Chapter 7: The Business Trip
The first thing Lilah became aware of was the profound, warm silence. Not the oppressive quiet of her own apartment, but a living, breathing hush, punctuated by the slow, deep rhythm of a heartbeat against her back and the soft, even puff of breath against her neck.
She was still nestled between them, a human parenthesis. Nathan’s arm was a heavy, possessive band across her ribs. Jace’s leg was thrown over hers, his forehead resting against her shoulder blade. The previous night was a series of visceral impressions: the cold tile, the scalding water, the bruising force of being held together, the silent tears into Nathan’s skin. It didn’t feel like a dream. It felt branded into her muscle memory.
Sunlight, sharp and merciless, cut through a gap in the charcoal-gray blinds, landing directly across her eyes. She winced, trying to shift, but Nathan’s arm tightened reflexively. A low, sleepy grumble vibrated through his chest and into her spine.
Then the arm lifted. The warmth at her back receded.
She turned her head, blinking against the light. Nathan was sitting on the edge of the bed, his broad back to her, already pulling on tailored trousers. The planes of his back were a landscape of muscle and old, faint scars she hadn’t noticed in the dark. He moved with a quiet, efficient purpose that felt completely at odds with the man who had pinned her to a shower wall hours before.
“You’re up,” she murmured, her voice gravelly with sleep and spent emotion.
He glanced over his shoulder. His expression was smoothed into that familiar, unreadable mask, but his eyes were soft, the mossy green darkened with something that looked like regret. “I have to fly to New York,” he said, his voice a quiet rasp. “A client summit. It’s been on the books for months.”
He stood, fastening his belt, then reached for a crisp white shirt draped over a chair. “Two weeks.” The words fell into the sunlit room like stones.
Two weeks. The number echoed in the hollow place last night had excavated. It felt simultaneously like a reprieve and a sentence.
Nathan buttoned his cuffs with precise, sharp movements. He picked up a heavy, silver wristwatch from the nightstand, next to the empty whiskey glass. The buckle of the strap made a definitive click in the quiet. He turned fully to face the bed, now looking every inch the imposing, refined architect—a stark contrast to the rumpled sheets and the two sleep-tousled bodies still in them.
He sat back down on the edge, the mattress dipping. His fingers, warm and sure, brushed a curl from her temple, then traced the line of her bare shoulder. The touch was infused with a restrained longing that his composed face couldn’t quite hide. “I wouldn’t go if it wasn’t critical.”
“It’s fine,” she said automatically, the EMT’s default response. She propped herself up on an elbow, the sheet pooling at her waist. “Work is work.”
From behind her, Jace stirred. A long arm snaked around her middle, pulling her back against a firm, sleep-warm chest. A groan sounded near her ear. “Ugh. Sun. Enemy of the creative soul.” He nuzzled into her hair, then peeked over her shoulder. His voice, still thick with sleep, took on a wicked, playful edge. “Oh. The corporate overlord suits up. What’s the verdict, warden? Life sentence?”
“New York,” Nathan said, his eyes still on Lilah. “Two weeks.”
A slow grin spread across Jace’s face. He pressed a smiling kiss to Lilah’s shoulder. “Guess that means you’re all mine, sweetheart.”
Nathan’s gaze flicked to Jace, a silent communication passing between them that Lilah couldn’t decipher. It wasn’t jealousy. It was something older, a negotiation. A handing-off of responsibility. Nathan gave a minute, almost imperceptible nod.
He leaned in then, cupping Lilah’s face. His kiss wasn’t like the ones from the night before. It was slow, deep, and unmistakably final. A bookmark. A promise. It tasted of mint and coffee and a sharp, metallic tension. “Use the key,” he said against her lips, his voice low. “The one on the kitchen hook. Don’t go back to your empty apartment after your shifts.”
It wasn’t a question. It was an instruction, delivered with the same quiet authority he used for everything. Before she could formulate a reply, he stood, straightening his jacket.
“Be good,” he said, the statement aimed at the room at large, but his eyes were on Jace.
Jace saluted lazily from the bed. “When am I not?”
A ghost of a smile touched Nathan’s mouth. He gave Lilah one last, long look, then turned and left. They heard the soft click of the loft’s main door a moment later.
The silence he left behind was different. Lighter, but charged with a new kind of potential.
