Chapter 37: First day

Mia's POV

I didn't pretend I didn't know what Luca was talking about. Zack's hand had not been there long. That was what I kept telling myself the whole way when I went to sleep, and the whole way through the night, and the whole night until it was morning.

We had pulled into the driveway just before eleven yesterday when we got back after signing the contract. I had not said a word the whole drive home. He had not pushed me to. He had parked, killed the engine, and we had sat for a few seconds in the cooling cab of his car with the heater clicking down and my breath fogging the windshield because the cold had already taken the cabin and neither of us had bothered to move yet.

"Mia."

"What."

"You don't have to talk to me yet. I just want to make sure we're walking into the same house."

"We are."

"Okay."

He got out. I got out. He came around to my side of the car without making it look like he had come around. He had a kind of manners that disguised themselves as physics. His hand did not touch me until we reached the second porch step.

Then it did.

Light. Right at the small of my back. Not a push. Not a grip. Just there. Like a question he had not bothered to ask out loud because he was already confident in the answer.

I should have moved away.

I did not.

The porch was empty. The street was empty. The yard was empty. The house behind us was dark and the houses on either side of ours were dark and the only light was the yellow bulb above our front door and the only sound was the wind dragging dead leaves across the driveway like loose paper. There was no reason for his hand to be where it was.

It stayed anyway.

We climbed three more steps. We reached the door. He let me in. He did not take his hand away until I was already through the doorway, and even then he took it away slowly, the way you take a bookmark out of a book you might come back to.

I stood in the entry while he locked the door behind us. My back was still warm in the spot where his hand had been. I told myself the warmth was friction. I told myself my coat was thick. I told myself a list of things I did not believe and did not have to believe because nobody was checking my answers tonight.

I had agreed to be his fake girlfriend less than an hour earlier. That was the part that made my pulse loud. The contract was a few hours old and my back already knew the shape of his hand. My back was a traitor. My back had no boundaries. I was going to have words with my back later.

Nobody was there. No one saw us.

That was what I had thought.

That was the part I had been wrong about.

I woke at 6:47 with the porch still in my head and my mouth tasting like old coffee. I had slept maybe four hours. The four hours had been the kind of sleep that did not count.

I lay in the dark for one more minute before I let myself move. The ceiling was the ceiling I had stared at when I was thirteen, when I was sixteen, when I was eighteen, when I had moved back into this room two months ago. None of the cracks had moved. I had grown up under those cracks. I had broken under those cracks. I was about to start a fight under those cracks.

I sat up.

I pulled on my training clothes before I gave myself permission to think about why I was dressing in a hurry. My body knew the routine. My body had been doing the routine for fourteen years. The only thing my body did not know yet was that I was about to walk into the kitchen and start a fight before breakfast.

I went downstairs.

I could hear him before I saw him. The clink of the kettle. The cabinet. The pour.

I stopped in the doorway.

He was at the counter with his back to me. Training jacket on. Hair still wet from the shower. One cup, his own, in front of him. He was pouring coffee.

"When you walked me to the door last night," I said. "Was that part of the arrangement."

He did not turn around.

"Define arrangement."

"Don't."

He turned.

He had the cup in his hand. The steam came up between us in a way I did not need extra symbolism from at this hour. He looked at me over the rim. He took his time about it.

"It was a porch, Mia. I walked you to a porch."

"Luca saw it."

A beat.

"And?"

"And nobody was supposed to."

He set the cup down on the counter. The sound was small. He leaned back against the counter and folded his arms. He did not raise his voice. He did not change his face. He just looked at me the way you look at a partner who has gotten a step out of sync and needs to be brought back into the count.

"If your ex-boyfriend is going to count my steps for the next few months," he said. "This is going to be a long season."

"He's not my ex-boyfriend."

He tilted his head. He did the thing with his mouth that was almost a smile but was not quite. He looked at me like I was a problem he was solving in his head while he was still talking.

"Mia. He absolutely is."

The word landed harder than I had been ready for. Ex-boyfriend was a word with edges. Ex-boyfriend was a word I had not let anyone say in this house in two years because nobody who lived here had wanted to say it. Now a man who had been here for four months was saying it and he was saying it with his coffee in his hand and the steam still coming up between us and he was saying it like he had been waiting for me to give him the cue.

I did not have a response. I was working on one. I was going to have one.

From the doorway behind me, Luca's voice came through, "She's right, Mercer. I'm not."