BORN TO RUIN LUCIAN KINGSTON

Lucien’s POV

I didn’t plan to stay.

That was the thing I kept coming back to, afterward. I hadn’t planned any of it—hadn’t planned to call her, hadn’t planned to end up at her door at nine in the evening with a bottle of wine and some half-formed excuse about returning the earring she’d left at the Aurelius.

I hadn't planned to stand in her doorway for a full three seconds when she opened it, because she was in a simple white dress with her hair loose and she looked so completely herself that the excuse I’d prepared dissolved before I could use it.

“You could have sent it,” she said, looking at the earring in my palm.

“I was in the area.”

She looked at me with those calm, dark eyes, the ones that had been doing something to my concentration for the past two weeks, ever since the dinner.

“You live twenty minutes in the opposite direction,” she said.

“I was in the area,” I said again.

She stepped back and let me in.

I walked over to sit and opened the wine because it seemed like the right thing to do. She poured two glasses, handed me one, and curled into the corner of the sofa with her feet tucked underneath her—easy, unhurried, like she had nowhere else to be and my being here was neither a surprise nor a disruption.

I didn’t know what to do with that.

The Elizabeth I knew had always brightened when I entered a room. She had always oriented toward me slightly, like a plant toward light, and I had—God help me—taken it completely for granted.

This Elizabeth just looked at me and waited.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” I said.

“I saw you four days ago.”

“At a dinner with ten other people.” I turned the wine glass in my hand. “You know what I mean.”

“Do I?”

“Elizabeth.”

“Lucien.” The faintest smile.

She looked at me for a moment. Then she reached over and topped up my glass, even though it was still half full. “You’re tense,” she said. “You’ve been tense since you walked in. Drink.”

I drank.

We talked about nothing important at first. The Mercer deal. A book she’d been reading. A restaurant that had opened near her office that she said was worth trying. Normal things-easy things.

Except nothing felt easy. Everything felt like standing at the edge of something I couldn’t see the bottom of.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

“You’re going to regardless.”

“What happened to you?”

She went very still. “Nothing happened to me.”

“Something did.” I set my glass down and turned to face her fully. “You’re different. Not worse just….” I searched for a better word to describe what I was about to say. “Like you know something you didn’t know before.”

Something moved through her expression.

There and gone, too fast to name.

“Maybe I’ve always been this way,” she said quietly. “Maybe you just didn’t notice.”

The thing was, she wasn’t being cruel. That was what undid me. She said it softly, almost sadly, like a fact she’d made her peace with.

“Elizabeth….”

“It’s late, Lucien.”

“I know.”

Neither of us moved.

The lamp in the corner threw the room into gold, and she was sitting close enough that I could see the slight unevenness in her breathing, and I had been telling myself for two weeks that what I was feeling was simply curiosity.

Sitting here, I couldn’t make myself believe that anymore.

“You’re looking at me again,” she said.

“I know.”

“You should probably stop.”

“Probably.” I reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear slowly, giving her every opportunity to pull back. She didn’t. My fingers brushed her jaw and she closed her eyes, just briefly, just for a second, and when she opened them again her eyes had become dilated.

“This is a bad idea,” she said.

“I know that too.”

“Lucien”

“Tell me to leave.” My thumb traced along her jaw while her eyes stayed on mine.

“Tell me to leave and I will.”

She didn’t tell me to leave.

She kissed me first—or I kissed her, or we both moved at the same moment and the question became irrelevant.

Her hands found the front of my shirt and mine found her waist and for a moment we just stayed there, forehead to forehead, breathing.

“Hey,” I said quietly. Stupidly.

A soft exhale. Almost a laugh. “Hey.”

Then her fingers curled into my collar and I moved closer.

I had thought, in the brief, arrogant moment before everything dissolved that I knew what this would be. We’d been together long enough that the unknown had been mapped away.

I was wrong.

She was unhurried in a way that made it impossible to be anything else. When I tried to rush she simply, didn’t, and somehow that was more devastating than anything else she could have done.

Her hands moved like she was paying attention to something specific, like she was memorizing, and every time I tried to find the shape of what she was thinking she would do something that emptied my mind completely.

“Look at me,” I said at some point.

She did, without flinching and it was almost too much, almost unbearable, the full weight of her attention with nothing filtered out.

I had looked into these eyes a hundred times and I had never once felt seen the way I did in that moment.

“Where did you go?” I asked. My voice came out rougher than I intended. “All those months. Where did you go?”

She touched my face, gently. Like something that hurt her to do. “I’m right here.”

“You weren’t. You were here but you weren’t”

“Lucien.” Her thumb moved along my cheekbone. “I’m right here.”

I turned my face into her palm and stopped asking questions.

Afterward she lay with her head against my chest and I looked at the ceiling and listened to her breathe and felt my heart thumping loudly.

“Let me stay,” I said.

A pause. “Lucien”

“Just tonight.” My hand moved through her hair, slowly. “Just let me stay please”

She was quiet for so long I thought she’d fallen asleep.

“Okay,” she said finally, softly. Like a concession she hadn’t meant to make.

I tightened my arm around her.

She lay still against me, and I stared at the ceiling.

I thought about her eyes when she looked at me. That specific, unbearable quality of her attention, like she was looking at something she already knew the ending of.

I almost asked.

Instead I pressed my mouth to the top of her head and closed my eyes.

In the morning, I told myself. In the morning I’d ask.

I was gone before she woke up and I didn’t leave a note.

I just left with the faint, devastating trace of her perfume on my clothes, and the certainty, settling into my chest like something that I had just made everything considerably more complicated.

And I don’t think I would ever not think about her.