Jace collapsed onto his back with a dramatic sigh, throwing an arm over his eyes. “Two weeks. That’s, like, a thousand years in artist time. He’ll come back expecting the place to be spotless and for me to have solved existential dread.” He peeked out from under his arm. “You gonna help me with the dread part?”
Lilah sat up, pulling the sheet around her. The space Nathan had occupied felt vast and suddenly cold. “I have to work. Double shift tomorrow.”
“Perfect.” Jace rolled onto his side, propping his head on his hand. The morning sun gilded his blond hair and caught the flecks of amber in his eyes. The playful energy was returning, filling the vacuum Nathan’s departure had created. “That gives you today to recuperate. And by recuperate, I mean model for me.”
“Model?” She raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah. For a painting. I’ve been stuck on this series for weeks. It’s about… juxtaposition. Hard and soft. Strength and vulnerability. All that artsy crap.” His gaze traveled over her, thoughtful now, not merely hungry. “You, in his bed, wrapped in his sheets, with that look on your face right now… it’s perfect.”
“What look?”
“Like you’re not sure if you’ve been rescued or captured.” He said it lightly, but it landed with the weight of truth. He swung his legs out of bed, completely unselfconscious in his nakedness. “Coffee. Then you can tell me to go to hell. But I make really good coffee.”
He padded out toward the kitchen. Lilah sat alone in the tangle of sheets that smelled like cedar, and sex, and the three of them. She looked at the closed door, then at the empty space where Nathan’s watch had been.
Two weeks.
She thought of her sterile, quiet apartment across the hall. The leftover Thai food in her fridge. The silence that would wait for her there, a silence that would now be filled with the echo of a flatline and the memory of hands that knew exactly how to hold her.
She heard Jace whistling in the kitchen, the cheerful sound followed by the explosive grumble of a coffee grinder.
Lilah got out of bed. She found her scrubs, cleaned and folded neatly on a chair—Jace’s work, she realized. She ignored them. Instead, she walked to Nathan’s closet, slid the door open, and pulled one of his long, dark wool sweaters off a hanger. It swamped her, falling to mid-thigh, the sleeves covering her hands. She buried her nose in the collar. Cedar and him.
She walked into the open living space. Jace was at the massive industrial stove, scrambling eggs with one hand and pouring coffee with the other. He glanced over, took in the sweater, and his grin softened into something more genuine.
“Stealing his clothes already. I like your style.”
“It’s cold,” she said, her voice quieter than she intended.
“Sure it is.” He slid a mug of black coffee across the concrete breakfast bar toward her. “So? What’s the verdict? Do I get to paint you, or do I have to spend the next fourteen days talking to the ficus plant?”
She wrapped her hands around the warm mug. The sweater’s sleeves engulfed her fingers. She looked at Jace—his easy stance, the open curiosity on his face, the complete lack of the brooding intensity that both drew her to and frightened her about Nathan. Here was something different. Something sunny. A lifeline, maybe.
“What would I have to do?” she asked.
“Just sit. Or stand. Mostly just… be there. Be you.” He shrugged. “It’s pretty boring, actually. I’ll probably play terrible music. I might talk your ear off about the existential horror of a blank canvas.”
She took a sip of the coffee. It was, as promised, excellent. She thought of Danny’s face, already beginning to blur at the edges in her memory. She thought of the way Nathan had looked at her as he left, like he was sealing her in amber.
She needed to not be alone with that.
“Okay,” she said.
Jace’s eyes lit up. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. But I’m not taking my clothes off.”
He laughed, a bright, unrestrained sound that bounced off the high ceilings. “Today, sweetheart, the clothes are the whole point. That sweater is a masterpiece of tension all by itself.” He pushed a plate of buttery eggs and toast toward her. “Eat. Then we begin.”
As she ate, Jace bustled around the north-facing studio corner of the loft, adjusting a large canvas, squeezing tubes of paint onto a palette already crusted with a thousand other colors. The morning light was clean and white, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air.
Lilah finished her food, feeling the simple solidity of it. The world outside—the bridge, the hospital, the future, the past—felt distant, held at bay by the concrete walls of this loft and the man now humming off-key as he mixed a shade of gray.
“Ready?” he asked, picking up a brush.
She took her mug, walked to the wide, worn armchair he’d positioned, and curled up in it, tucking her feet underneath her. The sleeves of Nathan’s sweater swallowed her hands. She looked out the window at the lead-gray sky over Puget Sound.
“I’m ready,” she said, and let the silence, now filled with the soft scratch of charcoal on canvas, settle over her like a shield.