Page 56 of Lady and the Butcher
We went to find it.
18
Ididn’t mean to fall asleep.
One minute I was pressed to the glass with his mouth at my throat and the city turned to diamonds, and the next I was heavy, my body deciding it was done negotiating with adrenaline.
The last thing I remember with any fidelity was his palm curving at the back of my head, a quiet cradle, and his voice in my ear saying, “Rest, Lady,” like a benediction.
When I woke, the world had lost its night edges. Morning pooled over the harbor in bands of silver, the bridge a pale sketch against a sky trying out blue. My cheek was on a pillow that smelled faintly of eucalyptus. A blanket I didn’t recognize tucked up under my chin—hotel-soft, weighty, the kind of kindness that didn’t ask for credit.
The other side of the bed held heat but not a body. I sat up too fast and the room tilted, sleep and a birth and an almost making a braid in my blood. My hair—a murdered salon blowout—had surrendered to the ponytail dent and humidity. A pang went through me for the money he’d spent, for the stylist who’dworked like an angel yesterday. Dollars gone. A different kind of proof that last night had been real.
Coffee found me before my feet found the floor. It arrived at the end of my arm in his hand like he’d been watching for the moment I’d surface.
“Good morning,” he said, voice low, rough with not enough sleep.
I wrapped both hands around the mug. Heat moved through my fingers to the rest of me. “I fell asleep on you.”
“You fell asleep,” he corrected, amused and not at all wounded. “On me, yes.”
“Rude.”
“Alive,” he said. “Preferred.”
He was in a navy tee and dark jeans that made his shoulders look like a problem and his mouth look like a dare. Bare feet. A cut on one knuckle I hadn’t noticed last night, healing clean. I wanted, very suddenly and very much, to lick that mouth and drag those jeans down and erase the entire concept of morning. Instead, I took a sip and made a sound that made his eyebrows lift like I’d just given him a better gift than sleep.
“Hungry?” he asked.
“For what?” It slipped out too fast.
“Breakfast,” he said, entirely straight. “And other things.”
Heat crept up my throat. He didn’t push. He set a tray on the end of the bed—eggs, fruit, toast cut in triangles like someone’s careful mother had done it—and a small bottle of water with my name hand-written on a hotel notecard.
I squinted at the handwriting.
“Eat.”
I did. We were quiet, the kind of quiet that wasn’t a lack but a layer. He watched me the way he always did—attentive without crowding, a metronome set to a rhythm my nerves were learning by heart.
He waited until I cleaned the last triangle, until the coffee was gone and the water was half, before he said, almost offhand, “Check your phone.”
A small dread twitched. I reached for it on the nightstand, braced for a string of messages from clients stacked like dominos. Instead there were emails I didn’t understand:Welcome to Harbor Answering—Your 24/7 Line Is Active. Contract Received—Holy City Midwives Coverage Pool. Offer: Front Desk (temp-to-perm), The Nesting Place.And three texts from Alana, my favorite part-time cleaner/saint, that read:uh who is your scary rich boyfriend, in a good way?? / also i have keys now? / see you later, boss.
I blinked. “What did you do?”
He leaned a shoulder into the window frame, loose and unbothered in a way that meant he’d moved heaven by making a few calls. “You needed a net. I bought rope.”
“Atticus.” My voice pitched high enough to startle a gull. “What does that mean?”
“It means when you’re at a birth, a human answers your shop phone.” He ticked items off with his fingers, not looking away from me. “It means a runner will pick up curbside orders and make porch drops so you don’t drive yourself across town and back. It means a front-desk coordinator starts today at ten to smile and reschedule and tell people we have things under control.”
“We?”
“You,” he said, like I’d insulted him. “And your kingdom.”
The emails multiplied as if feeling seen. An invoice from a software service I’d trialed and never committed to. A signed W-9 from someone named Mei Bateman with the subject line:Thrilled to be part of the village. A retainer receipt for a pool of on-call doulas I recognized by reputation—women who hadcaught babies in bathtubs and on yoga mats and once, famously, in a Target. The sums made my stomach do a slow roll.
