One Mate Was Never Enough のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 21 - チャプター 30

POV: Chloe “See, easy peasy,” he told me. I could feel the smile in his voice. He was watching my face with an expression I hadn't seen on him in seven years, unguarded, delighted, the look of a man who has just learned something he needed to know and is almost unbearably pleased about it. My face was hot. "I wasn't panicking." I lied.“Liar liar,” “I didn’t panic!” "You opened four cabinets in six seconds.""I was being efficient..." He smiles, that genuine smile that’s so real. And then, he kissed me. He did not rush it, he was slow, deliberate, his hand coming up to my face the way it used to, thumb at my cheekbone, tilting my chin up.And then his mouth on mine with a certainty that had nothing frantic in it. Like coming home to a house you'd been away from too long. Like something that had been waiting.I kissed him back.I didn't decide to, I just did, my hands finding the front of his shirt, and he made a quiet sound against my mouth that undid approximately everything I'

POV: Chloe He didn't speak again on the drive home. Neither did I. His words sat between us in the dark, ‘now you care’ and I sat with them and felt the guilt of them and didn't have a good answer, because he wasn't wrong, and we both knew it.Inside the house, I mean my house, the one built from words I'd spoken at twenty-two. I found the first aid kit myself this time, no panicking, very composed, and pointed at the kitchen island."Sit.""Chloe,""Sit, Tristan!" I said firmly.He sat...Something in his expression shifted, he looks surprised, faintly amused, quietly pleased in a way he didn't quite manage to put away before I saw it. I cleaned the wound without speaking, and he let me, watching my hands the way he watched everything about me.I handled it with the practiced ease of something I'd done before, years ago, when he was twenty-two and I was the person who took care of him, pressed against my chest until I couldn't quite breathe evenly."You remember how to do this," he

POV: Chloe "Tristan," I said."Start with block A," he said. "We're losing daylight."We worked until nine o'clock. The office emptied around us, Marcus at six, the last of the junior staff at seven, and the floor went quiet except for the sound of keyboards and the occasional exchange of technical specifics, clipped and professional, the language of two people who were not talking about anything except the work and were both aware of it.He was exactly as good as he'd claimed. Better, maybe. The calculations came out of him with the ease of something long internalized.I watched him reconstruct in two hours what should have taken a team of engineers a week, and felt something shift in my understanding of what those seven years had actually contained for him.Not just the buildings. Not just the Tomorrowland structures rising quietly across a city I walked through every day. He'd been carrying the technical foundation of every single one in his head, the way you carry something you

POV: Chloe Tomorrowland was real...That was the thought that kept arriving without warning in the middle of site walkthroughs, during contractor meetings.It's real...He made it real...Tristan walked me through the completed sections on a Thursday morning, and I watched him point out structural details with the quiet pride of a man who had been building toward this moment for seven years without telling anyone why. He explained load distributions and material choices and the specific angle of the eastern atrium glass with the technical precision he brought to everything, and underneath all of it, every few minutes, his eyes would find mine to check my reaction.Not for professional approval. Something else, something that looked, hope."The plaza," I said, standing in the center of it. The light was doing the thing, the exact thing, bouncing off the vertical garden panels and scattering across the ground in patterns I'd sketched in pencil... Just as I had imagined it."T

POV: Chloe The bathroom tiles were cold against my bare feet, a sharp contrast to the steam already filling the room. Ethan turned to face me, and the intensity from the lobby had softened into something else, something that looked almost like vulnerability."You have no idea how much I missed you," he said quietly, his hands finding my waist. "Every night in our bedroom, I kept reaching for you and finding empty space.""Ethan, I'm sorry I couldn't...""Shh." His finger pressed against my lips. "You're here now. That's what matters."He pulled his travel-damp shirt over his head, and I couldn't help the way my eyes traced the familiar lines of his chest.The muscles earned from years of competitive hockey games. His body was no different from Tristan's, just a bit younger."Help me with the rest," he said, and his voice had gone softer, almost plaintive. "Please, Chloe. I just want to feel your hands on me, it’s been a while,"The request was so earnest, so different