I avoid him for the rest of the day. This is difficult because the man has apparently developed the ability to exist in every room simultaneously — a talent he's been hiding behind all the quarterbacking.
He's in the kitchen when I want coffee, leaning against the counter with a mug like he's been cast in a commercial for domestic contentment. He's in the hallway when I need the bathroom, phone in hand, stepping aside with a "sorry" that doesn't sound sorry at all. He's in the garden when I escape for air, sitting on the stone wall with his face turned toward the sun and his sleeves rolled up like a painting of a man who didn't spend last night being used as a mattress by a woman in one sock.
Every time our eyes meet the heat rushes up my neck so fast it should be medically classified. I turn away. Find another room. Open a cabinet I've already opened. Pretend to be deeply invested in the contents of a pantry I've memorized down to the expiration dates.
He doesn't mention the kiss. He doesn't mention the dress on the floor or the climbing or the pretty eyes or the architecturally significant jawline. He just exists in my peripheral vision with that quiet almost-smile, making eggs, checking his phone, living his life like he didn't just rearrange the entire molecular structure of mine with a game and a truth and a kiss that wasn't the vodka.
By noon I've run out of rooms. The house is enormous but not enormous enough for two people and the thing that happened between them, and the worst part is I can't tell whether he's following me or whether the architecture is conspiring against us — hallways that funnel toward the same kitchen, doors that open onto the same garden, a floor plan designed by someone who believed in open concepts and didn't anticipate that two people would need to avoid eye contact in it while one of them is having a prolonged cardiovascular event and the other is making eggs with the casual grace of a man who slept perfectly fine, thank you.
In the afternoon I lock myself in the bathroom. Check the door twice. Sit on the edge of the bathtub, pull out my phone, and call Olivia. She picks up on the third ring, and I can hear the hospital behind her — the beep of monitors, someone paging Dr. Hernandez, the organized chaos of a woman who spends her days saving lives and her evenings listening to mine fall apart.
"I need to tell you something and I need you to not react until I'm finished," I whisper.
"That's never a good opening." She's moving — I can hear a door close, the noise dimming, the particular quiet of a supply closet or a break room. "Go."
I tell her everything. Whispered, rapid, hunched over my knees on the bathtub's edge like a woman in confession. The truth-or-lie game. The things we said — his mother, my mother, the ten years of sobriety, the charcoal portrait I almost confessed was of him.
The way the evening softened into something warm and dangerous and my feet ended up under his thigh and neither of us noticed the distance closing until his face was right there and the air between us ran out. The kiss. Not the staged one, not the café one, not the stadium one — the real one, the one that tasted like cranberry and honesty and the end of pretending.
Waking up on top of him on the couch in my underwear and one sock with no memory of how the dress left my body. The play-by-play he delivered with that grin: the dress removal, the climbing attempt, the pretty eyes declaration. Twice.
Olivia is silent for so long I check the screen to make sure the call is still connected. The little timer blinks at me — 2:47, 2:48, 2:49.
"You told the man he has pretty eyes?" Her voice is carefully neutral, the kind of neutral that's holding back a tidal wave.
"Apparently."
"And you climbed him like a tree?"
"Olivia, I swear to God—"
"And he just... let you sleep on his chest? Didn't touch you, didn't take advantage, just lay there being a pillow while you performed a one-woman show about his bone structure?"
I press my free hand over my eyes. "That's what he says."
"That doesn't sound like the towel-throwing monster you described two weeks ago." Her voice shifts — the amusement draining out of it, replaced by something steady and serious, the nurse voice, the voice she uses when the diagnosis is bigger than the patient is ready to hear. "Mia."
"Don't."
"You're falling for him."
"I'm not." The words come out too fast and too high, the verbal equivalent of a woman tripping over a flat surface. "I had too much to drink and my body made a series of catastrophic decisions without consulting management—"
"You're falling for him. And that terrifies you more than Ron, more than the contract, more than any of it." I can hear her sitting down, settling in, the creak of a break room chair accepting the weight of what she's about to say.
"Because the last time you let someone in, he told you your son was a burden and made you believe the walls closing in were your own fault. You spent five years shrinking yourself into nothing to survive a man who never hit you but never had to — because the words did the job just fine."
My forehead is against the bathroom mirror. The glass is cool and my reflection is a disaster — yesterday's mascara smudged under my eyes, hair that looks like it survived a natural event, a bruise on my temple that's fading from purple to yellow, and underneath all of it a woman whose eyes are doing something she doesn't have permission for.
The expression staring back at me isn't fear. It isn't confusion. It's the face of someone standing at the edge of something high with the wind pulling her forward.
"I can't afford this, Liv." My voice is barely audible, aimed at my own reflection. "Not now. Not with everything that's happening — the contract, Ron, the threats, William. I can't fall for a man who's paying me to pretend to love him. That's not a love story. That's a breakdown."
"Honey." Olivia's voice is gentle in a way that makes my throat close. "You jumped out of a window for him. You threw yourself in front of a car for him. You told him about your mother — something you've never told anyone but me." She pauses. "Your body already knows what you're not ready to say. It's been telling you for weeks. You're just the last one to read the memo."
I close my eyes. Press my forehead harder against the cool glass. In the mirror behind my eyelids I see the game, the couch, the cushion that disappeared, the face that was right there, and the ten seconds where nothing was fake. The kiss that wasn't the vodka.
And underneath all of it, like a heartbeat under noise, the quiet terrifying knowledge that Olivia is right. I am falling. The descent started before I noticed and the ground is very, very far away, and there is no one at the bottom waiting to catch me except a man with pretty eyes and ten years of secrets and a signed football on a five-year-old's nightstand.