Page 35 of Just One More Night
“Isn’t that what you do?”
“I travel all over the globe, wherever my mood takes me,” she said airily. “My investments fuel that lifestyle, sure, but so do the jobs I take when I want some cash. But what about you? What do you like to do?” She lifted up a hand when he started to answer that. “Don’t say me. You had a whole life before you met me, Stefan. And in the years since. What is it you actuallylike?”
Another question no one had ever asked him. A question he’d hardly dared ask himself some years, because how could it matter what he liked? He had needed to focus on surviving, like it or not.
“Art,” he said, without letting himself brood about it.
And he cautioned himself against putting too much weight on the fact that he’d never told anyone that before. His grandmother was the only person in his life who might have been interested in such things—but she had been a stoic, stern woman. It had never been her way to chatter idly.
Still, he found himself looking sideways to see what Indy’s reaction might be. Would she laugh? His heart kicked at him. Would she laughathim?
He had never put himself in this position before. Where another person’s opinion could hold so much weight.
The truth was, he did not care for the feeling.
But all she did was nod, looking off across the room. When he followed her gaze, he saw that she was looking at a bold piece he’d bought years ago in Cluj, known for an avant-garde art scene to rival Bucharest’s claims of being Romania’s artistic capital. He’d had it installed here in this house, his cathedral to what could be.
What could be—and now was.
“All the art you have in this house is beautiful,” she said, moving that dreamy look of hers to him. “Interesting and confronting and lovely. Is that why the rooms are so airy here? So that the art is what’s seen?”
“I spent most of my life in dark, desperate places,” Stefan told her, and his voice was rougher than he would have allowed it to be for anyone else. But this was Indy. And he could hardly demand her vulnerability if he wasn’t prepared to share his own, could he? “My mother did her best to make the places we lived feel more like a home, but my father always ruined it. Any extra money we had went to his debts or his drink. After she died, there was no point bothering.”
“I’m surprised you remembered art existed at all,” Indy said softly.
“Art is not something a person forgets.” He scowled down at his pot, this sentimental meal from one of the few good moments of his childhood, as if only just noticing that there was no part of what he was doing here tonight that wasn’t emotional. But he couldn’t seem to stop himself. “The perfection of a finely drawn line. A pop of color that changes everything. I saw pieces I liked over the years and had them sent here, telling myself that one day I would come here, live here, and have them all around me all the time. But that day never seemed to come any closer. Then I looked up from an ordinary evening of the typical darkness in my life, and there you were. All your fine lines and a splash of red in the night. I knew you were art, too.”
He snuck a look at her and found her gazing back at him, her lovely eyes filled up with tears.
Stefan could tell that she was trying out this intensity thing, as he’d asked her to do, because she didn’t dance away. She didn’t start singing, or change the subject, or move closer so she could put her mouth on him and distract them both. He almost wished she would. Instead, Indy let him see her respond. React.
All those emotions he knew she would have said she didn’t possess. Right there in her eyes like the finest chocolate.
“My grandmother left me her flat down Old Town when she passed,” he told her, because he couldn’t seem to stop. Maybe he didn’t want to stop. “It was filled with art. Maybe she was why I never forgot the power in it. I bought this house before she was gone, but it wasn’t until then that I began to make it mine. Even if I only made it here once a year, if that, I knew it waited here. I knew that I could come, walk these rooms, and let the art I’d chosen make me believe I was a different man. A better man. I told myself it didn’t matter how far offone daywas. For a long time, knowing this was here was enough.”
Indy drifted close and bumped him with her shoulder, a kind of unconscious gesture that about laid him flat. Because it was the antithesis of any of the ways they touched. It wasn’t sex. It wasn’t the prelude to sex. It didn’t have anything to do with sex at all.
But it was intimate.
And even though Stefan was the one who’d confidently thought he’d already done all the changing necessary, he felt something in him crack wide open.
“It seems like you do have a home after all, then,” she’d said quietly, her eyes shining. “That’s not a small thing, is it?”
And he didn’t know how to tell her than nothing that happened between them, or because there was athemat all, had ever been small.
But later that night, after he’d tied her up so she didn’t have access to her usual bag of tricks, then made her sob and scream until he was satisfied that she didn’t have a single thought in her head without his name on it, Stefan lay in the dark with the soft weight of her in his arms and wondered what he would do if a month was not enough.
Because he did not think that any place would soothe him now, not when he knew how much better it was when she was here. Lighting up already bright rooms with that smile of hers, making the world stop again and again while she did it.
He knew it did no good to worry about the future. There was only now.
July continued on.
Some days he bossed her around, because he could. Because it made both of them hot.
“I think, foolish girl, that I will have you naked today,” he would say.
Sometimes she grinned wickedly and looked thrilled at the notion. Other days she had different reactions, not all of them positive. One morning she scowled at him, blinking the sleep out of her eyes while she did it.