I woke up at three in the morning because I smelled coffee.
Not my coffee. Not the Huila I'd unpacked into his kitchen six hours ago, not the pour-over I'd made as an act of territorial rebellion. This was different — darker roast, heavier body, the kind of coffee a man makes when he doesn't know any better because nobody's ever taught him the difference between good and tolerable.
He was awake. On the other side of my deadbolt. Making terrible coffee in the middle of the night.
I lay in the guest bed — his sheets, his thread count, the kind of bed that costs more than my first three months of rent in Baker — and stared at the ceiling and listened to the sounds of Cole Ashford's kitchen through the wall. Cabinet opening. Water running. The beep of a machine that was not my machine and was producing coffee that would make me physically angry if I tasted it.
I should have stayed in bed. The deadbolt was locked. The key was on the nightstand. The agreement was clear — my space, his space, the door between them a line I controlled. Staying in bed was the architecture. Staying in bed was the plan.
I unlocked the deadbolt.
The hallway was dark. The apartment at forty-two stories had a different quality of dark than Baker — higher, quieter, the dark of altitude where the city noise doesn't reach and the only sound is the building itself breathing through its ventilation. I walked toward the kitchen in bare feet and a t-shirt I'd packed from Baker — not his shirt, my shirt, that distinction mattered — and the cedar in the hallway was so dense I could feel it on my skin like humidity.
The kitchen light was on. Just the one above the stove — warm, low, the kind of light people use when they don't want to admit they're awake. Cole was standing at the island with his back to me. Gray t-shirt. Sweatpants. Bare feet.
I'd never seen his bare feet.
The thought arrived with a force that was completely disproportionate to its content. I'd seen this man in ski gear and charcoal sweaters and the leather jacket from Aspen. I'd seen him in the VIP lounge at Elevation and the boardroom on the thirty-eighth floor. I'd seen him hold a cup and pull a chair and carry me through a crowd and silence ten men with eleven words. I had never seen his bare feet on a kitchen floor at three in the morning and the domesticity of it — the ordinary, human, un-engineered reality of a man in sweatpants making bad coffee because he couldn't sleep — did something to my chest that the thumb and the hand kiss and the first kiss combined hadn't managed.
"Your coffee is terrible," I said.
He turned. Whatever he'd been expecting to see in his kitchen at three in the morning, it wasn't me. His face did something I'd never seen — a full-body startlement that moved through his features like a wave before the composure caught up. For one second I saw the unguarded version. Not the CEO. Not the Mountain King. Not even the boy from Limon. Just a man in his kitchen who'd been making coffee alone and was suddenly not alone and the not-alone had arrived in bare feet and a t-shirt.
"You unlocked the door," he said.
"Your coffee machine offends me."
"It's a perfectly good—"
"It's a twelve-dollar drip machine from a grocery store and it's producing something that tastes like regret. The man who owns a Gulfstream and a forty-two-story building is making coffee on a machine that costs less than a bag of my beans."
"I've been meaning to upgrade."
"You've been meaning to upgrade for how long?"
"Since the building was finished."
"That's years. You've been drinking this for years."
"Nobody ever told me it was bad."
"Nobody in your life has ever told you your coffee is bad?"
"Nobody in my life has ever been in my kitchen at three in the morning."
The sentence landed in the room and settled there like a stone in water. Nobody. In years. The man who owned a city and commanded a room and had a past that included a woman named Sloane who touched his arm like she knew the terrain — that man had been making terrible coffee alone in this kitchen for years because nobody had been here to tell him it was terrible.
I walked to my coffee maker. The one I'd plugged into his outlet six hours ago like a flag in enemy territory. I could feel him watching me — not the way he watched me at Treeline, not the operational assessment or the wanting. The way a man watches a woman move through his kitchen like she belongs there, and the watching is tangled up with the fear that she might not come back.
I measured the Huila. Ground it. The sound of my grinder in his kitchen was obscene — loud, familiar, mine. The pour-over dripped. The smell changed — his terrible dark roast replaced by something that tasted like nine thousand feet in Colombia and the woman who'd sourced it because she doesn't sell anything she hasn't tasted at origin.
