Page 30 of Knight
The question slides between my ribs like a blade she's been sharpening since she walked through my door. She doesn't flinch when she asks it. Doesn't soften the delivery. Just sits on my couch in her jeans and her worn cotton shirt, smelling like cocoa butter and something clean, and asks me the one question no one in my world has ever bothered with because they already think they know the answer.
Power. Pressure. The weight of the crown.
That's what they assume keeps me awake.
They're wrong.
"I sleep fine," I say.
"You answered a text at two in the morning, drove across the city in twelve minutes, and washed my dishes without being asked. That's not a man who sleeps fine."
Every deflection I throw, she catches. Every wall I build, she walks around. She doesn't climb over them. She doesn't tear them down. She just finds the gap I didn't know was there and steps through it like she's been doing it her whole life.
I lean forward. Elbows on my knees. Close enough to see the flecks of amber buried deep in those brown eyes.
"You're dangerous," I say. Low. Honest in a way I didn't authorize.
"I'm a twenty-year-old stripper sitting on your couch drinking bad coffee." She lifts the mug. "You're the dangerous one here."
She's wrong about the coffee.
She's right about everything else.
The distance between us is three cushions of Italian leather and it feels like a dare neither of us is willing to lose.
Tension to Collision
The conversation doesn't end. It evaporates.
One minute she's telling me my coffee is terrible and I'm watching her mouth shape the wordterriblelike it's a private invitation. The next minute there's one cushion between us instead of three and neither of us moved on purpose.
Or maybe we both did.
Her knee is touching my thigh. The warmth of it burns through denim and I can feel my pulse in places that have nothing to do with my heart. She's looking at me without the armor — no suspicion, no calculation, no filed-away deflections waiting to be weaponized. Just her. Tired. Honest. A woman who spent last night holding a screaming thirteen-year-old alone in a dark apartment and is sitting on my couch now because she texted four words and I came running.
I should say something smart. Something that keeps the arrangement intact, keeps the categories clean, keeps me on theside of the line where this is still a transaction and she is still someone I can walk away from.
"Nova."
Her name comes out of me wrecked. Low and rough and stripped of every charming syllable I've ever used to keep a woman at the exact distance I need her.
She hears it. I watch her hear it — the way her breath catches, the way her fingers curl against the leather, the way her pupils blow wide and dark until the brown is almost gone.
"This is a bad idea," she whispers.
"The worst."
"The rules—"
"Are burning."
Her eyes drop to my mouth. My blood slams so hard against my ribs I can feel it in my teeth.
She closes the last six inches between us. Her hand finds my chest, palm flat against my sternum, and I don't know if she's pulling me in or holding me back but it doesn't matter because I'm already gone. I was gone the moment I washed her dishes at two in the morning. I was gone the moment her kid brother asked me to play Mario Kart. I was gone before I knew I'd left.
I kiss her and the taste of her rips through me like a lit match dropped into gasoline.
This is different from the office. The office was a collision — fast, desperate, a transaction dressed up as desire. This is slower. Hotter. Her fingers knotting in my shirt, pulling me over her as she falls back against the armrest. My hand sliding up her thigh, her hips lifting into me, that sound she makes against my mouth — the one that lives somewhere between surrender and defiance — and my entire body ignites.
