Chapter 7

She watched Aramis move toward the dark wood sidebar. His motions were fluid, yes, but they lacked the sharp, practiced theater of his earlier performance. He uncorked the bottle with steady hands—no performance, just the simple act of needing something to hold.

Aramis didn’t reach for the vintage wine that sat breathing in a decanter on the table—the kind of wine his father probably drank while discussing quarterly dividends. Instead, he returned with two heavy crystal tumblers filled with hot cider fogging the glass.

“My mother hates this stuff,” Aramis said, the corner of his mouth lifting in a tired, genuine half-smile. It was the first time Ivy had seen him smile without a layer of irony protecting it. “She calls it a ‘peasant drink.’ It’s unfiltered cider from the old orchard-keeper on the north edge of the property. He’s been here longer than the house has been standing.”

As he handed her a glass, their fingers brushed—warm skin against cold crystal, then the shocking heat of his palm. Ivy took it; the glass warmed her fingers.

“The cider smells like autumn,” Ivy said, her voice sounding strange to her own ears—small and stripped of the bravado she had poured into her ink. It was the voice of the girl who sat in the back of the class.

“It tastes like home,” Aramis replied, his voice dropping an octave. “Or what I wish home was like.”

Aramis didn’t take the velvet armchair that looked like a throne and bypassed the ottoman where the diary lay abandoned. Instead, he did something that shifted the world on its axis: he lowered himself onto the thick rug, folding his long, athletic legs beneath him and settling at her feet.

The action stole the air from Ivy’s lungs. When he sat on the rug, the hierarchy collapsed—he wasn’t the king anymore, just a boy looking up at her.

Ivy hesitated, her pulse thumping in her throat, then sank down beside him. She folded her legs, the silk pooling around her knees. Now they were eye-level; the height difference was gone. The class difference, the scholarship-versus-legacy divide, became negligible in the flickering amber glow of the fire.

She took a sip of the cider; it was hot, laced with honey and a sharp kick of cinnamon, burning pleasantly on its way down. It tasted nothing like the expensive, dry champagne Marcus liked to spray at parties, but like cider, raw and real.

She watched the flames lick at the charred logs in the grate. For weeks, she had written about the “dark hunger” in Aramis’s eyes—a ravenous, predatory need she had romanticized to make sense of her own terrifying desire. But looking at him now, observing the way the firelight softened the sharp, arrogant cut of his jaw, she realized she had mischaracterized him.

It wasn’t hunger; it was need.

“You seem different,” she said, the observation slipping out before she could polish it or hide it.

Aramis swirled the cider in his glass, watching the dregs of cinnamon dance in the amber.

“I feel different. I’ve spent eighteen years memorizing a script, Ivy. ‘Stand here; say this; look like you own the room so no one thinks to peer inside it; don’t let them see you bleed.’” He took a long, slow drink, his throat working. “Tonight ... throwing that book aside ... It’s the first time in my life I’ve actually forgotten my lines.”

“I wrote lines for you, too,” Ivy admitted. She traced the rim of her glass, staring into the depths of the liquid. “I turned you into a character because characters are safe and don’t have messy families, expectations, or fears. They do what the plot requires, and then you can close the book when it gets too heavy.”

“And what does the plot require now?” Aramis asked softly.

“I don’t know,” she whispered, “I’m off the map on this one. I didn’t write an entry for ‘sitting on the rug and being honest.’”

Aramis set his glass down on the stone hearth and turned his body fully toward her. There was no mockery left in him, no arrogant tilt to his chin.

“Good,” he said, “because I don’t want the map. I want to know who you are when you aren’t hiding in an alcove. I want the girl who watches the world so closely she can see the cracks in everyone else, but never lets anyone see her own.”

Ivy drew her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around her shins. It was a defensive posture—a physical echo of the protective shell she’d worn since freshman year.

“I watched because I didn’t think I was allowed to participate,” she confessed, her voice shaking slightly. “People like Chloe ... they take up so much space. They consume all the air in the room, and they do it effortlessly. I thought if I stayed in the shadows, I could at least breathe without being noticed. Never did I imagine you’d see me. I thought I was merely background noise to you; a piece of the furniture, a ghost that occasionally turned in a better essay than you.”

“You were never a ghost, Ivy; you were the only thing in technicolor in a black-and-white movie,” Aramis said. “But tell me something: the diary ... the erotica. Is that all there is? Is that the only thing you write when the world isn’t looking?”