Chapter 54: How About A Date?
The bathroom stopped Sophia in her tracks.
She had expected functional. A man’s bathroom — soap, shampoo, maybe a single moisturiser purchased without much thought from a pharmacy shelf. The kind of bathroom that got the job done and asked nothing more of itself.
What she found instead was a counter that made her pick up the nearest bottle and read the label twice.
La Mer. Kiehl’s. An Aesop cleanser she had looked at in a store once and quietly returned to the shelf. A toner she recognised from a skincare account she followed that cost more than her weekly groceries. Everything arranged without being arranged — not on display, just present, the way things are when their owner actually uses them consistently and without self-consciousness.
Sophia set the bottle down and looked at the full counter.
She thought about Liam’s jaw. His skin. The way it sat without effort — clear, even, the kind of complexion that made people assume good genetics without considering that good genetics had assistance. She thought about the blue eyes and the bone structure and the easy way he carried himself and arrived at a conclusion she immediately kept it under things she wasn’t going to say out loud.
If he ever walked into a modelling agency, someone would hand him a contract before he finished spelling his surname.
She turned on the shower.
The pressure was immediate and strong, the water finding its temperature in seconds. She stood under it with her eyes closed and let the gym leave her skin before reaching for the cleanser.
She told herself she was just using what was available.
She used four products. Methodically. Without apology.
-
Twenty-three minutes later she turned the water off.
She reached for the towel, wrapped it, tucked the corner, and stood at the mirror running her fingers through damp hair. The bathroom carried warmth and the Aesop’s botanical scent lingered pleasantly in the steam. She looked at herself in the mirror for a moment — skin bright, shoulders loose — and felt considerably more human than she had forty minutes ago.
Then she looked at her gym clothes on the floor.
Then she looked at the towel before kissing her teeth in frustration.
At no point during the shower, or before the shower, or during the walk from the kitchen to the bathroom, had she thought to ask Liam for the clothes first. They were somewhere outside this door — on the bed, presumably, wherever he’d left them — and she was standing here in a towel that ended at mid-thigh with damp hair and a decision to make.
She weighed her options briefly.
Gym clothes: no.
Towel as permanent solution: also no.
She opened the door.
-
Liam was in the kitchen with his back half-turned, glass in hand, entirely unbothered. He glanced over when he heard the door and his expression registered something between amusement and mild surprise.
"That took considerably longer than expected," he said.
"You have La Mer on your bathroom counter."
"You don’t say..."
"And the Aesop." She held the towel at the corner. "And whatever that toner was."
"Did you use it?"
"That’s not the point." She shifted her weight. "You said you had clothes."
"Check the bed."
She went. On top of the duvet lay a neatly folded grey t-shirt beside a pair of joggers with a white drawstring, both clean and soft from repeated washing. She pulled the shirt over her head and it fell immediately past her hips, the hem landing at mid-thigh, the sleeves dropping past her elbows. She pushed them up, looked down at herself, and accepted the situation.
She stepped back into the living room.
Liam turned from the counter.
He looked at her the way people look at something that has landed differently than expected — a full second, unhurried, taking in the shirt and the damp hair and the bare legs beneath the hem without making a production of any of it.
"You look good covered in me," he said.
It was smooth and clean. Delivered without a trace of effort.
Sophia felt the corner of her mouth pull sideways against her better judgment. "That was smooth."
"Call me the smooth criminal."
She looked down at the shirt again, tugging the hem slightly. "I can’t go home like this."
"Who said anything about going home?"
The question landed quietly and stayed there.
Liam held her gaze without leaning in, without pressing, completely at ease in the way of someone who had said exactly what he meant and was content to let it sit. There was no performance in it. Just the words, open-ended, genuinely offered.
"We could go out," he said. "Dinner somewhere easy. Nothing that requires a reservation or a prepared speech."
Sophia looked at him steadily. "I don’t have any clothes."
"I can get you clothes."
She paused. "You’d take me shopping?"
"That’s what I said."
"Right now. You’d take me shopping right now?"
"Unless you need more recovery time." He glanced toward the bathroom. "Twenty-three minutes for a quick shower — I assumed you were decisive but I’m adjusting my read."
"The products were extensive," she said, with full dignity. "It would have been wasteful not to use them properly."
"Twenty-two-in-one..." Liam teased her.
"You have individual La Mer on that counter. Don’t talk to me about twenty-two-in-one."
He laughed — genuine, low — and Sophia found herself smiling before she’d organised a reason not to. She looked at the shirt again. Looked at the window where the afternoon had settled into something mild and open. Looked back at him standing in his kitchen in a clean t-shirt and grey sweats, keys already appearing on the counter from nowhere in particular like he had known before she answered.
She thought about the gym. The Uber. The water glass refilled without comment. The bathroom counter that had quietly taken apart every assumption she’d carried through his front door.
She thought about the way he’d looked at her in the shirt for exactly one second and then held her eyes instead.
"You know what," Sophia said.
"What?"
"Why not."
Something settled in his expression — not satisfaction exactly. Just a quiet confirmation.
"Give me ten minutes," he said, pushing off the counter.
"Take fifteen," she said. "Use the toner."
He was already down the hallway and she heard him laugh from the other side of the wall, and Sophia stood in his living room in his shirt that fit like a dress and looked at the city through his window and thought that this was not remotely how she had expected her Tuesday to go.
She found she didn’t mind at all.
