Weekends in lake houses that technically belonged to shell companies.
Drives down Lake Shore at midnight with the city glittering on the water like shattered diamonds.
He never pretended to be harmless.
He also never lied about what he felt.
“You should stay away from me,” he told me on our third date, standing on the balcony of his penthouse with the skyline burning gold behind him.
“Because of the articles?”
“Because they’re not all wrong.”
I looked at him then. Really looked.
The expensive clothes. The calm voice. The bodyguards below. The hand resting lightly on the railing as though the whole city belonged under it.
“Then why are you here with me?” I asked.
Something rough flashed across his face.
“Because I met you and forgot how to do the smart thing.”
That answer should have sent me running.
Instead it followed me into sleep.
Into work.
Into every hour of every day.
He did not ask for pieces of me.
He took over whole rooms.
Whole weeks.
Whole futures.
And somehow, against reason, I let him.
The first time I told him I loved him, it was in bed, in the dark, after a thunderstorm had knocked out half the city.
His penthouse windows reflected only our shapes and distant sirens.
He went very still.
For one long moment, I thought I had made a mistake.
Then he rolled over, braced himself above me, and looked down like I had just handed him something too precious to touch with bare hands.
“Say it again.”
“I love you.”
His eyes closed.
When they opened, they were bright in a way I’d never seen before.
“You shouldn’t,” he said hoarsely.
“Too late.”
He kissed me like a starving man offered absolution.
A month later, he put a ring on my finger in his kitchen at two in the morning while I was wearing one of his shirts and no makeup and half asleep.
It wasn’t a formal proposal.
That would not have been us.
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