The smile stayed on her face longer than she meant to let it. She turned back to the water before he could see the full measure of it, but the warmth of it remained—settled somewhere just beneath her sternum, quiet and persistent, like an ember that had decided it wasn't going anywhere. The sun was continuing its slow descent toward the horizon, painting the water in colors that had no real names, only feelings: rose, and amber, and the particular deep gold that appears in the last minutes before everything shifts to blue.
She was aware of him beside her in the way you become aware of someone when your body decides, without consulting you, that their proximity matters. The warmth of his arm near hers without touching. The measured rhythm of his breathing. The way he occupied his space without crowding hers—present but not pressing, attentive without being demanding. She had been around enough men in this city, in this industry, to know how rare that particular combination was.
"I think I've found my new favorite hideaway place," she said, because the silence had become the comfortable kind and she wanted to stay inside it a little longer without letting it become something weighted. She looked out at the last of the light on the water. "It's really peaceful here."
"I like it," he agreed. His voice had the same quality it had carried all afternoon: unhurried, sincere, stripped of the professional veneer she had been half-expecting from the man whose name appeared at the top of industry conversations. He glanced at her. "Can I ask you something, Emma?"
"Yes," she said. Then, because the afternoon had made her comfortable enough for honesty: "If I can't answer it, don't blame me."
He laughed—a real one, short and warm—and the sound of it did something to the air between them that she chose not to examine too carefully. "It'll be an easy question," he said.
She raised an eyebrow. "Those are always the ones that aren't."
He smiled at that. He looked at the water for a moment before he turned slightly in his chair to face her, his forearms resting on his knees, his green eyes catching the last of the evening light. "What kind of man do you like?" he asked.
The question was simple in its construction and enormous in every other way. She had been asked versions of it before: usually at bars, usually by men who were already halfway to the answer they wanted her to give, who asked it as a formality before telling her who they were and expecting her to adjust accordingly. This felt different. He asked it the way someone asks a question they actually want to know the answer to, without preloading it with expectation, without already having his hand on the steering wheel of her response.
She looked out at the water. She thought about it honestly, the way you could only think about it honestly when you were sitting by the ocean at the end of a day that had been surprisingly good.
"I want a man who can love me with all his heart," she said at last. Her voice was quiet but steady, not the voice of someone performing vulnerability but of someone who had thought about this long enough to know exactly what she meant. "Someone I can make a family with. A simple man, someone I feel safe with." She paused. "Someone who likes to take walks. Who will read books to me and let me read to them." She exhaled softly. "Someone who's present. Who's actually there when he's with me." She turned to look at him. "That probably sounds very ordinary to someone like you."