Page 53 of Heat Unscripted

“May I?”

I nodded.

He drew them off my face the same way he uncapped his fountain pen, slow and exact, like the object mattered. He folded them one-handed and set them on the nearest shelf without looking, his attention already back on what was underneath. My face, bare. Smaller without the frames. The features fans had argued about for a decade as they tried to imagine what the person behind the voice looked like. The pale skin. The freckles scattered across my nose that I’d never told a single person about. The green of my eyes, different without glass between them and the world. Three small things I’d kept.

“There you are,” he said.

I barely heard it. A breath with a shape. His thumb mapped the arch of my cheekbone, then from the corner of my eye to the edge of my jaw, like he was learning a route he meant to come back to.

I held still. Not from fear. From the strangeness of being studied by someone whose attention was the sharpest thing about him. The pad of his thumb was warm. A little rough, which I hadn’t expected from a man who mostly worked with pens and paper. But the callus was real, worn in by years of writing, and the drag of it against my cheek lit up the nerves underneath.

“I need to tell you something,” he said.

“You told me everything in the kitchen.”

“Not everything.” His hand moved. Found the mechanical pencil still stuck in my hair, the blue one I’d shoved in beforecoming downstairs, and pulled it free with the same care. My hair fell in stages, the bun coming loose into auburn waves past my shoulders. He watched it happen with a look I couldn’t quite read.

“In the hotel room,” he said, setting the pencil next to my glasses. “Those hours. I tried to think my way through this. Through what I feel. Through how to hold it without building something around it that would suffocate us both.”

His fingers slid into my hair. Slow. Tracking each strand on its own, like he was reading script pages, one line at a time, nothing skipped, nothing assumed.

“I failed,” he said. “I couldn’t think my way through it. There’s no framework. There’s nothing in my whole life that prepared me for wanting something with the…” He exhaled. His hand went still at the nape of my neck. “With how completely I want you.”

The peppercorn flared, hot and wide open, broadcasting something he’d never have let loose in a production meeting, in the penthouse, anywhere the mask was still on.

I stepped closer. Into the scent. Into the heat coming off him through the wrinkled shirt like something he could barely keep behind his ribs. My palms found his chest, flat, the way I’d anchored myself to Tuck this morning, and under the cotton his heart was slamming.

“Then don’t think,” I said. “For once. Just this once.”

His breath stuttered. The hand in my hair tightened. Not pulling, gripping. His body wanted to move. His mind was still arguing terms.

“I don’t know how,” he whispered. The confession cost him. I could see it in the clench of his jaw, the brightness in his eyes that was close to spilling. “I have never once in my life stopped thinking. There’s no off switch. I don’t know how to…”

I went up on my toes. Pressed my mouth to the corner of his jaw. Just contact, for now. Lips against skin, warm and unhurried, set down with the same care he’d used taking off my glasses. I felt the muscle flex underneath. Felt his breath catch and let go in a rhythm he was no longer running.

“Then think slowly,” I said against his skin. The low register hummed where my lips touched, and I felt the shiver travel through him, chest and shoulders and down his spine. “Think about every single thing you feel. One piece at a time. As slow as you need.”

A sound came out of him. Low and wrecked, dragged up from somewhere under the baritone. His other hand found my waist, joined the first, his fingers spreading over my shirt, learning the shape of what was under it. The curve of my ribs. The narrow part at my waist. The warmth of skin through cotton.

He was mapping me. The way he mapped a story, a recording schedule, a character’s arc, the whole beat structure of a twenty-four-hour broadcast. Careful. Complete. Every variable noted before he moved to the next. Except this time the variables were the dip of my waist and the catch in my breath and the scent coming off my skin, steamed milk and honey, going warmer wherever his hands landed.

“Three years.” His mouth dropped into my hair, voice muffled in the strands, closer than skin. “I fell asleep to you for three years. Your voice was the only thing that made the silence bearable. And I told myself…”

He pulled back. Looked at me. The gray-green had gone dark, pupils blown, and the distance was gone, had been gone since the kitchen. What was left was raw and overwhelmed. A man who’d spent a lifetime treating feeling like static, finding out in this room full of books that it was the only thing worth tuning to.

“I told myself it was the craft I admired,” he said. “The technique. The exactness of your phrasing, the control, the…”He shook his head. The silver-streaked hair fell across his forehead, loose, unfixed. “It was never the craft. It was you. The person under every performance. The warmth that no amount of technique explains. I was in love with you before I ever knew there was a lie in the way.”

My chest went tight.

I took his hand out of my hair. Drew it down. Pressed it flat over my breastbone, above my heart and my pulse said everything I couldn’t put into words.

“Feel that,” I said.

His palm pressed in. His eyes shut. The lashes were dark against his cheeks. I’d never noticed that before, never been close enough to see how his whole face softened when his eyes were closed and the watchfulness dropped off it.

“Your heart,” he said.

“Beating for you. Since the penthouse. Since the honey jar. Since you read my own words back to me and made me forget how to breathe.”