His Secret Addiction

Chapter Seventeen

Damien's POV

Marcus canceled my nine o'clock. I found out when I arrived at the office and Ethan handed me a revised schedule with a note attached in Marcus's handwriting. *You haven't had a day off in four months. Go home. I've handled everything. Don't call me.*

Sophie had co-signed it. Literally. Her signature was at the bottom.

I stood in the elevator holding the note.

Alex was still at home. I'd left him drinking coffee and reading something on his tablet, relaxed in a way he rarely was during the week. I took the elevator back down.

He looked up when I walked in. "Forgot something?"

"Marcus cancelled my day."

"Cancelled your day," Alex repeated.

"Apparently I've been difficult to work with lately and everyone collectively decided I needed to leave the building." I loosened my tie. "Sophie signed off on it."

Alex set his tablet down slowly. "So you have a free day."

"We both do. I checked your calendar. Ethan already moved your eleven o'clock."

"Ethan is going to get himself promoted and fired simultaneously one day." He stood. "So what do we do?"

I realized I genuinely didn't know. I couldn't remember the last time I'd had an unstructured day with no agenda, no deliverables, no particular place to be.

"Whatever people do," I said.

Alex looked at me with something between affection and pity. "Have you never been on a day off before?"

"I've been on work trips that ended early."

"That's not the same thing." He disappeared into the bedroom and came back pulling on his coat. "Get changed. We're going out."

He took me to the farmer's market in Union Square first.

I hadn't been since it opened years ago when my grandmother dragged me there on a Saturday morning. I'd been twenty-two and impatient and completely missed the point. Walking through it now with Alex, no phone in hand for once, it was different.

He stopped at every third stall. Tested three different apple varieties and gave me serious analysis on each one. Argued cheerfully with a cheese vendor about the merits of aged gouda. Bought a jar of hot honey from a woman who called him honey herself and made him laugh.

I bought nothing. I just watched him.

"You're staring," he said without looking up from a display of bread loaves.

"You're interesting to watch."

"I'm buying bread."

"You're buying bread like it matters."

He looked at me then. "It does matter. When's the last time you ate something that wasn't ordered to a conference room or expensed to a client dinner?"

I thought about it. "February. Marcus's birthday. His husband cooked."

"It's November, Damien."

"I know what month it is."

He put a sourdough loaf in my hands. "Carry that."

I carried it for the rest of the market, which I suspected was his way of making me participate rather than observe. It worked, marginally. By the time we left I was also holding a bunch of herbs neither of us knew what to do with and a small jar of the hot honey because the vendor had been persuasive.

---

We ate lunch at a Thai place in the West Village that had twelve seats and a handwritten menu. Alex ordered for both of us without asking, which should have irritated me and didn't.

"You knew what I'd want," I said when the food arrived.

"You've been ordering the same flavor profiles at client dinners for months. You like heat and you always skip the sweet." He poured tea. "It wasn't complicated."

"You pay attention."

"So do you. You just use it differently."

He was right. I paid attention to people to understand leverage, patterns, weakness. Alex paid attention because he was genuinely curious about people. The distinction said something neither of us commented on directly.

We ate without talking about work. Without talking about the investigation or the board or Maya's upcoming arraignment. He told me about his brother James calling that morning, checking in, fumbling through the conversation because James didn't quite have the vocabulary for everything that had happened but was trying anyway.

"He asked if you were good to me," Alex said.

"What did you tell him?"

"I said you carried my bread at the farmer's market." He smiled. "He didn't know what to do with that."

"Neither do I, honestly."

"You did it anyway. That counts."

After lunch we walked. No destination, no particular direction. Through the Village, down toward the river, back up through Chelsea. He put his hand in mine somewhere around Fourteenth Street and neither of us made a thing of it. Just two people walking in the city on a cold November afternoon.

He stopped in front of a bookshop on Twentieth.

"Come on," he said.

Inside was narrow and warm and smelled like old paper. The owner barely looked up. Alex moved through the shelves with the same focused energy he brought to everything, pulling books out, reading back covers, putting them back or tucking them under his arm.

I found a section on architecture and stood there longer than I expected. Pulled out a book on mid-century industrial buildings and flipped through it.

Alex appeared at my shoulder. "I didn't know you liked architecture."

"My grandfather was a builder. He used to take me to construction sites when I was small." I closed the book. "Before the family business became my responsibility."

He took the book from me and added it to his stack. "We're buying it."

"I can buy my own book."

"I know you can." He headed toward the register. "I want to."

We left with four books between us. He'd bought me the architecture one and a novel he said I'd argue with but finish in two days. He was probably right about both.

On the walk home the sun was dropping behind the buildings, turning everything briefly gold.

"Good day," Alex said.

"Better than I expected."

He bumped his shoulder against mine. "Next time I'll aim for better than good."

"There's a next time."

"There's a lot of next times." He said it simply, without drama. Like it was already decided.

I looked at him in the fading light, holding our books and our sourdough and the small jar of hot honey, looking completely at ease in a way that had taken me thirty-five years to find in anyone.

"Yeah," I said. "There is.”