FROM THE VANTAGE POINT OF the sofa, I watch Graham work in the kitchen. He moves so fluidly, completely at home as he makes us a drink.

On one hand, I feel like I know him so well. But when I think about it, I really know nothing at all. The fact I want to know more leaves me a little uneasy.

He looks over his shoulder, the muscles in his neck flexing as he pours a drink. The soft grey pants he’s changed into sit right below his navel and he’s shirtless and shoeless.

“What?” he grins, coming towards me with a wine glass and a tumbler.

“Do you cook?”

“That’s random,” he chuckles.

“No, it’s not. You were in the kitchen. Kitchens are where food is made. You are sexy. Men in kitchens are sexy.”

“Really? I had no idea.”

“Trust me,” I laugh. “So, do you?”

He hands me the glass and keeps the tumbler. Staying standing, he looks at me like I’m a touch crazy.

“Sometimes. I don’t cook much. Too much goes to waste. I do have a cedar plank I use to make salmon sometimes. It’s really good.”

“I don’t like fish.”

“You don’t like fish?”

“I think it’s because I’m a Pisces,” I wince.

“That makes no sense,” he chuckles. “I also make crepes. Do you have any strange aversions to eggs or gluten?”

“Nope,” I say. “I love all things butter, eggs, and gluten. It’s a part of my balance thing. I eat all the terrible things and then do yoga.”

“I thought you went to yoga for stress?”

I look at him blankly. “I do.”

He laughs, shaking his head, then taking a sip of his drink. “What about you? Do you cook?”

“I try,” I admit. “I like to bake. You know, with—”

“Butter, eggs, and gluten,” we say in unison before laughing.

Our voices meld together in the air between us. It’s a delicious feeling, warm and cozy and even better than I ever imagined it would be.

Pulling my legs up and under me, I watch him in the light of the fireplace.

“I bet your kitchen is a wreck,” he says. “I’ve seen your desk and there are no liquids. I can only imagine you in a kitchen.”

“Yeah, it gets a little wild. Want to cook with me sometime?”

“No. No, I do not. I would never survive that with how messy you are,” he jokes.

I’m staring. I know it. I know he knows it when he pulls his brows together and tosses me a questioning glance.

“I was just thinking I love looking at you like this.”

“In sleep pants?” he laughs. “Wow. I now officially have a complex about how I look in a suit.”

“You rock a suit like no one else,” I smile. “But this is so different. You look all cozy and casual. It shows that maybe there are more sides to you than the demanding CEO,” I wink.

He sits next to me, fresh from the shower we took together. Sinking into the leather, he lays one arm along the back of the sofa. “I think you know there is more to me than that.”

“I do. But I feel like you keep so much of yourself closed off and your nose to the grindstone. Why?”

His features wash in a look that tells me he was expecting this question or one similar. It also tells me two other things: he’s prepared to answer it but he doesn’t want to.

He doesn’t right away. Taking a sip from his tumbler, he watches me over the rim. I expect he’s giving me a chance to change the subject, to get antsy by the look in his eye, but I don’t. It’s time. Things between us keep building, and I don’t know to what end.

“I don’t trust a lot of people,” he says finally. His tone is smooth, but I hear the grit behind it from the force he’s using to make himself talk about a subject he doesn’t want to broach. “It’s hard for me to really open up beyond my family.”

“But you have friends, right? And, you know, probably girlfriends sometimes.”

He grins, letting his hand fall to my thigh in some kind of comforting motion. I try not to blush. “I have more acquaintances than I do friends, I suppose. I mainly spend my time with one of my brothers or alone. I prefer it that way.” He pauses, smirking. “And, yes, I have girlfriends sometimes. But those relationships are very particular.”

I gulp, imagining red rooms and contracts. “What do you mean by that?”

“Just . . .” He looks at the ceiling. “I don’t spend time with a woman with the expectation, or desire, if I’m honest, that it will become something routine.”

Each word is said crisply without eye contact. Every syllable stings my heart. With each rip against the fabric of my most precious organ, it’s obvious: I was hoping for more.

Maybe I didn’t realize it until now, but it’s impossible to ignore the feeling in my stomach. The grinding, tumultuous movement in my soul.

My spirits fall, the wine glass shaking in my hand so I steady it with the other. I smile at him. I don’t want him to see me looking dejected.

“That being said, I really like spending time with you, Mallory. You really make this difficult for me.”

