The villa appeared through the windshield like something from a different planet — glass and white stone cantilevered over a cliff, the Pacific crashing below.
I stepped out with my duffel. Scuffed boots on polished stone. Thrift-store jacket against floor-to-ceiling glass. This is what money looks like when it stops apologizing.
Aiden hadn't spoken since the name drop. He walked past me without looking back, shoulders tight. Otis gave me a quick tour — my room, the kitchen, the common areas — then left with a handshake and a promise to check in tomorrow.
The door closed. Just me, the ocean, and a man who'd stolen my words and built a kingdom on them.
I found the schedule Otis had pinned to the fridge — meals, medication, therapy at two, studio at four. My job in list form. Keep him fed, medicated, sober, functional.
Then I walked into the kitchen and Aiden was leaning against the counter with a coffee mug, shirtless, tattoos catching the late afternoon light.
Oh, come on.
My body did the thing it had done in the car — that involuntary full-system response I had no permission to feel. The lean muscle across his shoulders. Hip bones cutting above low-slung sweats. The V of muscle I'd noticed outside the facility, now on full display like he'd staged it.
You've never even been on a proper date. Too busy working doubles and selling plasma to have a love life. And now the first man who makes your stomach flip is the one who destroyed you at seventeen. That's not irony. That's divine punishment.
"You just going to stand there?" He sipped his coffee, bare shoulders against the cabinet, at ease in his own skin in a way that felt like a weapon. "Kitchen's that way. Or do you need a tour of the fridge too?"
I didn't flinch. Walked past him — close enough to catch the scent of soap and something darker, coffee and sleeplessness — pulled a mug from the cabinet, and poured coffee from his pot without asking.
"Where's the rest of the band?"
"Their own places. They come in for rehearsal." He set his mug down, ceramic clicking against marble. "Why? Hoping for someone easier to talk to?"
"Hoping for someone who puts a shirt on before company."
"My house, Calloway. I'll wear what I want." He pushed off the counter and stepped toward me — not close enough to touch, close enough to make the air feel like a decision. His chest was right there. I kept my eyes on his face with the kind of discipline that should qualify as an Olympic sport.
"Let me be clear. I didn't ask for a keeper. I didn't ask for you. Otis hired you and Otis can fire you, and the sooner you figure out that you're furniture in my house, the easier this gets."
Furniture. Eight years ago I was Notebook Girl. Now I was furniture.
"Noted. Now eat something. Your nutritionist sent a meal plan and you look like you'd lose a fight with a strong wind."
Something flickered — surprise that I hadn't flinched. "I'll eat when I'm hungry."
"You'll eat now." I set a plate in front of him. "Sixty-three days sober and eleven pounds underweight isn't a personality trait."
His eyes lit up — the wrong kind of light. "You know what, you're right, Notebook Girl. Sixty-three days. That is worth celebrating."
He turned, opened the cabinet above the fridge — reaching over me, close enough that I could feel the heat off his bare chest — and pulled down a bottle of Jameson. Before I could move he was unscrewing the cap and tilting it toward his coffee mug.
I grabbed the bottle. My hand closed around the neck and his was still on the base and for a second we were both holding it, his knuckles against mine, his face six inches away.
"Let go, Calloway."
"Put it down."
"My bottle, my house, my kitchen."
"And you're sixty-three days clean. You drink that, the facility pulls your release and you're back in lockup by morning." My hand didn't shake. The rest of me was shaking plenty but he didn't need to know that. "Worth the toast?"
Something behind his eyes flickered — the bravado cracking enough to show the animal underneath. The part that genuinely wanted the whiskey more than he wanted to breathe.
He let go of the bottle. Stepped back.
"You're no fun, Calloway."
"I'm not here to be fun."
I poured the Jameson down the sink. He watched every drop with the expression of a man watching money burn.
He didn't eat. Walked out instead, restless energy pulling him through the house — couch, deck, studio hallway, pool edge. I followed. That was the job.
Every time I appeared behind him he gave me that lazy half-smile. "There she is. My little babysitter."
My little babysitter. Said in a voice that did things to the lower half of my body that had no business happening professionally. Twenty-five years old, eight of them spent working doubles instead of dating, and God had placed me in a glass house with a shirtless, infuriating, devastatingly built man I was contractually obligated to follow room to room.
"I'm not watching you," I said. "I'm making sure you don't end up on TMZ before the tour starts."
"You worried about me? That's sweet."
"I'm worried about my paycheck."
An hour later I caught him at the back door, keys in hand.
"Going for a drive."
"You don't have driving privileges. Court agreement."
"I'm going stir-crazy, Calloway."
"Open a window." I could feel the addiction pulling at him — a tremor in his hands he kept hiding by shoving them in his pockets. He wanted a bar or a liquor store or a friend who wouldn't say no.
He dropped the keys on the counter. Didn't speak to me for an hour.
I used the silence to sweep the house. Vodka behind an amp. Flask in a coat pocket. Six-pack in a gym bag. Tequila behind towels in the linen closet. Lined them all up on the kitchen counter like evidence at a trial.
When he came back and saw the collection he stopped in the doorway. His face did something complicated — a whole war behind the mask in under two seconds.
"You went through my things."
"Your sobriety is literally my job."
He picked up the flask, turned it in his fingers. His voice went light in the way I was learning meant the opposite. "You act like you've never lost control of anything in your life. Like you've always been this — put together."
He set the flask down. "But I remember a girl who poured everything she had onto a page and left it sitting out where anyone could find it. That's not control. That's begging someone to look."
The kitchen shrank. He'd reached back eight years and pulled out the one thing I couldn't defend against.
"It was so easy to build an empire on stolen lyrics, wasn't it?"
Silence. He held my gaze for three seconds and then his mouth curved into something lazy and terrible.
"Sweetheart, if I took your little poems and turned them into platinum records, you should be thanking me. I made them worth something."
He walked past me — close enough that his arm brushed mine, half a second of contact that burned straight through my sleeve. I didn't turn around. Stood in the kitchen with bottles on the counter and my hands trembling and the word sweetheart under my skin like a splinter I couldn't reach.
He smells like soap and self-destruction and you noticed. You noticed because you're pathetic and touch-starved and the first man to make your breath catch in twenty-five years is the one person you should want to set on fire.
I put the bottles in the trash. Scrubbed the counter until my knuckles ached, because if I didn't do something with my hands I was going to think about his arm against mine. And I was not going to be that person. Not here. Not with him.