Chapter 59

Mira’s POV

Ace brought food on Wednesday.

Not takeout, actual food, groceries in brown paper bags that he carried through Zara’s front door like it was something he did regularly, setting them on the kitchen counter and unpacking them with the calm efficiency of someone who had decided this was happening regardless of my opinion on it.

I stood in the kitchen doorway and watched him.

“I didn’t ask for this,” I said.

“I know,” he replied, opening a cabinet like he already knew where things lived. “Do you have a large pan?”

“Ace.”

“Large pan, Mira. I’m not leaving until I’ve used it.”

Zara appeared beside me, looked at the groceries, looked at me, and made a face that said let the man cook before disappearing back to her room with suspicious speed.

I found the pan.

He made pasta from scratch, which I hadn’t expected, standing at Zara’s small stove with his sleeves rolled up and his glasses slightly steamed from the pot, moving around the kitchen with a quiet confidence that was oddly easy to be around. He didn’t fill the silence with unnecessary conversation. He just cooked and occasionally asked where things were and let the whole thing breathe.

It was the most relaxed I’d felt in two weeks.

“You didn’t have to do this,” I said from the counter where I’d perched myself.

“I wanted to,” he replied simply, the same way he’d said it the last time, like it was the only answer that existed.

“You keep wanting to do things for me.”

He glanced over his shoulder briefly. “Is that a problem?”

I opened my mouth and then closed it again because I didn’t have a clean answer to that.

He turned back to the stove.

We ate at Zara’s small dining table, the three of us, and somewhere during the meal the specific weight that had been sitting on my chest for two weeks lifted slightly, not gone but different, less crushing.

Zara talked enough for all of us, which was her natural state, and Ace laughed at the right moments and argued back when she said something ridiculous, while I sat between them and ate actual food for the first time in days.

My chest hurt a little around dessert but I ignored it.

He came back on Friday.

And Saturday.

By the following Tuesday it had become a pattern that neither of us had formally agreed to, Ace appearing in the early evening, sometimes with food, sometimes just with himself, and staying for a few hours before leaving at a reasonable time without making it complicated.

Zara stopped pretending she had things to do in her room.

She just left.

“She’s not subtle,” I said on Tuesday, listening to the front door close behind her.

“No,” Ace agreed from the other end of the couch, “but she’s usually right.”

I looked at him sideways.

He was looking at the television, some documentary about deep sea creatures that he’d found and I’d pretended to be less interested in than I was.

His profile was calm even in the low light, and there was something about the way he existed in a room, quietly and without demand, that I was finding increasingly difficult to keep at the distance I’d originally assigned it.

“What are we doing,” I said quietly.

He turned to look at me.

“Watching television,” he replied.

“Ace.”

“Mira.” The corner of his mouth lifted slightly. “We’re just two people on a couch. Don’t make it complicated.”

“It’s already complicated.”

“Only if you want it to be.”

I looked at him for a long moment and he looked back, steady and unhurried, and something moved through me that I immediately tried to catalogue as gratitude or comfort or something manageable.

It wasn’t entirely manageable.

He reached over and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, his fingers grazing my jaw so briefly it almost didn’t happen, and I felt it in a way I hadn’t been expecting to feel anything for a while.

“Stop thinking so hard,” he murmured.

“I can’t help it,” I admitted.

“I know.” He dropped his hand. “It’s one of my favorite things about you actually.”

I laughed despite myself, short and genuine, and he smiled at the sound of it like it was something he’d been trying to get to for a while.

We went back to watching the documentary, but I sat a little closer than I had before and he didn’t say a word about it.

Thursday night he stayed later than usual.

Zara had an early morning with the teenager she works for and had gone to bed by ten, leaving us in the living room with the television turned low and the kind of quiet that had started to feel comfortable rather than careful.

I don’t know exactly how it happened.

One moment we were sitting there talking about nothing important, his arm had ended up along the back of the couch behind me somewhere in the last hour, and then I’d said something and turned to find him much closer than I’d registered, and then he kissed me.

I kissed him back.

It wasn’t desperate or hungry or charged with the specific electricity that a different man’s touch carried, the one I was actively trying not to think about. It was something gentler than that. Something that felt like being held by something warm and uncomplicated after a very long time in the cold.

When we pulled apart he looked at me carefully.

“Okay?” he asked quietly.

“Yeah,” I said, which was honest.

He nodded, his thumb brushing lightly across my cheekbone, and I closed my eyes for a second letting myself just be there inside that moment without picking it apart.

Maybe this was what moving on felt like.

Maybe this was what choosing something safe looked like.

Maybe Ace was exactly what I needed and I had been too busy looking somewhere else to see it properly.

I almost believed that.

Then my chest tightened sharply, a short vicious squeeze that stole the air from my lungs for a full three seconds before it released, and I pressed my hand against my ribs and breathed through it carefully while Ace was reaching for his phone on the cushion beside him.

By the time he looked back I had arranged my face into something neutral.

“You alright?” he asked.

“Fine,” I replied. “I’m just tired.”

He studied me for a second with those quiet perceptive eyes and I held his gaze without flinching because I had been hiding this particular thing for long enough that I was fluent in it by now.

“I should go,” he said finally, standing and stretching.

“You don’t have to,” I muttered, and I meant it in the uncomplicated way it sounded.

“Early morning,” he replied, pulling on his jacket. He leaned down, pressed a kiss to my forehead, brief and warm, and I sat there and let him.

“Goodnight Mira.”

“Night.”

I listened to the door close and sat in the quiet for a while after.

My chest throbbed once more.

Two weeks, the doctor had said.

That had been three weeks ago.

I pulled my knees to my chest and stared at the dark television screen and told myself the same thing I’d been telling myself every day.

Just a little longer. Hold on just a little longer.