The fourteenth floor hallway was empty and hushed, carpet swallowing their footsteps, and Emma had time for exactly one clear thought — *you can still leave, the elevator is right there* — before Alexander got the door open and that thought stopped mattering at all.
The door closed behind them with a soft, expensive click.
For a moment they just stood there in the dark of the suite, the city glittering through the wall of windows, neither of them reaching for the lights. She could hear him breathing. She could hear *herself* breathing. The careful distance they'd maintained at the bar, in the elevator, in three weeks of pretending this was conversation — all of it had thinned down to nothing, to a foot of charged dark, and she watched him look at her like a man arriving somewhere he'd be
