MY CEO IN DISGUISE

Chapter Six: The Weight of Knowing

The apartment felt too quiet for the first three days, the kind of quiet that gave Nora too much room to think, which was exactly what the doctor had told her not to do and exactly what she couldn't stop doing.

Sebastian Cole. CEO. Owner of the building, the company, the very desk she'd spent three years sitting behind pretending she didn't notice the man three cubicles over. She turned it over so many times in her head that first week that it stopped sounding like words and started sounding like static, a fact too large to actually hold onto.

He called every evening. Not texted, called, like he wanted to hear that she was actually resting and not just typing a reassurance she didn't mean.

"You're supposed to be asleep," he said, on the fourth night, when she picked up on the second ring instead of letting it go to voicemail like the doctor would have wanted.

"I was thinking."

"About."

"You know about what."

A pause on his end, and she could picture him exactly, the careful stillness he wore even now, even alone on a phone call at ten at night. "I should have told you sooner," he said. "Before the accident. I kept telling myself there wasn't a right moment."

"Would there ever have been one?"

"Probably not," he admitted. "I was going to keep lying to you for as long as it took to find out who I could trust in that building. And then the truck happened, and none of that mattered anymore compared to whether you were going to be okay."

She was quiet for a moment, turning her water glass slowly on the counter. "I'm not angry that you're rich, Sebastian. I want that to be clear. I'm angry that you let me worry I was going to lose my job over something that was never in question."

"I know."

"Do you?"

"Yes," he said, quiet and certain. "And I'm sorry for that part. Not for the rest of it."

"What's the rest of it."

"That I got to know you before you knew who I was," he said, and something in his voice went low and unguarded in a way she hadn't heard from him before, not even at the printer, not even in the hospital. "Every version of you I've seen in three months was real. Nobody was performing for the CEO, because nobody knew there was a CEO in the room. I got the actual you, Nora. I'm not sorry for that. I'll be sorry for a lot of things eventually, but not that."

She sat with that for a long moment, the phone warm against her ear, and felt something in her chest loosen that had been tight since the hospital, some fear she hadn't fully named until it started easing. "That's a very good answer," she said finally.

"I've had four days to think about it."

"Still. Good answer."

He came by twice that week, careful, brief visits under the excuse of dropping off files she didn't actually need, though they both knew what the visits really were. The second time, he stayed longer than either of them planned, sitting on the opposite end of her couch with a takeout container between them, and somewhere around the third episode of whatever show she'd put on to fill the silence, she found herself leaning into his shoulder without entirely deciding to, and he didn't pull away, and neither did she.

"You're doing better," he said, quiet, his hand finding hers on the cushion between them, thumb tracing slow, absent circles over her knuckles.

"The doctor says another two weeks before I can look at a screen for more than an hour."

"I meant with me."

She turned her head to look at him, close enough now that she could see the exact moment his eyes dropped to her mouth and came back up, deliberate, like he was giving himself permission to look and then reeling it back in. "I'm still deciding," she said, though her voice betrayed her, softer than she meant it to sound.

"Take your time," he murmured. "I'm not going anywhere."

He reached up, slow, and brushed his thumb along her jaw the way he had that night at her desk, except there was no printer buzzing to interrupt it now, no cleaning cart rolling closer down the hall, just the quiet of her apartment and the low hum of a show neither of them was watching anymore.

"Sebastian."

"Yes."

"If you're going to kiss me," she said, barely above a whisper, "you should probably do it before I change my mind and decide this is a terrible idea."

Something shifted in his expression, all the careful restraint of three months breaking at once, and he leaned in and kissed her slowly, like he'd been waiting considerably longer than three months to do it, one hand coming up to cradle her jaw while the other found the small of her back and pulled her gently closer. She melted into it without a fight, months of pretending she didn't want exactly this dissolving into the warmth of his mouth against hers, and when they finally broke apart, breathless, foreheads still touching, he let out a low exhale that sounded like relief.

"That took longer than it should have," he murmured.

"Three months."

"Three months too long," he said, and kissed her again before either of them could think of a reason not to.

Two floors above the executive suite, unbeknownst to either of them, a name lit up on Sebastian's private line, a message from a woman in Accounting named Selena who'd been quietly cataloging every unexplained absence of the mysterious new hire in Operations, wondering, with growing and entirely unprofessional interest, exactly where he'd disappeared to for the better part of a week.