“Since we are being honest and all,” I say, looking at the darkness through the window and thinking, briefly, how it feels like my heart, “that makes things really difficult for me too.”

Before he lifts his hand off my leg, he squeezes it. The spot he’d taken right above my knee feels utterly vacant as soon as his palm is gone.

“Mallory, if I have—”

“No,” I cut him off. “You have never indicated you wanted anything more from me than professional performance from seven fifty-nine to five o’clock. The rest of this was just a bonus. I don’t expect anything from you.”

I say the words and I mean them, but they still hurt like a motherfucker. My butt scoots away from him just a bit and his eyebrows shoot to the ceiling, but he doesn’t comment.

“You say I make things difficult, but I don’t want that, Graham. I’d never want to interfere with your work, with your family.”

“Mallory—”

“No. We aren’t at work, so I can put my foot down and make you hear me out.”

“Oh, like that matters,” he mumbles.

I shrug. “If this gets too difficult or hard or weird, I want to stop it before it gets out of control. I like this, but—”

“You don’t like this more than I do,” he whispers. “I just keep things in boxes for a reason. Right now, they’re a mess and I can’t handle messes.”

“I hate this for you,” I say honestly. “You must be so lonely.”

“Being alone is better than being in a relationship and making sacrifices you don’t want to make. Or having pressure put on you to choose between the other person and what drives you.”

“Who did that to you, Graham?”

The lines in his face move, and I see his surprise that I came out and just asked. Frankly, I’m surprised I came out and just asked too, but I want to know.

He sighs and gets up and heads back in the kitchen. His shoulders are stiff as he fills his tumbler again, keeping his back to me as he quickly downs a good portion of the liquid.

A ripple of panic bubbles up and I’m not sure what to do. My purse is in his car, with my phone, so I can’t even call Joy to come and get me, but I feel like I should leave. That I’ve overstepped my boundary by asking.

My mouth opens to issue an apology and an offer to just go when he turns back around. This time, I see that he’s made up his mind.

My wine glass rattles as I place it on a coaster on the table in front of the sofa. My breathing gets ragged as he gets closer. I’m unsure what he’s going to do or say.

“When I was in college,” he says, sitting on the edge of the sofa, “I wanted to go to law school. I thought it was the best way to help my dad’s company, which was the only thing I ever wanted. Growing up, Barrett would go to the movies on the weekends or to a friend’s house, and I would go with Dad to the office and just soak it up. I loved the excitement, the power I felt sitting at the spare table and listening to his conversations.”

He takes a deep breath, refusing to look at me.

“I have everything laid out in front of me. I knew from eighth grade what I wanted to do and how I was going to get there. We had career day in middle school. We had to pick four professionals to go talk to. The other kids were picking the deejay and television guy and whatever. I picked the attorney four times,” he laughs, his voice a touch shaky.

With a trembling hand, I let my palm rest against his knee. The corner of his mouth quivers, but doesn’t quite turn up.

“My freshman year of college, I met this guy. We had similar interests and started hanging out. We got an apartment together our sophomore year. It was the first time in my life I’d really kind of loosened up some, you know? It was fun,” he shrugs. “Second half of my junior year, I had a philosophy class. The first day, this woman walks in. She was a grad student filling in as a teaching assistant.”

“You don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to,” I say softly. The somberness on his face hurts my heart. “Let’s talk about something else.”

“No.” He clears his throat and looks at me, the greens of his eyes clear. “Her name was Vanessa. I fell in love with her that first day.”

His admission is a shock to my heart, my hand slipping off his knee.

He continues on, despite registering my reaction.

“I made a few passes and within three weeks, we were together. We’d meet after class at her apartment across town or we’d spend the weekend at mine. We’d talk philosophy and politics, staying up all night debating free will and morality. It was the first time in my life I met someone that I thought really understood me. Appreciated my, well, my brothers would say geekiness.”

He forces a swallow, pain written all over his face. Gazing off in the distance, like he’s replaying the time in his mind, I sit back and struggle to contain my own emotions—emotions I can’t pinpoint, but am acutely aware exist close to the surface.

“We weren’t supposed to be fucking around. We knew she could lose her position and maybe even her scholarship, but she was adamant, as was I, that we wanted to be together. So we continued. The entire semester. Each day got deeper, like stepping off a ledge with every tick of a clock. She wanted all my attention, got jealous when I would go home to see my family or my mom would call or Dad would want me to help with a situation at Landry. It just became so much bigger than I could handle. I constantly felt like I had to choose between her and my other obligations. And, no matter what I chose, someone was pissed off. I didn’t want to let anyone down.”

