Page 37 of Lady and the Butcher

“Six o’clock,” he said. “Put this on. Shoes. Nothing else.”

“Nothing else,” I repeated, and the air in the room changed shape around those words.

He didn’t step closer. He didn’t press. He only looked at me with that patient hunger and then turned away, pulling his phone from his pocket like a man with calls to make and men to command, and all of that existed in a parallel plane that had nothing to do with me until he decided it did.

“Atticus,” I said, before he disappeared down the hall, because there was still one more thing gnawing.

He paused.

“If I panic,” I said, the words too honest for how lacquered my hair suddenly looked, “if I decide tonight that I can’t do this—if the glass, or the way you don’t touch me until I’m shaking, or the fact that you know my brother, if any of it gets to be too much?—”

“I’ll take you home,” he said. He didn’t even let me finish. “I’ll put you in a car and I won’t follow. I won’t call. I won’t make it a lesson.”

I believed him.

“And if Idon’tpanic?” I asked.

His gaze dropped very deliberately to my mouth. “Then you’re in for a memorable night.”

My knees threatened to give.

He was halfway down the hall when my phone buzzed. Stephen.

I stared at the screen until the buzzing stopped, started again, stopped. Three texts came in a row.

Stephen:You alive?

Stephen:Mom says she senses a shift in the universe. Did you do witch stuff again?

Stephen:Also the twins want to borrow your blender????

I typed:Alive. Busy.

Three dots. Stephen:Okay. Dinner this week?

My thumbs hovered. I typed,Soon, and set the phone facedown like it might see something it shouldn’t.

I slipped out of my clothes and stepped under the spray just long enough to rinse the city from my skin. No shampoo, no scrubbing—just heat and steam loosening the tension from my shoulders, a reset before the night ahead. I patted carefully around my salon-styled hair, protecting the blowout like it was crown and armor both, then smoothed lotion over my legs. I told my thighs they were welcome in every room I walked into, even this one, and slid into the dress.

The shoes made me taller, not because of the inches but because of the way they asked my spine to behave. I didn’t put on the new lingerie. I put on the lip balm, let my mouth look like it always did but better, and looked at the woman in the glass.

She didn’t look small. She didn’t look like an imposter. She looked like a woman who had written a letter and then walked into it.

A knock sounded on the bedroom door like a punctuation mark.

“Come in,” I said, and my voice held.

He filled the doorway without trying. His gaze did the thing it did, sweeping slow, cataloguing, not lingering too long on any one place, as if making me guess at his favorite detail was part of the point.

“That,” he said, not a question.

I smoothed a nonexistent wrinkle at my hip because my hands needed somewhere to go. “You did pick it.”

“I chose it,” he said. “You made it something I want to ruin.”

Every muscle in my body turned into ayes.

He came closer. Not close enough to touch. Close enough to breathe the same air. The sun slid lower beyond the glass, gilding the bridge, turning the harbor a color that had no name.