Otis showed up mid-morning. Dropped onto the kitchen stool across from me with a grin I hadn't seen before.
"Jude and Tommy say you're handling it. He's eating. Showing up. Hasn't thrown anything." He leaned forward. "You're the first person in two years who's actually managed him."
"He's not that scary."
"He is. You're just scarier." He shifted gears — tour started in two days. Then he leaned back, studying me. "There's a producer I work with. Adrian Voss — half the Billboard top ten. We get through this tour clean, I set up a session. He likes your voice, and we have a very different conversation about your future."
Something in my chest cracked open — a door I'd boarded shut at seventeen. "You really think —"
"I think you should've been there a long time ago."
Mid-breath, mid-hope, a voice from the hallway: "Notebook Girl wants to be a little star?"
Aiden leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. "What are you going to sing about, Calloway? Making lattes? Mopping floors?"
"I'll figure it out. I managed to find words once before. Someone just took them."
The kitchen went quiet. His smile didn't waver but something behind it tightened. Then he pushed off the doorframe. "I'm going to the jacuzzi. Bring me a towel in thirty minutes."
I finished with Otis. Checked my watch. Thirty-two minutes. Grabbed a towel and walked toward the back deck.
The jacuzzi was on the lower terrace — stone-edged, steam curling off the surface, the Pacific blue and indifferent below. I rounded the corner and stopped.
Aiden was in the water. And he was not wearing anything.
Bubbles obscured him from the waist down but everything above — wet skin, steam rising off his shoulders, tattoos glistening, collarbones sharp enough to cut — hit me like walking into a wall. Don't look. Don't you dare look. I looked. The V of muscle disappearing into the waterline. Wet hair across his forehead. The way his chest moved when he breathed.
God, he's beautiful. I hate that so much.
His head was tipped back, eyes closed, and for one unguarded second he looked almost peaceful. Younger. Like the boy he might have been if the world hadn't gotten to him first.
Then his eyes opened. Caught me looking. The smile that spread across his face was slow and devastating.
"Wow, Calloway. If you wanted to stare, you could've just asked."
My neck went hot. I held the towel out at arm's length. "Your towel. You're welcome."
He didn't take it. Arms spreading along the stone edge, he looked at me with the kind of shameless appraisal that would get anyone else slapped. "You could join me. Most girls would kill for the invitation."
"Most girls haven't read your tabloid history."
He laughed — low, warm, settling somewhere behind my ribs where it had no business being. "Fair. But you're still standing there."
I was still standing there. Towel extended. Legs not moving. He was watching me with something that had shifted past sarcasm into territory I didn't have armor for — direct, unhurried.
"Leave it and go if it's too much for you."
"Nothing about you is too much for me."
"Then why are you blushing?"
I heard the water move before I processed it. He rose out of the jacuzzi — just stood up, all at once, water streaming off every part of him — and stepped onto the stone like walking naked toward a woman holding a towel was something he did between breakfast and lunch.
I should have looked away. Instead I froze — eyes locked on his face because if they dropped even an inch I was finished — and he walked toward me, dripping, unhurried, steam curling off his skin. Every step closed the distance and my body did something it had never done before. My skin went hot and tight all at once, a flush spreading from my neck down my chest like someone had lit a match under my collarbone.
I have never been this close to a naked man. I have never been this close to a naked anyone. And it had to be him. Of course it had to be him.
He stopped close. Too close. The towel bunched in my fists was the only barrier that existed. He was looking down at me — not cruel, not performing, just open and hot and direct — and he reached out and lifted my chin with two wet fingers.
"What's wrong, Calloway?" Barely a whisper. "Never seen a man's body before?"
Every nerve fired at once. His wet fingers under my chin. Water dripping from his chest through my hoodie to my skin, warm then cold where the air hit. Heat radiating off him like a furnace.
My pulse hammering in my teeth, my wrists, the hollow of my throat. I was twenty-five years old and no one had ever stood this close to me with this little between us and my body didn't know what to do with the information — fight and flight and something else, something lower, something that tightened in my stomach like a fist.
"Of course I have. Just — you don't just —"
"Just what?" His eyes traveled my face, reading something I was trying desperately not to write.
"Walk at someone like that without warning."
"You had thirty minutes of warning."
"That's not what I —"
His thumb shifted against my jawline — barely, a millimeter — and the breath I pulled in was audible and sharp and I could have killed myself for the sound.
His eyes changed. The smirk lost ground to something else — uncertainty I'd never seen on his face. His gaze dropped to my mouth. Stayed. Came back to my eyes, and I watched him do the math. My rigid body. My shallow breathing — not want alone but something closer to terror. The way I'd said of course I have like a rehearsed line.
He went still. His voice came out different — stripped of everything, almost gentle.
"Oh. You're actually a virgin."
It wasn't a question. It landed between us like a stone into deep water and the silence that followed was the loudest thing I'd ever heard.
My face burned so hot I could feel my heartbeat in my cheeks. I wanted to deny it — wanted something cutting that put him back in his place — but the words wouldn't come because he was looking at me like he was seeing me for the first time and the cruelty was gone from his face entirely. Just — gone.
He pulled the towel from my grip — gently, almost careful — and wrapped it around his waist without breaking eye contact. The bravado rearranged itself, the edge pulling back like a tide going out.
He stepped back. Ran a hand through his wet hair. Looked past me at the ocean.
"It's hot out here. Can you grab me a water?"
His voice was normal. Almost too normal. Like a man putting a mask back on and not quite getting it straight.
"You have legs."
"And you have a job description. Water. Please."
The please was new. I noticed it.
I walked into the house and pressed my cold hands against my burning face in the kitchen for ten seconds before I opened the fridge. The image of him stepping out of the water was seared behind my eyelids — every drop, every line, every inch of skin that I absolutely had not looked at and could somehow see in perfect detail.
My hoodie was still damp where the water from his chest had soaked through, and I pressed my hand against the wet spot and pulled it away like I'd been caught.
I brought him the water. He was sitting on the terrace chair now, towel secure, looking out at the Pacific like it owed him something. When he took the bottle from my hand his fingers didn't brush mine. Deliberate. Careful.
"I'm starting to understand why nobody wants this job."
He didn't look at me. But the corner of his mouth moved — not a smirk, not a grin. Something quieter. Something he didn't want me to see.
"Yeah," he said to the ocean. "Me too."