Chapter Text
The apartment was quiet—that particular strain of silence that adheres to ceilings, nestles into corners, and makes even the floorboards hesitate before creaking. It had the stillness of a painting in a locked gallery. I dropped my gloves on the table by the door; no alarm chirped, no digital eye blinked. The usual theater of return performed itself without incident.
I passed through the arch into the sitting room, drawn by the warm breath of light stretching across the rug. And then—I saw her.
Claire.
She was seated in the corner like a petal peeled from a larger flower and gently left to dry. The color of her robe—a rich, lapis blue, trimmed in cream lace—was too delicate for this decade, too soft for her usual postures, and yet she wore it as if the fabric remembered her before she ever put it on, the hem slipping over the tops of her knees like a sigh.
She had made a nest, unintentionally, but no less artful than the meticulous clutter of a Vuillard interior: books with yellowing pages splayed indecently; fashion magazines opened to profiles of elegant women frozen mid-laugh; old black-and-white photographs, their edges frayed, balanced against the toe of her discarded heel. That heel—a sculpted, rust-red mule—lay overturned beside her like a toppled relic, suggesting movement that had paused, not ended.
She hadn’t looked up.
One of her shoes—its pair—was under the radiator, right where she’d kicked it last week. I hadn’t moved it. She hadn’t mentioned it. Some silences were comfortable.
Her hair was longer than it had been the last time I studied it. A warmer color too—less red, more cinnamon under the light. It curled softly at her shoulders, catching what little sun the room permitted. There was something disarmingly cinematic about the whole tableau.
She turned a page with one finger, slow as if the paper might protest. For a moment, I said nothing. I simply… watched.
It wasn’t her softness that startled me. It was the fact that she wore it without apology. She wasn’t trying to appear harmless—Claire had never aspired to anyone’s expectations. But she was layered, folded like origami. A woman who could strip a rifle, quote a poem, and forget to put on both shoes.
She looked up then. A quiet flick of the eyes in my direction. Not surprised. Just... taking attendance.
"I was looking for something to read," she said, as if I required explanation.
"I can see that."
A small smirk played at the corner of her mouth—one of those brief, private expressions that always made me feel like I was interrupting a thought she wasn’t going to share.
"You’re home early," she added, and turned another page. Vogue. Mid-century layouts. A woman in sunglasses leaning against a convertible with too much attitude to stay trapped in ink.
I stepped closer. "You redecorating my mission briefings into a French boudoir?"
She shrugged. It was the most elegant shrug I’ve seen—one shoulder rising, the silk slipping lower in a quiet reveal. Not for effect. Not even for me.
"Thought they needed more lace."
She was reading, or pretending to. Her fingers, those quick, normally utilitarian things smudged with oil or gripping throttle, were now languid in their task, turning pages with a reverence that belonged more to a lover tracing skin than a rider chasing speed.
I moved toward her.
Not because I had something to say. Not because I was needed. But because the way her left shoulder rose and dipped with each breath had, unacceptably, become more compelling than the classified file I’d spent an hour memorizing.
I crouched.
She didn’t flinch. Of course not. She only shifted slightly to allow me space, and in that movement the robe slipped farther from her collarbone, revealing the hollow where clavicle meets softness—an anatomical parenthesis that made my palms ache with a very unscientific want.
"What is it you’re so absorbed in?" I asked, leaning forward. My voice was controlled, modulated—but I was not looking at the pages.
Her eyes slid to mine, framed in lashes darker than her hair. "Style section. Vintage couture. Silk chemises from the sixties. A piece on French film stills from the ‘70s. You’d hate it."
"I hate very little when you’re wearing it."
That got me the faintest quirk of her lips—nothing as gauche as a smile. A recognition, perhaps. That I was not here to discuss aesthetics, or politics, or anything that required clothing.
She turned a page. A centerfold photograph—a model in a dressing gown not unlike hers, cigarette in hand, jaw slack with ennui. Claire tilted her head, examining it as though measuring the mood.
I pretended to study it too.
But what I studied was the way her hair brushed the nape of her neck. The way her knee, bent and pale and bare, had a small crescent-shaped mark near the joint, like she’d pressed it too long into the corner of a book. I studied her pulse, fluttering low in her throat when she shifted her weight just enough to make me wonder if she was aware of how my breath had changed.
And still she read.
As though I were merely a part of the room—an intelligent lamp, a sentient floorboard—incapable of anything but watching.
But I was not made for watching.
Or maybe I only understood that later.
She turned another page, noiselessly. The room was dim now, the light thinning into gold near the baseboards and thickening to dusk where her hair fell in waves across her shoulder.
I crouched lower, elbows braced on my knees, not bothering to feign interest in the articles anymore. Her perfume—something citrusy, clean but subtle—had begun to warm with the heat of her skin and the stillness of the air. It reminded me of citrus groves in high-security labs, oddly enough—natural things cultivated in unnatural environments.The kind that required sterilization protocols and biometric locks. Beauty, preserved in conditions designed to suppress growth.
She didn’t look up when she spoke.
"You always stare like that when you’re thinking something you won’t say."
It was said simply. No challenge. No smile.
I should have lied. Should have brushed it off. Instead, I said,
"You notice more than you let on."
That got her attention. Her eyes flicked to mine—sharp, bright, refocusing.
"I always do," she said. "People don’t believe it unless I start yelling. But I usually know things before that."
She turned the page again. A photo of a model with an expressionless face in a white trench coat, standing ankle-deep in water. Claire studied it too long.
"Do you think I ask too many questions?"
The line was casual, and yet perfectly placed.
"Yes," I said. "But only the right kind."
There was a pause then—and it was lovely, the kind of pause that makes rooms feel like sealed-off worlds. The air slowed. Even the dust in the sunbeam seemed to drift more thoughtfully.
Then she murmured, without looking up, "C’est dommage. Tu regardes pourtant comme si tu voulais m’enlever la robe."
A shame. You’re looking at me like you want to take the robe off.
My reply came without pause.
"My French is excellent. But you already knew that."
And then—
My phone vibrated.
Just once. Barely a tremor against the inside of my jacket. But enough.
She didn’t look up again. She didn’t need to.
"You have to go," she said.
I stood slowly. "Unfortunately."
Claire closed the magazine in her lap—not with frustration, not with flair. Just… closed it. As if this version of the evening had been catalogued, placed in its folder, filed away.
Before I turned, I looked back at her.
Barefoot, in silk. A woman surrounded by paper ghosts and vintage beauty, sitting in the corner of a room like she’d been painted there by a hand more honest than mine.
"You always know more than you should," I said.
She didn’t look at me when she replied,
"Yeah. And you always pretend that doesn’t bother you."
In the months that followed, I would see far more terrible things. I would make worse choices, speak colder truths, build walls so high I could no longer hear myself inside them. But I would remember that room—her bare foot brushing the edge of a photograph, the lace slipping off her shoulder, the way she never asked the obvious questions, only the real ones.
And I would think, absurdly, irreparably:
I should have let the silence keep me.