Chapter 7: The room
792 Words
Irene's Pov
He doesn't wait for an answer.
He says come with me and then he turns and walks and I follow him because I don't have a better option and also because, and I am aware of how this sounds, I want to.
He reaches back and takes my wrist to guide me around a corner and the spark goes up my arm so fast I nearly stop walking. few seconds of contact. He drops my wrist the moment we clear the corner, like he touched something hot, and puts distance between us and keeps walking and I feel the loss of it in a way that is wildly disproportionate to the situation.
I am following a stranger down a hall in a house I don't know and mourning the loss of wrist contact.
I am going to need a doctor. A different kind of doctor.
The room is at the end of the east wing.
He opens the door and steps back and I walk in and I stop.
It is... large. That's the first word. Large. High ceilings, a bed that could fit four people without negotiation, windows that run almost floor to ceiling and look out over the back grounds. Everything in a deep cream and dark wood. A fireplace that is already going. Flowers on the dresser, white, fresh.
I turn around slowly.
A bathroom through one door. A wardrobe through another, and through the open wardrobe door I can see clothes hanging, women's clothes, the right size, which means someone prepared this before I was awake enough to ask for anything.
I look at him.
He's standing in the doorway with his shoulder against the frame and his arms crossed, watching me take it in. His face is doing nothing. That face does nothing constantly and I am already, in the space of a morning, starting to read the nothing for what's underneath it, which is probably not a skill I should be developing this quickly.
"It's yours for as long as you need it," he says.
I look at the fireplace. The flowers. The wardrobe full of clothes in my size.
"You prepared this," I say.
"Mrs Aldea prepared it."
"Before you knew I'd be awake."
He doesn't answer. Which is an answer.
I turn back to the window. The grounds are white and very large and somewhere out there, past the tree line, is a ravine I apparently fell into last night. I look at it and I feel nothing familiar. No memory of the path, no memory of the cold, no memory of anything before a white ceiling and a man in a chair.
I feel his eyes on my back.
"I'm leaving for New York this afternoon," he says.
I turn.
"The position." He pauses. "Mateo's nanny. If you don't want it, you don't have to take it. You can stay here regardless."
I look at him. He is watching me with that careful stillness, waiting.
"I'll do it," I say.
Something moves through his expression. Gone before I can read it.
He nods once and pushes off the doorframe and comes into the room, not far, enough to cross to the window and look out at the grounds the way I was looking, standing beside me, and the warmth of him is immediate and ridiculous and I keep my eyes forward.
"The estate has a doctor who will come to check you this week," he says. "Mrs Aldea knows everything you need. Mateo's routine..."
He stops.
I turn my head to look at him, and he is looking at me, close, too close, with an expression I haven't seen on his face before.
My hair has fallen across my face.
He reaches up.
His hand moves toward my face slowly, fingers almost at my cheek, almost at the strand of hair, and I hold my breath and I don't move and the fireplace is very loud suddenly in the quiet room...
His phone goes off.
He goes still.
One second where neither of us moves and his hand is still raised and we are very close and the phone is going off between us like something that knows what it interrupted.
He drops his hand.
He steps back and takes the phone from his pocket and looks at the screen and whatever is on it puts the controlled expression back on his face in an instant, smooth and complete, like it was never gone.
He answers it.
He walks out of the room without looking at me again.
I stand at the window and I press the back of my hand against my own cheek, where his fingers almost were, and I look out at the white grounds and I breathe.
- Writer
