I wasn't thinking about him.
That was what I told myself while I was sitting on the library floor with my back against the bottom shelf and a book open in my lap that I hadn't actually read a single page of in the last forty minutes.
I wasn't thinking about Anthonio. I was reading. I was completely fine and I was reading.
The book had been on the same page since hours.
It was late. The house had gone quiet the way it did after ten.....staff gone, brothers in their rooms or wherever they went when the day finished. I liked the house at this hour. It felt like it belonged to me in a way, it didn't during the day when it belonged to everyone. Then I heard the front door.
Not a break-in sound. A key. Familiar weight of footsteps in the entrance hall, calm,someone who knew this house well enough not to need the lights. Someone who had been here enough times that the house didn't feel foreign to him in the dark.
I knew before I saw him.
Anthonio appeared in the library doorway and stopped when he saw me on the floor. He looked at me. Looked at the book. Looked back at me.
"You're sitting on the floor," he said.
"I noticed."
"Why?"
"The chairs weren't doing it for me tonight."
"The floor is doing it for you?"
"More than you'd think."
He looked at me for another second like he was deciding something. Then he came in and sat down on the reading chair closest to where I was, which was not far. He had his jacket off, sleeves pushed up, the look of someone who had come from somewhere that had gone long.
"Romeo let you in?" I asked.
"Romeo's asleep. I have a key."
"Since when?"
"Since a long time ago." He leaned back in the chair. "You going to ask me what I'm doing here?"
"I figured you'd tell me if you wanted to."
He looked at the shelf above my head. "The meeting ran late. Didn't feel like driving back."
I nodded and looked back down at my book and pretended I was reading it. The room was quiet. Not uncomfortable. Just the particular kind of quiet that existed between us now, ever since the kitchen, ever since the terrace, ever since two words said in the dark that I had been carrying around for weeks without knowing what to do with them.
"You're not reading," he said.
"I'm reading."
"You haven't turned a page."
I closed the book. "Fine. I'm not reading."
"What are you doing then?"
I looked up at him. He was watching me with that steady expression he always had, the one that gave nothing away and somehow still said everything. I had stopped trying to figure out how he did that. I had been noticing it since the night of the party and I still didn't have an answer.
"Thinking," I said.
"About what?"
I didn't answer that. He didn't push it. We sat in the quiet for another minute and I was very aware of how close the chair was to where I was sitting on the floor and how that put him closer than he would have been if I'd chosen a chair like a normal person.
"You should sit on actual furniture," he said.
"You sound like Romeo."
"Romeo's right sometimes."
"Don't tell him that."
The corner of his mouth moved. Just slightly. I looked back at the shelf and told myself to stop noticing things like that.
"How long have you been in here?" he asked.
"A while."
"Since before or after everyone went to bed?"
"Before."
He looked at me. "That's a long time to not read a book."
"I had things on my mind."
"Like what?"
I turned and looked at him properly then because I was tired of looking at the shelf and tired of pretending the question didn't have an obvious answer. He was already looking at me. He was always already looking at me when I turned, which was something I had noticed and still hadn't figured out what to do with.
"You know what," I said.
Something shifted in his expression. Small. Controlled. The same thing that had happened on the terrace, in the kitchen, every time we got close enough to something real that one of us had to decide what to do with it.
He leaned forward in the chair.
Not toward me exactly. Just forward, elbows on his knees, closing some of the distance without making it a decision. But the distance closed anyway. He was close enough now that I could see the tiredness behind his eyes that the rest of his expression was working to cover, the kind that lives in someone's face when they've been managing too many things for too long.
"Andrea," he said in a low tone, Just my name.
"Don't," I said.
"Don't what?"
"Say my name like that and then say something sensible."
He looked at me for a long moment. "What do you want me to say?"
"I don't know." And that was true. I just knew that the space between us had been shrinking for weeks in ways neither of us had fully acknowledged and I was tired of pretending I didn't feel it. "Something honest."
He was quiet for a second.
"Honest," he said, like he was turning the word over. "Honest is that I've been trying very hard not to be in rooms alone with you."
"You're in one now."
"I know."
"You walked in anyway."
"I know that too."
Neither of us said anything for a moment. The house was completely still around us. No sound except the two of us sitting in a room that felt like it had gotten smaller since he walked into it.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because I'm apparently not as good at this as I thought I was."
I don't know which one of us moved first. I don't think it was a decision exactly, more like the natural result of everything that had been building since the birthday party and the kitchen and the terrace and two words I had never stopped thinking about. He was close.
Close enough that I could feel the warmth of him and see the exact moment something shifted in his eyes from controlled to something else entirely.
His hand came up.
Slow. Deliberate. His fingers touched my jaw, just barely, just the lightest pressure, almost like a question he wasn't sure he should be asking.
I didn't move.
His forehead dropped toward mine. A fraction of space left between us. His thumb moved along my jaw and I forgot how to breathe in a way that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the fact that this was happening and I had been trying not to want it for so long that now that it was here I didn't know what to do with my hands.
Then he stopped.
Not because something interrupted us. Not because anyone walked in. He just stopped. His forehead was still against mine, both of us stayed still, and I felt the exact moment he made the decision because his jaw tightened and his hand didn't move but everything about it changed.
He pulled back.
Slowly. Like it cost him something. He stood up and put deliberate distance between us and when he looked at me his expression was back to that controlled unreadable thing, but something was still moving underneath it that he hadn't quite gotten back under control.
"Anthonio—"
"Don't." His voice was quiet. Not cold. Just final. "Go to bed, Andrea." He didn't wait for me to respond.
He left.
I heard his footsteps in the hall. The spare room door opening and closing.
I sat on the library floor with the closed book in my lap and the imprint of his hand still on my jaw and the space where he'd been sitting still warm, and I sat there for a long time without moving.
I was thinking about all of it. Every second of it. The way he said my name and the way he looked at me right before he pulled back and the fact that he pulled back at all — that he'd been close enough and chosen not to, which should have made it easier and made it significantly worse.
I pressed my fingers to my jaw where his hand had been.
Then I closed my eyes and sat in the quiet and understood that whatever this was, it wasn't going away. It hadn't been going anywhere since the night of my birthday and I had just been pretending otherwise.
I was done pretending.
I just didn't know yet what came after that. And for the first time in a long time, not knowing didn't scare me as much as it should have.