Page 101 of Heat Unscripted

I watched him nudge a dial, a tiny adjustment, the kind that settles a mix. Then he stepped back, looked at the result like he was grading it, and nodded once.

Then he saw me.

His whole face shifted. Not a smile, not quite. A small recalibration toward something warmer. His eyes went from the doorway to me and stayed there, and I thought about how many years he’d spent listening to scraps of my voice through a machine, and how he was still, after all of it, getting used to me standing in a room as an actual person.

I’d worn green. The color of deep water when the light hits it right. Silk, simple, down to the floor. My hair was loose. No pencil, no bun, just the auburn waves Bram had let down in the library and never put back.

No glasses.

I’d left them at home. The room went soft at the edges, the galleries blurring, the book spines turning to color instead of words. I didn’t need to read anything tonight. I needed to see three faces from close enough that it didn’t matter.

Cillian’s gaze moved over me the way his fingers moved over a board. Thorough. Missing nothing.

“The room’s resonance peak is at two-twenty hertz,” he said. “Your voice sits at one ninety-six. The mismatch’ll add warmth to anything you say.”

“Is that you telling me I look nice?”

His mouth went up at one corner. “It’s me telling you the room was built for you.”

Tuck came through the door sideways, because the doorframe was made for Victorian scholars and Tuck was made for filling rooms that should’ve been too small. The suit was charcoal, broad across the shoulders, top button open because Tuck has never in his life made peace with a top button. It fit him the way his flannel had fit me. Like it had been claimed.

He stopped three steps in. His eyes found me and went wide, the scar through his eyebrow pulling tight.

“Oh,” he said. That was it. One word, out of a voice that could fill a stadium, down to almost nothing. The cedar of him bloomed, warm and immediate, the bourbon note going soft at the edges, and his hands, halfway to his cuffs, just dropped open at his sides.

“You’re…” He swallowed. Tried again. “You left the glasses.”

“I did.”

“I can see your…” He lifted a hand, waved it at the general area of my face without committing to which part had broken him. “All of it. Just you.”

“That was the idea.”

He crossed the room in three strides. His palms found my waist through the silk, his forehead came down against mine, and the cedar wrapped around my chamomile in the inch between us. Two scents that had stopped asking each other for permission.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

“I’m going to cry later. Wanted to warn you. It’s going to be loud and ugly and I will not apologize for it.”

“Noted.”

Bram was late.

He was never late. Years of meetings and script reviews with a man who treated being on time as a moral stance, and I had never once seen Bram St.James walk in after the minute he’d named. The sun came up. The tide came in. Bram was early.

The clock read seven past the hour when the door opened.

He stopped on the threshold the way he stops on every threshold, the room rearranging itself around him before he was all the way through it. Black suit, cut so clean it looked like an argument he’d already won. A dark blue pocket square, sameshade as the vest from the last session, in his breast pocket. The silver in his hair caught the light from the gallery.

He carried nothing. No folio. No fountain pen. No legal pad, no notes, no prepared remarks.

His hands were empty.

The peppercorn reached me across the whole room, dark and warm, with that sweet edge I’d learned to read as Bram wanting something and not building a structure around it first. His eyes found mine and held. The analytical distance that had lived in his face for four years just wasn’t there. Only the looking.

“I’m late,” he said.