We were a thing.
Real enough that another man stepping wrong toward her made something ancient and possessive in me rise up without permission. Real enough that she looked calmer after I said what I said. Real enough that some part of me kept asking what I had done to deserve her.
She touched my wrist lightly. “You’re trouble.”
“I’ve been hearing that.”
“From me.”
I smiled. “Still counts.”
The rest of the mixer moved the way rooftop events did once the drinks settled in and the view started doing half the work. Conversations drifted from the bar to the railings, from lounge seating to high-tops, from business into something looser. Work happened around us. She moved in and out where needed, checking on the caterer, speaking to Burton’s people, makingsure a photographer got the right shots without making it look like she was managing the whole sky.
I kept to the edges without hovering.
Mariah gave me one look near the bar that said she knew exactly what had happened with Andre and approved of how it ended. Zaria’s little nod at Talia later made me think she knew too.
By the time it wrapped, the rooftop had cooled. The candles on the cocktail tables flickered harder in the breeze, and Talia looked tired in that pretty, worn-down way women did after being on for too many hours in heels. I took her wrap from the back of a chair before she had to reach for it and settled it over her shoulders myself.
She looked up at me, soft around the eyes now.
“You always do the little things,” she said.
“That’s because the little things be the real things.”
That got me a look I carried all the way to the elevator.
Downstairs, the city had thinned some. Traffic easier. Air softer. I opened her door, waited until she got settled, then went around to my side and started the truck.
The drive to her place didn’t need much talking. We had done enough of that all evening. She sat with one hand resting on her thigh, head turned slightly toward the window, and every now and then the streetlights caught her face and showed me a woman who looked happy in a way that had become deeply important to me without my consent.
Halfway there, she looked over.
“You staying?”
I smiled and glanced in the rearview.
“My bag already packed.”
That got a laugh out of her, low and delighted.
“You planned that?”
“I planned options.”
“That’s slick.”
“That’s grown.”
She shook her head, still smiling, and reached across the console to put her hand on my thigh.
That touch sat warm on me the rest of the drive.
At her house, I grabbed my bag before I came around to get her. She looked at it, then at me, and something about that quiet little exchange felt more intimate than a lot of the sex we had in the past week.
Not because the sex wasn’t good.
Because this meant tomorrow.