Chapter 366: Sofia Is Back? 2

The door opened into a space that was entirely hers and Liam stood just inside it and let the place arrive.

It was not large but it had been thought about, which made it feel larger than its dimensions suggested.

Her living room sat immediately inside the entrance, a dark green couch against the left wall, the kind of green that was specific rather than generic, chosen by someone who had stood in front of options and made a real decision.

Two cushions on it that matched without being a set.

A low table in front of it carrying a small plant on one end that had been alive long enough to look entirely settled in its pot, which said something about the person who had been keeping it alive.

The walls were a warm off-white and she had things on them.

A print above the couch, abstract enough to carry multiple readings but specific enough to tell you something about the person who had hung it there.

A smaller thing beside the window that he could not fully make out from where he was standing but which had clearly been placed rather than put.

A rug on the floor in a pattern that pulled everything together without making noise about it.

Books on a shelf to the right of the window. Real ones, the kind with broken spines and pages that had been turned by an actual person rather than decorative ones arranged by color for a photograph.

Liam looked at all of it and had the specific feeling of a place confirming something he had not known he was expecting.

"Sit," Sofia said, dropping her bag on the small table near the entrance, already moving into the room with the ease of someone who knew where everything was in the dark. "Do you want something? I can make you something."

He looked at her.

She was looking back at him from near the kitchen, the question genuinely open, her expression carrying the warmth of someone who had just brought someone they liked into their space for the first time and wanted them to feel the space was worth being in.

He had eaten. His stomach had no complaints. The word no was technically available to him.

He looked at her standing there in the cream top with the longer dark hair and the honest eyes and his mouth made its own decision independent of his stomach’s opinion on the matter.

"Sure," he said. "Whatever you’re having."

She smiled. "Give me two minutes. I’m going to change first. I’ve been in this since this morning."

She disappeared through a door to the right.

He sat on the green couch.

It received him the way furniture received people when it had been chosen by someone who actually sat on it, genuinely comfortable, the kind of comfortable that did not announce itself but simply was.

He settled into it and looked at the print above him for a moment and then at the plant on the table and then at the books across the room.

He could hear her moving around behind the door, the muffled sounds of someone navigating a space they knew completely, drawers opening and closing, the specific quiet of someone changing in their own room.

He looked at the plant.

It was a pothos, the kind that grew steadily and forgave inconsistent watering and rewarded basic attention with genuine expansion.

She had it in a terracotta pot on a small wooden stand and it had been there long enough to have sent a vine down the side of the stand and onto the table.

’She’s been here a while,’ he thought. ’This is not a new place. This is a place that has been lived in properly.’

He looked at the books.

He was trying to read the spines from where he was sitting when the door opened.

He turned and his brain did the specific thing brains did when the information arriving through the eyes exceeded what they had been prepared for, a half second recalibration, the world adjusting its expectations around new data.

She had changed into a short silk sleep set.

Her shorts were small and sat high on her thighs, pale and light, the kind of fabric that existed for comfort and had not been consulted about what comfort would reveal.

Her top was thin-strapped and fitted close, the silk moving with what was underneath it rather than separate from it, and what was underneath it had not been visible in quite this way through the cream top at the cafe or the fitted top from when she had walked in front of them earlier.

Her boobs sat full and round against the fabric, the weight of them present and specific in the thin silk, her inverted nipples pressing outward through the material with the natural certainty of things simply being what they were, unbothered by the silk’s attempt to contain the information.

She crossed to the kitchen behind the half wall without stopping, moving with the comfortable ease of someone in their own space, and Liam looked at the print above the couch with sudden renewed interest.

"Smoothie?" she called from the kitchen. "Or I have stuff for a sandwich if you’re actually hungry."

"Smoothie is good," he said, to the print.

The fridge opened. The sound of things being moved and considered. A blender lid clicking into place.

He could see her through the gap above the half wall, her hands moving across the counter, her hair falling forward slightly as she looked at what she was putting together.

She reached back toward the lower shelf for something and had to lean forward over the counter to reach it and the shorts rode up with the lean, the fabric pulling tight, and the full shape of her ass presented itself to the room in the specific rounded heart of it, and below the shorts the fabric pulled close enough that the outline of everything underneath it was present and visible and entirely unaware of being observed from the couch.

Liam looked at the ceiling.

Then at the plant.

’The plant is very interesting,’ he thought. ’Very. The vine is particularly compelling. I am going to look at the vine for as long as necessary.’

The blender started.

He exhaled through his nose.

The blender ran for about thirty seconds and stopped.

She came around the half wall with two glasses, holding them both with the casual ease of someone who had done this walk many times, and crossed the room and sat beside him on the couch, close but not calculated about the closeness, just the natural proximity of two people sharing a couch that was one person’s and one person’s guest’s.

She held his glass out.

He took it.

She folded one leg under herself and turned slightly toward him and sipped her own and looked at him with the expression of someone who was comfortable and intended to stay comfortable.

He drank.

It was good. Mango and something else underneath it, something that had been thought about.

She was still looking at him.

He could feel it.

"What," he said, not looking at her.

"Nothing," she said. The smile in her voice fully audible.

He looked at his glass.

She let about four seconds pass.

"You’ve been looking at my chest," she said. "Since the cafe."

He looked at the wall directly ahead of him with the focused attention of someone who had found the wall extremely interesting and was committed to that position.

"I have not," he said.

"You really have," she said. "I’m not upset about it. I noticed and I’m just saying."

He looked at her sideways.

She looked back at him with the smile sitting comfortably on her face, her dark eyes warm and unbothered, her whole manner carrying the ease of someone who had brought up a topic they had no anxiety about.

He looked at his glass.

Then at her.

"The last time I saw you," he said, choosing honesty because the evidence against any other position had been mounting since the cafe, "you weren’t." He glanced briefly and looked back at her face. "You’ve changed."

"I know right," she said, looking down at herself with the expression of someone who had been in an ongoing conversation with this development for some time and had largely made peace with where it had landed. "It kind of happened fast. I looked in the mirror one day and I was like." She raised her eyebrows. "When did that happen."

He looked at her properly now, at the way the silk sat across her chest, at the weight of her boobs against the thin fabric, at the inverted nipples pressing through the material.

He nodded. Slowly. The nod of someone who had reviewed a situation from multiple angles and arrived at a considered conclusion.

"It suits you," he said.

She looked at him with the smile warming further into something that was specifically for this moment.

They sat with that for a second.

The apartment around them was quiet in the specific warm way of a well-settled space in the late afternoon, the light coming through the window at the angle it came at this hour, the plant on the table sitting in it.

She shifted slightly on the couch, turning more toward him, and looked at him directly with an expression that had moved from the easy warmth of before into something more considered, more present, carrying a question that she had clearly been deciding whether to ask and had decided.

"Do you want to touch?" she said.

She said it simply. Not performing the question or building toward it or surrounding it with anything. Just the question, sitting there between them in the warm afternoon air of her apartment, entirely sincere.

He looked at her.

At the dark eyes and the longer hair and the silk top and the honest directness of someone who had said what they meant and was waiting simply for what he meant back.

He set his glass on the table.

He looked at her.

"Yes," he said.