Addicted To The MC President

Chapter Nine Cigarettes And City Lights

~ Lily ~

By the time the bar officially closed, I should have been home but this had become a recurring theme in my life lately — I should have been home, I should have been sleeping, I should have been reviewing contracts scheduled for tomorrow’s board meeting. Instead, I was sitting at the same stool I’d occupied for almost five hours while the remaining customers filtered toward the exit and the staff cleaned around us.

At some point, I’d stopped checking the time. At some point, I’d stopped pretending I wasn’t enjoying myself. Both developments felt equally concerning.

A waitress carried a stack of chairs past me and flipped them upside down onto nearby tables. The room looked different without customers. smaller and more intimate. For some reason, I liked it better.

“You know normal people leave when the establishment closes,” Hector said, not looking up from the empty glasses he was collecting at the far end of the counter.

I glanced toward him. “I’ve never been accused of being normal.”

“Fair,” he replied simply, moving down the bar.

I watched him work for a moment. The strange thing was that he never seemed rushed — even when he was busy, there was something exhilarating about the way he moved. Most powerful people I knew looked like they were perpetually running late for their own lives. Hector looked like a man who had nowhere else he needed to be. It was annoyingly attractive.

“You’re staring again,” he said, without looking up.

I immediately looked away. “I wasn’t.”

“Sure,” he murmured.

“I was observing,” I said.

“That’s a nicer word for staring,” he replied, the corner of his mouth pulling upward.

I hated that he was smiling. Mostly because it meant he knew I was full of it.

Twenty minutes later the last employee disappeared upstairs, leaving only the two of us in the empty bar, a few minutes later Hector finished wiping down the counter and tossed the cloth aside.

“Come on,” he said, already moving toward the back.

I frowned. “Where are we going?”

“Outside,” he said over his shoulder.

“That sounds suspicious,” I said, sliding off my stool.

“We are going upstairs, you're not being kidnapped,” he said, pushing open the back door leading upstairs.

“Those aren’t mutually exclusive,” I replied.

His laugh followed me all the way through the door and out into the night.

A moment later we stepped onto a narrow metal fire escape overlooking the city. The night air hit my face immediately, cool and clean after hours inside the bar. Below us, Manhattan stretched endlessly in every direction — windows glowing against the darkness, traffic crawling through the streets like slow rivers of light. For a few seconds, I simply stood there and took it in. The view wasn’t higher than my penthouse, wasn’t more expensive, wasn’t more impressive by any measurable standard. Yet somehow it felt better. Probably because nobody had spent forty million dollars designing it.

Hector settled against the railing and pulled a cigarette from his pocket, lighting it with a brief flare that illuminated his face before disappearing back into the dark.

“You always look like you’re about to say something,” he said, glancing over at me.

I turned toward him. “What?”

“You do,” he said, exhaling slowly. “Every time you go quiet, something’s going on behind your eyes.”

I laughed softly. “Maybe that’s because I’m usually thinking about something.”

“That’s normal,” he said.

“For me, it’s dangerous,” I replied.

He took a slow drag and then held the cigarette out toward me without a word. I stared at it, then at him, then back at it.

“You always smoke?” I asked.

“Occasionally,” he answered.

“That isn’t an answer,” I said, narrowing my eyes at him.

“It’s the only one you’re getting,” he replied, watching me with quiet amusement.

I accepted it mostly out of curiosity. The first inhale reminded me exactly why I didn’t make a habit of smoking, the second felt slightly less terrible. By the third, I was beginning to understand why people developed the habits.

“You’re terrible at that,” Hector said, watching me without mercy.

I glared at him over the cigarette. “I’ve had a difficult week.”

“You’ve had a difficult decade,” he said, while leaning his forearms against the railing.

I turned back toward the city and stared out at the lights below. A siren wailed somewhere in the distance and faded.

“I used to think if I worked hard enough, eventually everything would settle down,” I said quietly.

He turned his head toward me. “And?”

I smiled without humour. “I’m forty percent sure adulthood is just one long scam.”

“Only forty?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

That earned a real laugh from me, which kind of surprised me a little.

The conversation drifted naturally after that. We talked about cities we’d visited, terrible restaurants, terrible bosses, terrible decisions that had seemed reasonable at the time and somewhere in the middle of a story about a disastrous charity auction, something occurred to me — something embarrassing. I had the habit of apologising for everything, for example; talking too much, making a scene, changing subjects and for simply taking up space in the conversation.

I was still working out when exactly I’d started doing that when Hector cut me off mid-sentence.

“You know you do that constantly, right?” he said, watching me steadily.

I blinked. “Do what?”

“Apologise,” he said.

“I don’t apologise constantly,” I said.

“You apologised three times during that story,” he replied, his voice soft without sounding accusing.

“No, I didn’t,” I said.

“You apologised before you even started telling it,” he said, holding my gaze.

I opened my mouth. Then closed it. Because unfortunately he was right, and we both knew it. “Most people don’t notice,” I said finally.

“Most people aren’t listening,” he replied.

His reply settled somewhere uncomfortable inside my chest and I looked away. For years I’d learned to make myself smaller without even realising it, I would always try to smile more, argue less, accommodate everyone, manage my emotions and prevent conflict at any cost.

While not realising the damage I was causing myself, I won't blame Dylan this time because he didn't cause them my environment did, but he certainly didn’t help in managing the situation.

“You don’t need permission to exist, you know,” Hector said, his voice low and completely serious.

The statement was so unexpected that I actually laughed. “What kind of motivational poster nonsense was that?”

“I’m serious,” he said, and that made it worse somehow because he clearly was.

Nobody had ever pointed it out before. Not Ginger, not Elias, not my parents, not even me in my most honest moments alone. Yet now that he’d said it, I couldn’t stop thinking back to the way I softened opinions before sharing them, the way I apologised before asking questions, the way I automatically made room for everyone else’s comfort before my own.

For a moment neither of us spoke. The city glittered below us while cool air drifted through the space between buildings.

Then I made the mistake of looking at him.

His attention was already on me — not in a possessive and lustful way it was as if he was actually seeing me…not the act I put up. Just me, standing on a fire escape with a cigarette I didn’t know how to hold, saying things I’d never said out loud before.

The realisation sent something warm and inconvenient moving through my chest.

For a second neither of us looked away. Then another second passed, and another. Then the air became thicker somehow, more charged, like the city below had taken a collective breath and held it. At that instance, I became aware of every small detail at once and I could feel the rough edge of the railing beneath my hand, the distant sound of traffic, the way his eyes hadn’t moved, the way mine hadn’t either.

Then a car horn blared from somewhere below and shattered whatever had quietly assembled itself between us.

I looked away first as the word “coward” sounded in my head and it wasn’t wrong.

I was relieved neither of us mentioned what had or was about to happen, which somehow made it worse. Or better. I honestly wasn’t sure anymore.

A few minutes later we headed back inside. The bar was completely quiet now, every chair upturned and every glass in its place. Hector locked the front door while I reached for my purse.

“You heading home?” he asked, turning back toward me.

The question shouldn’t have disappointed me. It did anyway. “Eventually,” I said.

One corner of his mouth lifted. “That’s not an answer.”

“I’m learning from you,” I replied.

“Bad idea,” he said simply.

I laughed, and then stood there a second longer than necessary — the same thing always happened every night and neither of us seemed particularly eager to be the one who ended it, and the fact that I’d noticed that about both of us felt very alarming.

Because somewhere between the divorce, the headlines, and coming to this place, I had developed a habit of wanting to be close to this man, and for the first time since meeting him, that realisation genuinely scared me.

The worst part?

I already knew I was coming back tomorrow.