Page 99 of Luxe

After some time, she stops shaking, collapsing in a dead sleep again me. But when I try to lay her back down, to get up to get something to cover her, but her eyes fly open and she's grabs my arm.

"I'm here. I'm here. Go back to sleep, sweetheart," I say, easing back down next to her.

She closes her eyes as I gently stroke her hair, whispering promises that I'm never ever leaving her, as every possible scenario of what might have happened races through my brain. And what I’m going to do to the person who did this to her.

I jolt awake sometime later, and she's gone.

"Kiara?" I yell, the panic threading through my vocal cords and seeping into my words.

The apartment is dark except for the moonlight filtering through the windows and the lights under the kitchen cabinets.

"Kiara! Where are you?"

I race up to the bedroom, the sheets are messed up on the bed from the morning. She's not in the ensuite. I jump down the stairs two at a time, feeling like my heart beats are visible against the skin of my ribcage.

Not in the kitchen.

Not in the bathroom.

Not in the guest room that she found when she explored the apartment last night.

Not in the office, nor the movie room.

"God, no." I mutter as I run to the elevator, going where, I don't know.

But I don't have to go far.

She's standing in the foyer, her belongings at her feet, holding a book in her hands.

" Oh my god! Kiara! Didn't you hear me call after you? I thought you'd left me again. I was scared fucking senseless!” I yell from the adrenalin.

And then I notice the tears streaking her cheeks, new ones, over her face, so pale, she almost looks translucent, like if I blow she'd dissipate like the ectoplasm of our time together.

"What's wrong? You have to tell me what's going."

She doesn't say a word and just holds the notebook out to me, open.

And when I look down, I feel like I'm going to fade into the wind with her. And then, like a firestorm, I'm put together, wild and furious as I pull her against me a little too roughly, trying to squeeze the pain out of her.

twenty-eight

Kiara

Kylian's apartment is so far up from the ground, I feel like it's the only place I've ever heard silence since moving back to Hong Kong. At my Dad's house, he leaves all the doors and windows open, trying to soak in as much of the city as he can, making up for the decades he lived in England.

But up here, except for the gentle hum of his appliance, and his soft, regular breath in my ear, it's like... there's nothing and no one else in the world.

Oh, how I wish that were true.

My tongue, plastered on the roof of my mouth, peels away, almost painfully, and there's no question why. I'm so dehydrated, having had nothing to drink for the last six or seven hours, what moisture I did have in my body was squeezed out of my eyeballs.

Kylian stirs a little in his sleep, and I take the opportunity to roll off the couch as gently as I can.

I drink two glasses of water, feeling my cells thirstily suck in every drop, plumping up, happy.

I don’t want to go back to the couch in case I wake him up. And he needs his rest. He's probably exhausted from having to deal with a mad woman.

I wander around the dark apartment, taking in the few pieces of artwork on the walls. No Picassos, no Monets, no Hirsts, just beautiful paintings and sketches from names I've never heard of. Not surprising. For all his style, there's so much substance in that man. A surge of affection washes through me and I feel an urge to climb back onto the couch and crawl into the safe space of his arms. But the last thing he needs is for me to wake him up and demand more attention. I can't imagine what he's been feeling. But I couldn’t have talked about it if I’d tried

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