I poured two cups. Set one in front of him on the island. The island was wide — six feet of stone countertop that could have held a dinner party. I stood on my side. He stood on his. Six inches between my cup and his cup and the distance was the most charged six inches in the building.
He picked up the cup. Took a sip. His eyes closed.
"That's—"
"Better than yours. I know."
"That's the best coffee I've ever had."
"You've been drinking it at my counter for months."
"Not like this." He opened his eyes. "Not in my kitchen. Not at three in the morning. Not made by a woman who unlocked a door she didn't have to unlock."
I looked at him across the island. Gray t-shirt. The t-shirt was loose enough that the collar had shifted and I could see the base of his throat — the hollow, the pulse, the place I'd been cataloging since the night in late January when he'd stood at my counter and said my name and his voice had landed behind my collarbone. The pulse was visible now. Fast. The same fast I'd felt through his wrist in Vail and through his chest in Treeline.
"I couldn't sleep," I said. "I heard your machine."
"Lark."
"The sound woke me up. The terrible coffee sound. That's why I unlocked the door."
"Lark."
"It's not because I wanted to be in your kitchen. It's because your coffee machine is an abomination and someone needed to—"
"Lark." Third time. Quiet. The voice that had said wanting. The voice that had broken and rebuilt and broken again across twenty-two chapters of a negotiation conducted over eighteen inches of beetle-kill pine that was now six inches of stone in a kitchen at altitude. "You can say you wanted to be here. It's allowed."
The kitchen was warm. The stove light was low. The city was asleep forty-two stories below and two people were standing on opposite sides of an island holding cups of coffee made by the woman who'd unlocked a door at three in the morning because she'd heard a man making something terrible and couldn't stand the sound.
"I wanted to be here," I said.
He didn't move. Didn't cross the island. Didn't close the six inches. He'd learned. Don't move. The woman crosses the distance or the distance stays.
I didn't cross it either. Not tonight. Tonight the six inches was enough. The coffee was enough. The bare feet and the sweatpants and the terrible machine and the knowledge that he'd been alone in this kitchen for years and wasn't alone tonight — that was enough.
"Teach me," he said.
"Teach you what."
"How to make coffee that doesn't taste like regret."
I almost laughed. The almost was warm this time — not the almost from the Vail dinner table that had cracked something open, not the almost from Elevation that had burned. This almost was soft. Domestic. The kind of almost that happens at three in the morning when you're standing in a man's kitchen in bare feet and he's asking you to teach him something and the asking is the most vulnerable thing he's done since he told you about October.
"It starts with the beans," I said. "Everything starts with the beans."
"Show me."
I walked around the island. Not to him — to the coffee maker. But the path took me past him and the six inches became three inches became the heat of his body next to mine as I reached for the bag of Huila and my arm brushed his arm and the contact was so small and so devastating that neither of us breathed for two full seconds.
I showed him the beans. The grind. The pour. My hands on the equipment and his hands next to mine and the three-in-the-morning kitchen holding us both in a space that smelled like cedar and good coffee and the very beginning of something that had been building since October and was only now finding its shape.
"Same time tomorrow?" he said.
I looked at him. Bare feet. Bad coffee. The man who commanded rooms standing in his kitchen asking a woman to come back.
"Fix the machine and I'll think about it."
"The machine is irrelevant. You're the reason the coffee is good."
"That's the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me and I hate that it's about coffee."
The ghost smile. The real one underneath. At three in the morning in a kitchen at altitude with six inches of stone and two cups and the beginning of a language that didn't need words because the coffee was saying everything.
I went back to my side of the deadbolt. Locked it. Stood in the dark of the guest suite and pressed my back against the door and held the cup in both hands and the warmth went through the ceramic into my palms the way his warmth went through everything — walls, wood, fabric, the door between us that I'd locked with the only key.
His footsteps in the hallway. Stopping outside my door. Not knocking. Just standing. The way a man stands outside a door he can't open, listening for the sound of a woman he can't reach, holding a cup of coffee she made him that tasted like the best thing he'd ever had.
I pressed my hand against the door. Palm flat. The way I pressed my palm against the Treeline counter. The way he pressed his palms against the boardroom table.
On the other side, I heard his palm against the wood.
Two hands. One door. Both.