His eyes darken, his hands locking together in front of him. “Then one night, it was late and we’d been drinking more than we should’ve. It was pouring down rain and her apartment was closer, so we decided to just head there for the night. We’d never stayed there on a weekend,” he says, his jaw pulsing. “In the morning, her husband walks in.”

“No!” I gasp, my hand finding his thigh again.

“I had no idea, Mallory. None.”

My mouth hangs open as I both try to process what he said and the look on his face. I’ve never seen Graham angry before, but this is so severe, I’m almost scared.

“Word got out,” he says, spitting the words, “and she was exposed. Apparently I wasn’t the only one she was with. Her husband who worked out of town all week, hence why we never went to her house on the weekends, hung her out to dry with the department.”

“She deserved that!”

“Maybe,” he says. “So all this is going down and she’s still calling me, telling me she wants to be with me. She loves me. I was her soul mate. She wants to marry me, have my babies. That shit, you know?” he hisses. “I was so messed up over this girl that I was going to give her a chance to explain. I just wanted so badly for it to be real.” His jaw clenches, the muscle in his face pulsing. “Imagine my shock when I went to her house and realized . . . she was gone.”

“Graham,” I gush, wishing he’d look at me. “I’m so sorry.” I want to pull him into my arms. I have to hold myself back from reaching for him.

“I nearly flunked out the next semester. I couldn’t find her. I thought she was dead or something. It was the worst period of my entire life. My parents thought the world had fallen apart. They were wanting me to go to therapy, threatening to pull me out of school altogether. I just couldn’t function. I was a complete puss.”

“What were you supposed to feel? Look what she did to you!” I say, hating this woman for putting this look on his face. “That shit is hard, Graham. Especially when you’re going through it the first time and it’s that dramatic.”

“She nearly ruined my life. That’s just putting it mildly. She fucked up my school situation, my relationships with my family. Everything was ripped out from under me in a few months’ time while she vanished, not bothering to give me the courtesy of letting me know she was alive until a few months later with a letter and no return address.”

He smiles sadly. “I would rather be alone than be in that situation again.” He reaches across the sofa and tucks a stray strand of hair behind my ear. “I look at you and think what a good girl you are. When I’m with you, I just want to stay there forever. When I’m not with you, I want to be.”

Tears tickle my eyes because I know there’s more coming. The epic life-ruiner, “but,” that is on the tip of his tongue.

“But I can’t be, Mallory.” He lifts my chin so I have to look at him. His face is so handsome, so tender, that I nearly can’t breathe. “Since then, I’ve made a plan on how to deal with things before they creep up. I have contingencies for contingencies so I’m not in a place to make a decision based off emotions.” He smiles softly. “I don’t know how to manage whatever this is between us. There’s no blueprint for this, and every experience I have with it tells me to end it now. But I can’t,” he whispers.

Words are lost to me as I lose myself in his eyes. There’s so much to the depths—pain, sadness, hope. My heart is torn in my chest because I don’t know what to do.

The confusion over how to respond, what words to piece together, leaves me speechless.

He tugs at his hair, his head buried in his hands. “I hate feeling this way.”

“Don’t,” I say, grabbing his wrist. “You were honest with me. You just told me something you didn’t have to and something that was obviously not easy to say.”

“I’ve never talked about it out loud like that.” He wraps my hand in his and brings it to his lips. He doesn’t kiss it, but just holds it there. “But I wanted you to know what you were dealing with.”

“Dealing with?” I say, scooting closer to him. “You’re a man that’s had his heart broken. I’ve had mine broken too. I get it. It hurts.”

He drops my hand and smiles more beautifully than I’ve ever seen from him before. “I hope you find love someday. I hope you find some guy that thinks of you the way I do.” His grin falters. “I hope he can give you what you need back.”

I look away, unable to see the look on his face and deal with the emotions swirling on mine. Just knowing that he thinks of me the way I think of him, yet can’t, won’t, go forward, breaks my already shattered heart.

“I think I should go home now,” I say, needing space.

“I’ll get your jacket.” He takes my hand and pulls me to my feet. As I turn to walk away, he hauls me in his arms and holds me close. His heart strums steadily in his chest, the smell of his cologne dancing over my senses. When he pulls back, I know things won’t quite be the same between us. “You ready?”

“Let’s go.”