Chapter Nine - Proximity
616 Words
She called Sera on Sunday morning while the penthouse was quiet.
"Tell me something normal," Nora said when she picked up.
"Gerald grew a new leaf," Sera said immediately.
"That is the best thing anyone has said to me all week."
"Things that bad?"
"Not bad exactly." Nora looked out the window at the city. "Strange. He is strange. Cold and controlled and I cannot read him at all."
"Is he cruel?"
Nora thought about it honestly. "No. He is not cruel. He is just contained. Like everything is behind glass."
"Contained can thaw," Sera said.
"You are nineteen."
"And right," Sera said cheerfully.
Nora smiled despite herself. They talked for another twenty minutes and by the time she hung up she felt more like herself than she had in days.
Lucian was in the kitchen when she came out.
This was new. He was usually gone before she woke up. He was standing at the counter with his coffee looking at something on his phone and he glanced up when she appeared.
"You are home," she said, and then felt immediately obvious for saying it.
"I have calls this afternoon," he said. "I am working from here today."
"Right." She went to the coffee pot. "I will try not to disturb you."
"You do not disturb me."
She turned around. He said it like a simple fact, no particular weight behind it, and had already looked back at his phone. She turned back to her coffee and did not examine the small warm thing that happened in her chest when he said it.
She worked in the library most of the morning. Around noon Elena brought her lunch without being asked and Nora ate at the low table with a book propped open beside her plate.
Lucian appeared in the library doorway at some point in the early afternoon.
She looked up.
He looked at the room, at the books she had reorganised slightly on the nearest shelf, at the throw she had claimed for the reading chair, at the small collection of pencils she kept on the side table. Something moved across his expression briefly.
"You have rearranged things," he said.
"Only slightly. I can put them back if you want."
"No." He looked at the shelf again. "It is fine." He was quiet for a moment. "I used to spend time in here."
"Marcus said that." She watched him. "What changed?"
He looked at her. "Time," he said, which was not really an answer, and then he left.
But that evening he came to dinner.
Not to his office, not to his wing. He sat at the actual table and Elena served them both and for a while neither of them spoke. But it was a different kind of quiet from the first night. Less like a wall and more like two people who had not yet found all their words.
"What do you design?" he asked, when they were halfway through the meal.
"Logos mostly. Brand identities. Sometimes editorial illustrations."
"Do you enjoy it?"
The question surprised her a little. Not the words but the way he asked it, like he actually wanted to know. "Yes," she said. "I always have. Drawing was the first thing that was mine. Nobody taught me to want it. I just did."
He was quiet for a moment. "That is rare," he said. "Knowing what is yours."
She looked at him across the table. The candlelight caught the sharp line of his jaw and the dark of his eyes and she thought about what Marcus had said about him noticing more than he shows.
She picked up her fork and said nothing and filed it away.
- Writer
