Chapter 8: Next Month

The lease application stayed in my bag.

I took the cab home with my hand flat on top of it.

The kitchen light was on at midnight.

Colin sat at the island in a gray T-shirt with a cup of tea gone cold in front of him.

"You waited up," I said.

"I said I would."

"You say a lot of things."

"I'm trying to say fewer," he said. "And do more of them."

I didn't answer that.

I couldn't have slept if I'd tried, so I took the stool beside him.

I reached into my bag for the black cloth sketchbook and then pushed it back down.

Instead I took out a clean sheet of tracing paper and a pencil.

"What are you drawing?"

"The north stair at work. I want to see it from the other side."

He watched me for a minute without saying anything.

I drew the landing and the rail and the way the light would fall from the skylight in the afternoon.

My hand moved on its own, quick and sure.

"Katie," he said after a while.

"Hm?"

"Can I see?"

I slid the paper over.

He looked at it for a long time.

He turned it a quarter turn and ran his finger along the line of the rail, and his face changed.

"This is good," he said. "This is really good."

"I know."

"No. I mean it. I didn't know you could do this."

"You knew I was an architect."

"I knew you were a junior at a design firm when I met you," he said. "I didn't know you were this."

"You never asked."

He put the page down.

"No," he said. "I didn't."

I should have been angry.

Instead I was looking at his mouth.

It was two in the morning, and his shirt was thin.

He was the first person in this house who had looked at my work and said so.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Waking Up Married To My Crush! from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.