the corner of his mouth. "I was going to say you look like you're thinking too hard."

"Oh." I looked back at the window. "Sorry."

A beat of quiet.

"You do look good though," he said. "In that."

I turned to look at him. He was looking at me with an expression that was not entirely consistent with the agreement and he knew it and wasn't doing anything about it.

"We agreed," I said. "Last night. We sat in this exact room and we agreed."

"I remember."

"So you can't say things like that."

"I'm aware." He didn't look away.

I looked back at the window. My face was doing the thing. My whole body was doing the thing, actually, the swimming top suddenly feeling like significantly less fabric than it had an hour ago, and my mind went somewhere it had been trying not to go since the pool, his shoulders coming out of the water, the light running off him, the way he had looked standing there like something that had been designed specifically to make agreements difficult to keep.

'Stop,' I told myself. 'Stop it right now.'

I looked at him and my eyes moved, briefly and without my permission, to his chest. Still bare. Still exactly as unfair as it had been by the pool. I felt the heat move through me somewhere low and immediate and I pressed my lips together and looked away and whispered, mostly to myself, "....fuck."

Not quietly enough.

I knew it wasn't quietly enough because the quality of the silence in the room changed completely.

I didn't look at him. I kept my eyes on the window and kept my face forward and told myself that if I didn't look at him then the moment would pass and we could both pretend it hadn't happened, which was a strategy that had worked reasonably well so far and which I was committed to.

Then his hand closed around my wrist.

Not hard. Not demanding. Just there. Warm and certain and completely deliberate, the way he did everything.

He drew me toward him slowly, giving me every opportunity to pull back, and I didn't pull back, which was information I chose not to examine too closely in the moment. When I was close enough he looked at me, really looked, the way he had looked in the hotel room when the lamp came on, like he was reading something and had reached a line that surprised him.

Then he kissed me.

Not like the bar. That had been something I had started, something reckless and driven by grief and too much to drink. This was different. This was him, deliberate and unhurried, his hand moving from my wrist to my jaw, and I kissed him back for three full seconds before my brain caught up with what was happening and I pulled back.

"What are you doing?," I said. My voice came out unsteady. "Evander. We agreed last night."

"I know." He didn't move away. His thumb was still at my jaw, just resting there, and his eyes hadn't left mine.

"Then you need to stop."

He looked at me for a long moment. The city light was behind him and the room was quiet and Brynn was asleep down the hall and the agreement was somewhere on the floor between us in pieces and neither of us had moved.

His voice, when it came, was completely level.

"I dare you," he said, "to tell me to stop."