“Good.”
There’s nothing else to say. He doesn’t want me here. I don’t want to be here. I’ve made my penance. “Leo,” he says as I reach the door. Push it open.
I look back at him.
“I’m sorry.” Winston stands by the window, a look of genuine concern on his face. Not for me. It’s for his mother, and his family, and their reputation. It might not collapse if I released these videos, but it would be damaged.
“It was a long time ago,” I tell him.
He doesn’t say anything else.
One more minute, and we’re out of Halcyon. Thomas shuts the door to the SUV behind me and jogs around to the driver’s seat. He keeps his eyes firmly on the road. I’m the only one to witness how badly my hands are shaking. I can’t hold my phone.
Now that the meeting is over, now that we’re away from that fucking building, my body has recognized the size of the threat. A delayed response to reliving what Caroline did and to the act of showing another person. I never have before. My lungs constrict and my heart tests the boundaries of my rib cage, looking for a way out. I have a flash fever. Rising fast.
“Pull over.”
Thomas doesn’t hesitate. He pulls directly to the curb. I have just enough time to get to an alley before I’m sick on the ground.
Chapter Twenty
Haley
Leo’s house is quiet the morning after my party, but it’s a good quiet. The quiet of a space that was very recently bursting at the seams with joy. Everyone but Daphne left with drivers at the end of the night. I’ve taken a long, long shower and dressed in soft clothes. I’m sore from the party. I don’t know if it’s from the heels or the dancing or my nerves.
I go downstairs to look for Leo and find Gerard waiting in the foyer instead. “Good morning, Haley. How was your party?”
“It was amazing.” There’s a tense set to his posture. Gerard’s eyes go back to Leo’s large double doors. “Is Leo in the dining room?”
There are usually three places I can find him if he’s not in the bedroom when I wake up. His office, the den, or the dining room. Sometimes I find him reading at the table with a cup of coffee at his place. The first day I was here, I found him just that way. His plate in front of him, and his book. He’d abandoned the book in favor of making me take all my clothes off and come all over his fingers. I told myself it was awful, and cruel, and humiliating, but in reality it was over for me. I was never going to be the same after that. I was never going to want anyone else. I just didn’t know it yet.
“No. He’ll be arriving back at the house in about five minutes.”
“Back at the house? Where did he go?” Worry clenches my stomach in a fist. Leo didn’t say a word about leaving. The last time he invited me for a walk, he turned out to be very, very sick. “Is everything all right?”
“He had a meeting in the city. Everything is secure. We’ve had no problems on the grounds.”
Secure is not the same thing as all right.
I go to the dining room to wait for him.
The space has been transformed back into its usual arrangement. All that’s left from my party are the gold hangings on the ceiling. He made that perfect night for me, and then he went to the city without telling me. I don’t know whether to be pissed off or afraid or both. The house feels like a cavern without him. It feels like a popped balloon. Someone has put his book back on the table. It’s a battered paperback. I recognize it. It’s a story about building a cathedral.
Voices in the foyer. Footsteps in the hall. And Leo appears in the doorway.
I’ve come into the room many times while he’s backlit by the window. He has the most cutting profile, the most beautiful profile I’ve ever seen. The light always catches on the planes of him, casting shadows that take my breath away.
It’s a different view from his seat. That first day when I came into this room, I almost stopped breathing at the sunlight on his cheekbones. He would have seen me, lit in a soft glow. He’s standing in it now. What I didn’t know on that day was how it showed everything. It’s the kind of light that makes hiding impossible.
This is his house. He’s choosing to let me see him this way. In his pristine black clothes. They were made for him. To highlight his body, yes. To show off the lean muscle on his tall frame and his perfect thighs and strong shoulders. But they were also made to protect him from as much pain as possible.
I don’t think it’s working.
He’s wrung out, his dark eyes haunted. Leo stands up the tallest when his pain is bad. There’s another level beyond that, though. There is. He hasn’t admitted it to me out loud, but I can tell by looking at him that we’re almost there now. A pressure in my chest expands. I want answers. I don’t want to ask for them. Not because I’m afraid of the answers, but because I don’t want to hurt him. Not any more than this meeting already has.
Leo looks at me for a long, long time. Until I can feel him struggling. Until the silence seems heavier by the second. His eyes go to his book, and then back to me. “Are you ready for breakfast?”
“Are you?”
His hands come up and he covers his face. Runs them right over his eyes and down. It’s over in a split second and it’s probably nothing. Except it’s not a gesture Leo makes. It’s not something I’ve ever seen him do. And not with trembling hands. “I’m not hungry.”
“What if we just—” I cross the room and take his hand. Leo squeezes mine and brings it to his mouth. Grazes his teeth over my knuckles. “Sometimes, if I was having a really shitty day, my sister would send me upstairs to start over. So I’d get in bed and take a nap and wake up again, and then it would be better. Or at least bearable.”
He lets out a breath. “I’m fucking terrible at napping.”
“Then let’s not nap.”
Leo pushes me back against the doorframe then. He drops his head and kisses my jawline, kisses my neck, kisses my mouth. He puts both hands on my face, and the shaking disappears. Like I’m the only solid thing in the room. In his life. He feels like the only solid thing in mine. “Upstairs,” he says against my skin, and then he picks me up and takes me there himself.
* * *
The day passes. The night. The next morning. Leo doesn’t tell me about his meeting, and I don’t ask, but I know he’s thinking about it. I keep catching him staring off into nothing. I go to him every time. I can’t resist it. He’ll tell me when it’s time, when he can, but until then—
Until then, I can kiss his cheek. Drag my nails down the back of his neck and make him shiver. Beg him to take me to bed.
It’s nightfall, and I’ve been reading in the den. Daphne sits on the opposite chair, her legs over the arm, staring at the ceiling while she bickers with Leo about her room. “I just want you to have an opinion about it.”
“I have no opinion about your mural, Daphne.” He’s standing at the window, looking out.
“It’s going to be on a wall in your house. You could at least say if you want a forest scene or an ocean scene.”
“You only paint oceans.”
“Maybe I want to paint a forest.”