Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 109

Chapter 109

The whole time I had the persistent, prickling sensation of being watched.

I turned around twice in the first store. Once in the second. Each time, no one was looking at me. Just the normal movement of shoppers and staff going about their afternoon. I shook it off and kept going, but the feeling did not fully leave.

I had dinner alone at a small place near the lab, something simple that I barely tasted because my mind

was elsewhere, and then I went back to Helix and moved into the room.

It was small but thoughtfully built, the kind of space that had been designed by someone who understood that small did not have to mean cramped. The walls were a warm off-white, the floor real hardwood. A compact kitchen along one wall, properly fitted, with a real cooker and a coffee machine that looked like it had been chosen with care. A flat screen mounted opposite the bed, which was a proper double, not a single dressed up with extra pillows. A small table with two chairs. A balcony just big enough for two people to stand comfortably and look out at whatever the evening was doing to the

sky.

It would do. It would more than do.

I was arranging my things when Pat appeared in the doorway with an expression that was fighting between amusement and concern.

“You brought a lot,” she observed, looking at the bags lined up along the wall.

“I did not want to lack anything while I was here,” I told her.

She looked at the bags. Then at me. Then at the bags again.

“Right,” she said, and did not push further, which was one of the reasons I loved Pat.

I waited for Dominic to call.

He did not call.

I had spoken to him twice already that day and I had been the one to reach out. He knew what was coming. He knew we were at the final stage. And still, nothing.

I told myself it did not matter. This was not a relationship. There were no rules about who called whom or how often. We were two people with an arrangement and arrangements did not come with communication expectations.

I fell asleep waiting.

When I woke up the next morning and checked my phone, there was nothing from Dominic and, surprisingly, nothing from Julian either. I had spent the night outside the house without a word to my husband and he had not bothered to check. Which told me either his ego was still running the show or

something else had his attention.

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Either way, it was useful information.

I started my morning, kept checking my phone between tasks, and eventually could not stand it anymore.

Pat caught me looking at my screen for the fourth time in an hour.

“Are you expecting a call from someone?” she asked, with the particular tone of a woman who already had a theory.

“I am just checking the time,” I told her.

She did not believe me. I could see it on her face. But she let it go.

I excused myself to the bathroom.

I stood in the small tiled space and looked at my phone and had a brief internal argument with myself about whether calling him made me look desperate. I concluded that the question itself was the problem. We were not in a conventional relationship. There was no desperate or not desperate. There was just what I wanted to do.

What I wanted to do was hear his voice.

I called.

He picked up on the second ring and when he said good morning the warmth in it was so immediate and genuine that I forgot, briefly, that I had been overthinking this for the past twelve hours.

“I have been thinking about you,” I said, and heard the words leave my mouth before I had made any decision to say them.

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