Chapter 10: The Bed

She woke before he did.

This surprised her. She had not expected to sleep at all—she'd been certain she would lie awake in this old bed in this old room cataloguing everything that could go wrong, running the engagement performance like a closing-night checklist. Instead she'd slept deeply and woken to early lake-house light, the thin kind that comes in before anyone's decided the day has started, gray at the edges and not quite committed.

His hand was still near hers. Not touching, but close enough that she could feel the warmth of it. At some point in the night they'd each migrated back to their own sides of the pillow border, or maybe the pillow border had drifted. She wasn't sure. Either way, the distance between them was less than they'd negotiated.

She lay very still and watched the light move on the ceiling.

She thought about what he'd said. I almost called you last week. Just to talk. Not about work. She thought about the specific weight of that sentence, the way it had landed in the dark without fanfare, like a fact he'd simply been waiting to state. James didn't embroider. When he said a thing, he meant the exact thing he said.

He had wanted to call her. Not about a client. Not about a project.

She turned her head and looked at the side of his face in the early light. He was still asleep—breathing slow and even, his jaw relaxed in a way it never was in the office. He looked different asleep. Less assembled. The CFO was something he put on in the morning, like the blazer and the careful neutrality, and right now it was somewhere else in the room and he was just a person in a bed in a lake house in September.

He'd said: I'm your superior. It would have been inappropriate.

And then: Now you're my fake fiancée, which is somehow both worse and the only thing that makes sense.

She'd gone six months thinking he barely registered her existence beyond the professional capacity. She'd gone six months working three desks from a man who had a playlist with her name on it and could describe the prints on her office wall from memory. The gap between those two versions of reality was so large she couldn't look at it directly.

She got up quietly, pulled on the Northwestern sweatshirt she'd borrowed from the hook in the hallway yesterday—his, though he hadn't said so, she'd just taken it without asking and he hadn't said anything—and padded toward the door. She was careful with the floorboards. The house was still silent. She made it to the kitchen without waking anyone.

The kitchen was cool and pale with morning light off the water. She put the kettle on and found a mug and stood at the window looking out at the lake, which was flat and gray-green and entirely unbothered by any of this.

She was aware, standing there, that something had shifted. Not dramatically—nothing had happened, no declarations, nothing she couldn't unsay if she needed to. But she'd woken up with his hand near hers and thought about staying, which was different from what she'd thought about last night, which was how to keep things professional. It was different from what she'd thought about on the drive up, which was how to perform well enough that no one questioned the story.

She wasn't thinking about the performance anymore.

She heard footsteps on the stairs and then James appeared in the kitchen doorway in sweatpants and bare feet, his hair still showing the shape of the pillow. He looked at her at the window in his sweatshirt and did not mention the sweatshirt.

He went to the coffee maker.

"You slept okay?" she asked.

"Surprisingly." He found two cups without opening the wrong cabinet, which meant he'd been in this kitchen before in the dark. "You?"

"Better than expected."

He poured. Handed her a cup without asking how she took it, because he already knew.

She thought about how strange it was to have someone know how she took her coffee without being told. She thought about how that should feel like a violation of something—her privacy, her right to disclose things herself—and how it mostly just felt like being known.

"Can I ask you something?" she said.

He set his own cup down. "Yes."

"When you started—" she paused, found the right word—"paying attention. To me. Did you think it would come to anything?"

He was quiet for long enough that she thought he was deciding how much to give her.

"I thought it would stay where it was," he said finally. "You were good at your job and I was good at mine and there was enough distance between us professionally that I could—keep it managed."

"And then?"

"And then I needed someone for the lake house, and the only person I kept coming back to was you." He looked at his coffee. "Which probably tells me something I should have paid attention to sooner."

Nadia wrapped both hands around the mug. The tea had steeped past its ideal time but she didn't put it down. "I keep thinking about the part where you said you couldn't call me because it would be inappropriate."

"It would have been."

"I know." She turned to face him. "I'm just thinking about how much energy we've both spent being appropriate."

He met her eyes. In the morning kitchen light he looked very much like what he was—a careful person who had been carrying something for six months and hadn't yet found a way to put it down.

"What happens when we get back to Chicago?" she asked.

He didn't answer immediately. She appreciated that he didn't reach for something easy.

"I don't know," he said. "I know what I want to happen. But I also know what we agreed to, and I know that you deserve to choose without the arrangement in the room complicating it."

"The arrangement is almost over."

"I know that too."

She held his gaze for a long moment. Outside, the lake was starting to catch the first real light of the morning. Someone in the house above them was moving—footsteps, slow, probably Richard with his knee.

"Okay," she said finally.

"Okay what?"

"I'm not going to think about it this morning. About what happens after." She took a sip of her too-steeped tea. "This morning I'm just going to drink this and help your mother with whatever she's planning for breakfast and not think about Chicago."

Something crossed his face. Not quite relief. Something more careful than relief, more tentative. "Okay," he said.

"But James."

"Yes."

"Stop pretending you don't want to."

She left him there with his coffee and walked toward the sound of Elizabeth moving upstairs.

She made it as far as the hallway.

The arrangement ended in four days. She knew what she wanted. She knew what he'd said—I know what I want to happen—and she knew what she'd just said back, which was either the most honest thing she'd done in months or the most foolish, and she couldn't tell yet which.

She stood in the hallway with her tea going cold.

She did not go back. She did not go upstairs. She stood at the exact middle of it, which was not a place she'd planned to be.