บททั้งหมดของ Lover by Design: บทที่ 51 - บทที่ 60

CelesteThe dinner was the day after tomorrow, which gave us one stolen day, and we spent it being obscenely, criminally happy.Michael had moved us again, and this time the bolt-hole was almost cruel in its beauty, a borrowed apartment above a harbour, all light and white stone and a terrace that hung over water so blue it looked invented. He’d taken it for its exits. I decided to take it for its terrace.And for one day, he let me.That was the miracle of the day, bigger than the sunshine, bigger than the absurd lunch we ordered and mostly abandoned. Michael went off duty. Not entirely, he’ll never be entirely off, but the vigilance loosened, and the perpetual quarter of his attention that lives on the door came back into the room and stayed with me, and I got to see what he’s like when he isn’t guarding the perimeter of his own life.He’s funny. I knew that. But happy-Michael is funny and w

CelesteWe didn’t speak until we were three streets from Ferrand’s, and then I said the thing I’d been holding since the second course.“The cufflinks.”“I saw you catch something,” Michael said. “I couldn’t find it.”“The quiet man at the end of the table. The one you filed as staff.” I pulled my phone as we walked. “His cufflinks. Small, dark, oval, an unusual setting. I’ve seen them before, and it took me until the fish course to place where.”I found it, the photo Ollie had dug up weeks ago, Huxley in his final week, laughing at a party with a glass in his hand. I zoomed to the edge, to the man half-turned beside him, to the small dark oval at his wrist. “There. Same cufflinks. Same man. He stood next to Huxley days before Huxley died, and tonight he sat three feet from Ferrand pretending to be furniture.”Micha

CelesteHe’d given me the hand, the habits, the two years beside a stranger. He’d given me Switzerland. And somewhere in the giving, I caught the thing he hadn’t given, because I’ve learned to hear a Michael-sized omission, the small wrongness of a step that isn’t there.“You know his name,” I said.Michael looked up from the screen. “I told you. We never used names.”“You never used names then. That’s not the same as not knowing it now.” I sat across from him. “You spent an hour giving Ollie this man’s habits in forensic detail. How he structures a bid. How he moves money. Where he banks. That’s not the profile of a stranger, Michael. That’s the profile of someone you’ve thought about since. Someone you’ve looked for. You know more than you’ve said, and somewhere in the last hour you decided not to say all of it.&rdq

MichaelShe couldn't answer. I was right and we both knew it, and I fucked her until she came with her forehead hard against my shoulder and something like a sob of pure frustration in it, and I followed her, Celeste's name low and wrecked in my throat, holding her up because her legs wouldn't.Afterward I untied her. The silk came away and her wrists were marked, and she looked at the red lines and smiled like they were hers.Chosen. Given. Earned.She slid down the wall and I caught her jelly-legged body and carried her to the bed. Then I fucked her again, fast and hard with her legs thrown over my shoulders and me on my knees, buried deep and thrusting hard until she came again, and again, and again.Afterward she lay sprawled and boneless and radiant, and she turned her head on the pillow and gave me a look of pure, wicked satisfaction, and she said the thing that has not left me since.“See?” sh

MichaelWe went in fast and low, and I knew before we cleared the second room that we were too late.The silence told me. Finished violence has its own quiet, and this was it.The bidder was in his small controllable room with the walls he’d understood, and the walls hadn’t saved him, walls never do. He was still alive when we reached him, barely, the way a candle is still lit in the second before it isn’t, and there was nothing to be done.I have seen enough of this to know the difference between a man you can save and a man you can only sit beside.I’ve been the reason for rooms like this.That was the thought I couldn’t put down, kneeling in the aftermath of a killing dressed up as mine. I know the arithmetic of a scene like this from the other side of it. I have made silences like this one, for clients I refused to look at, and now here was one written in my own handwriting by a str