She leans forward, her chin resting lightly in her hand.
“When?”
“Late. When I can’t sleep.”
“What do you play?”
“Rachmaninoff. Chopin. Whatever demands precision.”
A slow smile spreads across her face. “You’re far more layered than you pretend to be.”
“I don’t pretend to be a machine.”
“You absolutely do.”
“And you?” I counter. “You hide plenty.”
Her eyes flash with surprise. “I do not.”
“You deflect with humor when something matters.”
She opens her mouth, presumably to argue the point, then she snaps it closed again. “That’s observant,” she admits after a moment.
“Listening is my thing, remember?” I remind.
She reaches for the wine at the same time as I do. Our fingers brush deliberately this time. Neither of us pulls away immediately.
“What scares you?” she asks suddenly.
I arch a brow. “That escalated fast.”
“Answer me.”
I glance down at our hands, still touching lightly around the glass bottle. I gently pick the wine bottle up and pour out the last of the wine, sharing it between our glasses.
“Wasted potential,” I say.
She frowns slightly. “Meaning?”
“Building something halfway. Settling for mediocrity. Investing in the wrong future.”
She studies me as her thumb shifts slightly against mine. “I’m afraid of being too noticeable,” she says quietly.
“Why fear it? You are someone who naturally commands attention. Most women would weaponize it, but one of the nicest things about you is that you don’t.”
She smiles at that, a small, conspiratorial smile that feels like it belongs to just us. She tells me smaller things about herself then. Like the way she drinks her coffee too hot and burns her tongue every time. And her habit of reading the last page of a novel first to see if it’s worth the emotional investment.
“That’s monstrous,” I tell her.
“It’s efficient,” she shoots back.
“It ruins the narrative arc.”
“It protects my heart.”
I shake my head. “You are chaos disguised as order.”
“And you are sentiment disguised as order.”