Page 267 of The Lies We Play

That is the fear. Not whether he will want me. Want is easier to survive than hope. I can see want coming. I can feel it in the air, in a hand, in the slow drop of someone’s gaze.

Hope is worse.

Hope asks me to become someone I may no longer be.

Will I be enough if I don't remember how I loved him? Will he look at me and find only the outline of a man he once buried without a funeral? How much did he matter to me? How much did I matter to him? Were we tender? Were we cruel? Did I make him laugh? Did I make him wait? Did I leave pieces of myself in his hands and then disappear so completely that all he could do was keep holding them?

Fuck.

I close my eyes.

My left hand has found my right wrist beneath my coat. Thumb against the trinity-knot. The pressure is small, automatic, private. My body has been making this gesture in moments before impact for as long as I have been a man who needs it.

Boardrooms. Dinners. Doctor’s offices. Therapy. Every morning, Constance’s voice came through the door asking if I had taken what I was supposed to take.

I have done this without knowing why.

I don't know why yet.

My body does.

The elevator slows.

The doors open onto a small private vestibule. Low lamp. Pale wall. A narrow hall ending at a dark door.

And Creed.

He is standing with one hand on the frame, like he has been listening to the elevator rise floor by floor. As if each number cost him something. He is bigger than my mind prepared for and exactly as solid as my body seems to know.

Barefoot, wearing faded jeans and a washed-thin T-shirt that has lost the fight against his shoulders, he looks built by years of ice, impact, and restraint. Broad chest. Strong neck. Forearms carved by work he never had to describe to anyone. His hair is longer than I expected, damp-looking in places, dark blond turning brown where it falls near his cheek, waves pulled back from his face only to come loose again. He looks like a man who was once photographed for being beautiful and then lived enough to make beauty less convenient.

His jaw is not quite symmetrical, like the way beautiful things stop being perfect once life gets its hands on them. There is a roughness to him. Scruff darkens his face, close enough to intentional, uneven enough to be human. His mouth is fuller than I remember from the screen, the corner split and healing. His eyes are pale blue-gray and fixed on me with an intensity I feel before I understand it.

The hand on the doorframe is his left.

I see the trinity knot first.

Three dark lines folding into one shape.

The same shape on my wrist.

The same shape on hers.

The woman I have not allowed myself to think about by name since the call, because if I say Livia inside my own mind, I'm not sure what else will come loose with it.

Creed doesn't speak.

Neither do I.

I step out of the vestibule.

My body goes still.

A small change crosses his face and disappears before anyone else would catch it. His fingers tighten once on the doorframe.

He’s giving me the hall. The choice. The distance.

I cross it.